The King James Bible carries 63,779 cross references. Those are the small notes in the margins that send you from one verse to another, and Pastor Christoph Römhild had gathered them into a single digital dataset. In 2007 he and the researcher Chris Harrison drew every one of them as an arc over a line of the Bible’s chapters, Genesis at the far left and Revelation at the far right.
The picture they made has no words on it. It looks like a rainbow folded over itself sixty thousand times. What it shows, at a glance, is that the Bible never stops talking to itself. Gospels reach back to Isaiah, Paul leans on Genesis, and the Psalms get quoted from one end of the book to the other.
This series asks what happens if you set the Gnostic gospels on that same line, just past Revelation, and draw an arc every time one of them quotes, borrows, or echoes the Bible. Which texts would be tangled up in the canon, and which would sit off by themselves? I built that map. This post is the guide to reading it.
The Map
Everything below the line is the Bible talking to itself. Those faint arcs are 18,476 links between chapters from the cross-reference collection at OpenBible.info, the same kind of data Harrison and Römhild used. Where they pile up into dark bands, you’re looking at parts of scripture that refer to each other constantly.
Everything above the line is new. Each colored arc connects one of sixteen Gnostic texts to a Bible passage it uses, 133 arcs in all. Hover over a text’s name on the right (or tap it on a phone) to light up its arcs and read a short summary. Hover over any single arc to see the passage, the Gnostic text’s own wording where there is a quotation, and a note on what it does with it. The buttons above the map switch each color on and off, and the table under it lists every arc if you’d rather read than hover.
Two Questions for Every Arc
Most arguments about the Gnostic gospels ask one question, which is whether a text agrees with the Bible. The map asks two.
The first is density. How much of the Bible does this text actually use? Some texts send out a dozen arcs. Some send out three. Some send out none.
Direction is the second question, and that’s what the colors show. A blue arc means the text affirms the passage and uses it the way the Bible does. A gold dashed arc means it reinterprets the passage, keeping the words but giving them a new and usually inward meaning. A red dotted arc means it inverts the passage and tells the story against its biblical sense.
The Gospel of Thomas gives a good example of gold. Luke’s shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to find the one that wandered off. Thomas tells the same parable, then makes the lost sheep the largest of the flock and has the shepherd tell it, “I love you more than the ninety-nine.” Same story, new point.
For red, nothing beats the Secret Book of John. It follows Genesis closely, scene by scene, and keeps stopping to correct it. When it reaches the deep sleep that God brings on Adam, the risen Jesus tells John flatly, “It is not as Moses wrote and you heard.”
Put the two questions together and the texts spread out. Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora is dense and mostly blue. The Secret Book of John is just as dense and entirely red. Thunder: Perfect Mind is sparse and all gold, and Eugnostos the Blessed has no arcs at all. A single yes-or-no question would lump half of these together.
What the Whole Map Shows
Three patterns stand out on the finished map.
Genesis takes the most hits. It receives 26 arcs, more than any other book, and 22 of them are red. Almost every inversion on the map lands in the Old Testament, and most of those land in the first seven chapters of Genesis. Only five red arcs touch the New Testament at all. The Gnostic quarrel with scripture was mostly about who made the world and whether that maker was the highest God. With Jesus’s sayings they tended to keep the words and argue about the meaning.
The Psalms come second, almost entirely because of one book. Of the 25 arcs that land in the Psalms, 22 come from the Pistis Sophia, where the disciples interpret Sophia’s prayers of repentance, one after another, with psalms of David. That is a story worth its own post, and it’s the next one in this series.
Four texts sit on the line with nothing above them. Eugnostos, Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes don’t quote the Bible at all. They speak the language of Platonist philosophy, and on this map they look like islands. If you came to this series asking which Gnostic texts fall completely outside the Bible, those four are the plainest answer.
What the Map Can’t Tell You
A colored arc measures a relationship. It doesn’t measure truth. A traditional Christian reader might look at the blue arcs and see the “safe” texts, and someone drawn to the Gnostic tradition might prize the red ones as the bravest. The map doesn’t settle that argument, and I’m not trying to settle it here. If you want the theological differences laid out plainly, I covered them in How Gnosticism Differs from Orthodox Christianity.
The map is also a starting set rather than a complete index. I only drew arcs I could check against a translation, mainly Marvin Meyer’s edition of the Nag Hammadi texts, Bentley Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures, and G. R. S. Mead’s 1921 Pistis Sophia. Thomas alone has dozens more parallels than I’ve shown. The full scholarly catalog is a reference work by Craig Evans, Robert Webb, and Richard Wiebe called Nag Hammadi Texts and the Bible, and serious students should know it exists. New arcs will appear as the series goes on.
When we reach the Genesis texts, I’ll also take care with the red arcs. The figure those texts invert is the creator of Genesis, and that myth has been turned against Jewish readers before. Reading it honestly includes noticing that.
How to Use the Map in Your Own Reading
You don’t need the series to get something out of this. A few ways in:
- Trace one text you already know. If you’ve read the Gospel of Thomas, tap its name and follow its 21 arcs. Open each Bible passage beside the saying and read them as a pair.
- Switch off two colors. Turn off blue and gold and the red arcs stand alone. You can see in one view exactly where the Gnostic writers chose to argue with scripture.
- Watch where arcs land in the dark bands. When a colored arc lands somewhere the faint arcs are thick, the Gnostic author picked a passage the Bible itself keeps returning to. Those choices are rarely accidental.
- Pick a gray text and read a page of it. Spend ten minutes with Allogenes or Eugnostos. You’ll hear right away why they have no arcs. They read more like a philosophy seminar than a Bible study.
Where the Series Goes Next
Over the coming posts we’ll walk the map from the texts closest to the canon out to the ones beyond it. Thomas beside Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Gospel of Truth, which barely quotes the Bible but never stops echoing it. The Genesis retellings, the odd pair of Judas and Thunder, and finally the four islands.
First, though, the arc that started the whole project. This series began with a hunch of mine that when David sings about Wisdom in the Psalms, he’s describing the same figure the Gnostics called Sophia. The hunch turned out to be half wrong and half more right than I expected, and the map shows exactly where. That’s the next post.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Secret Book of John are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). Details of the original BibleViz project come from Chris Harrison’s description on his website. The Bible’s internal cross references in the map are from OpenBible.info (CC-BY). Every Gnostic arc is listed with its source in the table beneath the map.
