Passions

I skipped saying 7 for years. Every time I read through the Gospel of Thomas, I’d hit the lion, shrug, and move on to the fisherman in saying 8, who at least made sense. It read like a riddle with a line missing, or a copying error somebody forgot to fix. It turns out the saying makes a lot of sense once you know what a lion meant to a reader in the second or third century. Two other texts help, one by Plato and one from the Gnostic library itself, and both were sitting in the same pile of books buried near Nag Hammadi. Read with them, Thomas 7 becomes one of the most practical sayings in the collection. ...

Grief has a name in the Secret Book of John. It’s Nenentophni, and it sits in a list of 365 angels and demons who, according to the text, built the human body one part at a time. Fear is Blaomen. Pleasure is Ephememphi, and desire goes by the short, almost friendly name Yoko. Most readers skim this section. It’s pages of unpronounceable names assigned to eyelids and toenails, and it looks like the least useful part of a difficult book. But tucked inside it is a compact theory of the emotions, borrowed from the best psychology of its day and bent into a Gnostic shape. I think it’s one of the more practical things in the whole Nag Hammadi library. ...