Gospel of Truth

Most of us have spent a few minutes hunting for reading glasses that were on our heads the whole time. Nothing about the situation needs to change in that moment. You don’t need new glasses, or forgiveness for losing them. You need to notice something that was already true. Two old traditions, one from India and one from the Mediterranean, built whole religions on a version of that moment. Buddhism calls the problem avidya. The Gnostic Christians called it agnoia. Both words mean not-knowing, and both traditions put it at the bottom of everything that goes wrong in a human life. ...

Picture the church in Rome around the year 140. There’s no cathedral and no Vatican, just a scatter of house congregations that speak Greek, argue constantly, and look to a handful of gifted teachers. One of the most gifted is a man from Egypt named Valentinus, and by one ancient account he expects to be made bishop. He wasn’t. Someone else got the job, and within a generation Valentinus had become a favorite target of the heresy hunters. Bentley Layton, whose translation of the fragments I’ll lean on throughout, says that if things had gone the other way, “the whole future of Roman Christianity might have been unimaginably altered.” ...

Try something before you read any further. Without touching your phone, recite one passage from any scripture you care about, beginning to end. The exact words, the way they’re written. If you managed it, there’s a good chance you learned it as a kid, from a parent or a Sunday school teacher who made you say it until it stuck. If you stalled after the first line, you’ve got plenty of company. I’ve written about the Gospel of Thomas on this blog for months, and I still reach for the search bar more often than I’d like to admit. ...

Halfway through the Gospel of Truth there’s a parable about moving house. A family packs up, and some of their jars turn out to be bad ones that crack on the way. The owner doesn’t grieve over them, because the full jars made the trip, and those were the ones worth carrying. Then the parable gets restless. A great disturbance breaks out among the jars, “for some were empty and others were filled, some were ample and others were depleted, some were purified and others were broken.” I read that line on my laptop with a row of tabs open above it, each one too narrow to show its title, and I had the uncomfortable sense that the text was describing my screen. ...

Somewhere in the middle of the second century, a Christian teacher composed a sermon that begins with the word joy. Not judgment, not sin, not the end of the world. “The gospel of truth is joy,” the first line announces, “for people who have received grace from the Father of truth.” The church that won history’s argument burned what it could of texts like this one, and for most of two millennia we knew it only from a complaint. Irenaeus, cataloging heresies around the year 180, grumbled that the Valentinians had produced something called the Gospel of Truth that bore no resemblance to the real gospels. He meant it as an insult. As a book review, it turns out to be accurate, because the text that surfaced in the Egyptian codex later named for Carl Jung resembles nothing else in early Christian literature. It rewards a slow walk. ...