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.

A Letter, Not a Treatise

The manuscript calls it a treatise at the end, but the form is a letter. A teacher writes to “Rheginus my son,” who has asked “in such a pleasant way” about the main questions on resurrection. Marvin Meyer’s translation keeps the tone, which is unhurried and fond. Scholars place it in the second half of the second century and count it among the Valentinian texts, the school that also gave us the Gospel of Truth, and a few have wondered whether Valentinus himself wrote it. Most think not. Whoever he was, the writer led a community and signs off greeting Rheginus’s “brothers and sisters, who are my children.”

His opening move is a swipe at the philosophers. Some people, he says, want to become intellectuals, and if they manage to explain an unsolved problem they get “an exalted opinion of themselves.” His quarrel is with the posture, the pursuit of one’s own rest through cleverness, when rest is something “we received when we came to know the truth and rested on it.” The letter will argue, but it refuses to be won by argument. That refusal is the first thing to understand about it.

What the Savior Did

The teacher’s account of Christ is more conventional than you might expect from a text condemned as heresy. The Son of God was also a son of humanity, he writes, and “embraced both aspects, humanity and divinity,” so that by the one he might conquer death and by the other restore the fullness. The fullness, the Pleroma, is the Valentinian name for the whole of divine reality from which the world broke loose. Einar Thomassen, who introduces the text in Meyer’s edition, notes that this two-natures picture anticipates later orthodox teaching.

Then comes the line the whole letter turns on. “The Savior swallowed death. You must know this.” The phrase is Paul’s, from the great resurrection chapter of 1 Corinthians, where “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” But the teacher runs it one step further. When Christ laid aside the perishable world, he “swallowed the visible through the invisible,” and in doing so “granted us the way to our immortality.” What got swallowed was the world itself, revealed as the smaller thing.

Rays From the Sun

His image for how this reaches us is the best thing in the letter. Since we are visibly here, he says, we wear the world like a garment. But “from the Savior we radiate like beams of light,” and at our sunset, “our death in this life,” we are drawn back upward “like rays by the sun, and nothing holds us down.”

Read that slowly, because it quietly answers the question Rheginus asked. A ray belongs to the sun for the whole length of its crossing, and calling it home is nothing like reuniting two separate things. Resurrection on this picture is less an event that happens to you than a fact about what you are made of, finally taken seriously.

The teacher is honest that none of this can be proven. “The affirmation that the dead will arise belongs to the realm of faith, not of argument.” He shows no embarrassment about that. The philosophers who demand a proof, in his view, are asking the sun to submit its credentials to one of its own rays.

The World Is the Illusion

Rheginus has evidently heard the objection that the resurrection is a kind of ghost story, and the teacher meets it head on. Remember the gospel scene where Elijah and Moses appear beside Jesus on the mountain, he says, and then:

“Do not think that the resurrection is an illusion. It is no illusion. It is truth. It is more appropriate to say that the world is illusion rather than the resurrection that came into being through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Then the prose breaks into something close to verse. The living die all at once, the rich become poor, kings are overthrown, everything changes. “The world is illusion.” He catches himself, “Let me not speak so negatively,” and pivots to what the resurrection is instead:

“It is real, it stands firm. It is revelation of what is, a transformation of things, a transition into newness. Incorruptibility flows over corruption, light flows over darkness, swallowing it, Fullness fills what it lacks.”

Notice the direction of the flow. Light pours downward into darkness and swallows it. The Gnostics get accused of hating the world, and this letter does call it illusion, but its picture of salvation is the fullness flooding in to fill a lack, which is closer to healing than to escape.

Already, and Not Yet

Here is where the condemned sentence appears, and it comes with a condition attached:

“Rheginus, do not get lost in details, nor live according to the flesh for the sake of harmony. Flee from divisions and bonds, and then you already have resurrection. If the mortal part knows itself, knows that it will die even though it has lived many years in this life, why not look at yourself and see that you already have arisen and have been received in?”

You already have arisen. The teacher goes further, almost exasperated. “You have the resurrection but go on as if you are to die.” Why is he so patient with Rheginus? “Only because of your lack of training.” Everyone, he says, “needs to practice ways to be released” from the mortal element so as not to wander, “but rather to recover what one was at the beginning.”

Thomassen points out that the letter never fully resolves its two pictures. There is a resurrection now, possessed by those who know, and there is a resurrection later, when the body is left behind and “only the living parts that are within will arise.” Both are affirmed. What the letter refuses is the idea that the later one can be received by someone who has not begun the earlier one. The Gospel of Philip, from the same school, says it without the diplomacy:

“People who say they will first die and then arise are wrong. If they do not receive the resurrection first, while they are alive, they will receive nothing when they die.”

That is the claim in full, and it is milder than what 2 Timothy feared. The future stays in place. It is entered from the present, and waiting for death to do what only living can do is the one way to miss it. Readers of this site will recognize the shape from Thomas, where the kingdom is already spread out on the earth and the whole task is seeing it.

What “Training” Looks Like

The teacher’s word for what Rheginus lacks is training, the language of the gymnasium, and he seems to mean something practical. “Flee from divisions and bonds” is his instruction, and the Valentinians had a whole sacramental life built around it. For a reader without their rites, the letter still gives enough to work with.

  • Practice the sunset. Once a day, at the actual sunset if you can, spend a minute on the fact that the mortal part of you “knows that it will die.” The teacher treats this knowledge as the doorway. Let it be plain and undramatic.
  • Name one division. The letter’s word for what keeps us from the resurrection we already have is division, the self split against itself, one part living “for the sake of harmony” with what everyone else expects. Find one place today where you’re keeping the peace with the world’s picture of you. That’s the bond.
  • Ask where the light comes from. When something in you is generous, attentive, or unafraid, pause and treat it as a ray, something you received. The teacher’s whole psychology is that these moments are evidence of the sun.
  • Read the letter. It takes ten minutes. The translation is in Meyer’s Nag Hammadi Scriptures under “The Treatise on Resurrection,” and it reads better aloud.

Ask and I Shall Clarify

The letter ends with a teacher declining to have the last word. “If anything in the explanation of the treatise is too deep, ask and I shall clarify it.” He tells Rheginus not to worry about sharing the letter, since “many are awaiting what I have written to you,” and signs off with “the love of family.”

Hymenaeus and Philetus never got to explain themselves. This teacher did, and what survives is a patient man telling a younger one that the thing he is waiting for is the thing he is standing in. Whether you believe him is, by his own admission, nothing he can argue you into. He would only ask you to look.

The Treatise on Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), with Einar Thomassen’s introduction to the Treatise. Paul and 2 Timothy are quoted from the NIV.