Gospel of Philip

The charge against the Gnostics fits in one breath. They believed a lesser god made the world, so they decided matter was bad, so they hated the body. You can still hear the verdict whenever someone calls an idea “gnostic” because it treats flesh as an inconvenience to be managed or escaped. I’ve spent a lot of this blog reading these texts sympathetically, so it seems only fair to put the charge to them directly. The short answer is sometimes yes. The longer answer is that the texts fought about the body among themselves, and a few of them defended it more stubbornly than their critics did. ...

Pick up a used book and sometimes a stranger’s notes fall out of it. A line copied from a sermon, half a recipe, a question underlined twice. You can’t reconstruct their life from the scraps, but you can tell what they cared about. Reading the Gospel of Philip feels a lot like that. It has no story and no clear outline, and it jumps from baptism to donkeys to the price of pearls without warning. It’s also the most quotable book in the Nag Hammadi library, and once you know how to read it, the jumps start to make sense. Here’s a guided walk through its best images. ...

Spend two years working in Dublin and there’s a good chance you’ll come home calling everything “grand.” You won’t decide to. Nobody will sit you down and teach you Irish slang. You’ll just hear the same voices every day until their words start coming out of your mouth. Most of us know this effect from the inside. We pick up the phrases of the people we live with, and after enough years we start to sound like our parents whether we like it or not. Saying 108 of the Gospel of Thomas takes that ordinary fact and turns it into a promise about Jesus. It’s short, it’s strange, and I think it marks the clearest line between Thomas and the church that left it out of the Bible. ...

The Gospel of Philip compresses an entire liturgical world into a single sentence. “The master did everything in a mystery,” it says, “a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber.” Five rites, in a fixed order, presented as the complete curriculum of transformation. The Valentinian school, the most sophisticated branch of Gnostic Christianity, appears to have practiced some version of this fivefold sequence, and Philip is our best window into what the rites meant to the people inside them. The site’s introduction to the mysteries covered why such things came in graded ladders. This post climbs this particular ladder one rung at a time. ...

You probably learned that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute whom Jesus forgave. She’s the repentant sinner who washed his feet with tears and dried them with her hair. There’s just one problem: that’s not what the texts say. The Bible never identifies Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. That association came later, in a 6th-century sermon by Pope Gregory the Great, who conflated several different women in the Gospels into a single figure. ...

The Gospel of Philip lists five mysteries practiced by the Valentinian Gnostics. “The master did everything in a mystery: baptism, chrism, eucharist, redemption, and bridal chamber.” Of these, the bridal chamber stands as the highest. If the Temple in Jerusalem had three sections (outer court, middle court, and holy of holies), the Valentinian understanding mapped their sacraments onto these spaces. Baptism was the outer court. Redemption was the middle court. The bridal chamber was the holy of holies itself: the innermost approach to the divine presence. ...