Gnosticism

You’ve probably carried a grocery bag with a small tear in the bottom. Somewhere between the car and the kitchen, a thin trail of rice follows you across the driveway, and you feel nothing. You find out when you set the bag on the counter and it slumps over, half as full as when you left the store. Jesus tells almost exactly that story in the Gospel of Thomas, and it appears in none of the four gospels in the Bible. Right after it comes a second parable missing from the canon, about a man who practices a murder before he commits it. Sayings 97 and 98 make a strange pair. Read together, they describe two ways a spiritual life can go, and they’re worth a slow look. ...

Here is the version you’ve probably seen, on a poster or a quote site or tucked into a book on creativity: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” It’s a beautiful sentence. The two halves mirror each other perfectly, and the message is easy to carry around. Express what’s in you or it will eat you alive. Write the novel, start the business, say the thing you’ve been holding back. ...

Ask most people what the Gnostics thought of the Hebrew Bible and you’ll get a one-line answer. They hated it. The God of Moses was the villain, the jealous craftsman who trapped us in matter, and the whole Old Testament was his propaganda. There are Gnostic texts that come close to saying exactly that, and this site has walked through some of them. Then there is a letter from a teacher named Ptolemy to a woman named Flora, and it does something nobody expects. It takes the Law of Moses apart piece by piece, with a scalpel rather than a hammer, and it ends up treating most of the Law with respect. If you’ve only met the cartoon version of Gnosticism, this is the text that complicates it. Here’s how the argument works, where it still falls short, and what a modern reader can borrow from it. ...

Near the end of the New Testament, two men get named and condemned for a single idea. Hymenaeus and Philetus, the writer of 2 Timothy warns, “say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some.” We never hear their side. Their teaching spreads “like gangrene,” the letter says, and then it drops them. In 1945 a jar came out of the Egyptian sand holding, among much else, a short letter from a teacher to a student named Rheginus, and its thesis is the sentence the church had warned against. Not that the resurrection will come. That it has. The Treatise on Resurrection is a sustained second-century argument for that position, it runs under two thousand words, and it turns out to be one of the warmest things in the whole library. Let’s walk through it and ask what living from it might look like. ...

In 1244, the most respected religious teacher in Konya met a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz, and the meeting ended the teacher’s career on the spot. Jalal al-Din Rumi had been a theologian of rank, head of his late father’s community, secure in his learning. Four years later Shams vanished, probably violently, and the scholar’s grief broke open into poetry that has not stopped moving readers in eight centuries. ...

The buried texts were written to be carried, and their sentences show it. Short, strange, and built to detonate slowly, the best of them work less like arguments than like seeds, and the communities that treasured them seem to have used them exactly that way, one saying held close until it opened. Thomas announces on its first page that these are hidden sayings whose right interpretation is life itself, which is a strong claim to staple to a list of one-liners, and the sentences hold up under it. This collection gathers ten of the most powerful, chosen for meditation, each with a line or two of setting. All are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the edition this site recommends owning, and each has been treated at length somewhere on this site for readers who want the full context. ...

His credentials have never been matched. Offered anything by God in a dream, the young king asked for “a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong,” and the request so pleased heaven that wisdom was granted with wealth and honor thrown in. Kings and queens traveled continents to test him. Three thousand proverbs, the temple itself, a golden age. The Bible builds Solomon into the tallest intellectual figure it has. ...

When this site walked the five Valentinian sacraments, it promised that the other great Gnostic school had its own approach, and the promise comes due today. The Sethians, the tradition behind the Secret Book of John, kept a summit rite they called the Five Seals, and almost everything about it differs from the Valentinian ladder except the number. Where the Valentinians climbed five separate rungs, the Sethians spoke of one rite, fivefold, administered at the climax of salvation itself. The texts guard its details closely, which is exactly what you would expect of a mystery, and what survives is enough to see the shape and to feel why it mattered. ...

History sometimes arranges its evidence with suspicious timing. In 1945, a farmer near Nag Hammadi in Egypt broke open a sealed jar of buried Gnostic scriptures. Within about two years, in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, Bedouin shepherds of the Ta’amireh tribe found the first cave of what became the Dead Sea Scrolls, another buried library, also in jars, also hidden from a hostile century. Two libraries, interred by two different communities, surfacing almost together after nearly two millennia underground. They document different movements, and reading them side by side transformed one of scholarship’s oldest questions, which is where Gnosticism actually came from. The answer the jars suggest is closer to home than anyone expected. ...

A seventeenth-century mystic named Angelus Silesius compressed this entire post into a couplet. Christ could be born in Bethlehem a thousand times, he wrote, and it would profit you nothing unless he were born in you. That is the whole method, stated with maximum nerve. The gospel events happened, and the allegorical readers never much argued the point. Their claim ran deeper, that the events also describe a sequence that unfolds inside any soul undergoing awakening, so that the familiar scenes, manger, river, desert, mountain, cross, and empty tomb, compose the central panel of the scripture-wide map this site has been walking. The Gospel of Philip says outright that these things are to be understood symbolically, and Meister Eckhart preached the same birth in the soul from inside the medieval church. Here is the sequence, scene by scene. ...