The Gnostic Gospels (3 page)

who we were, and what we have become; where we were … whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth.
²⁰

Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of
gnosis.
Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says:

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.” Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate … If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him
in yourself.
²¹

What Muḥammad ‘Alī discovered at Nag Hammadi is, apparently, a library of writings, almost all of them gnostic. Although they claim to offer secret teaching, many of these texts refer to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and others to the letters of Paul and the New Testament gospels. Many of them include the same
dramatis personae
as the New Testament—Jesus and his disciples. Yet the differences are striking.

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.

Second, the “living Jesus” of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal—even identical.

Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way: he remains forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic
Gospel of Thomas
relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source:

Jesus said, “I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out.… He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.”
²²

Does not such teaching—the identity of the divine and human, the concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder
who is presented not as Lord, but as spiritual guide—sound more Eastern than Western? Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the “living Buddha” appropriately could say what the
Gospel of Thomas
attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced gnosticism?

The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, suggests that it had. He points out that “Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christians (that is, Christians who knew and used such writings as the
Gospel of Thomas
) in South India.”
²³
Trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East were opening up at the time when gnosticism flourished (
A.D.
80–200); for generations, Buddhist missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria. We note, too, that Hippolytus, who was a Greek-speaking Christian in Rome (c. 225), knows of the Indian Brahmins—and includes their tradition among the sources of heresy:

There is … among the Indians a heresy of those who philosophize among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from (eating) living creatures and all cooked food … They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, nor like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge (
gnosis
) through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise.
²⁴

Could the title of the
Gospel of Thomas
—named for the disciple who, tradition tells us, went to India—suggest the influence of Indian tradition?

These hints indicate the possibility, yet our evidence is not conclusive. Since parallel traditions may emerge in different cultures at different times, such ideas could have developed in both places independently.
²⁵
What we call Eastern and Western religions, and tend to regard as separate streams, were not clearly differentiated 2,000 years ago. Research on the Nag Hammadi texts is only beginning: we look forward to the work of scholars who can study these traditions comparatively to discover whether they can, in fact, be traced to Indian sources.

Even so, ideas that we associate with Eastern religions emerged in the first century through the gnostic movement in the West, but they were suppressed and condemned by polemicists like Irenaeus. Yet those who called gnosticism heresy were adopting—consciously or not—the viewpoint of that group of Christians who called themselves orthodox Christians. A heretic may be anyone whose outlook someone else dislikes or denounces. According to tradition, a heretic is one who deviates from the true faith. But what defines that “true faith”? Who calls it that, and for what reasons?

We find this problem familiar in our own experience. The term “Christianity,” especially since the Reformation, has covered an astonishing range of groups. Those claiming to represent “true Christianity” in the twentieth century can range from a Catholic cardinal in the Vatican to an African Methodist Episcopal preacher initiating revival in Detroit, a Mormon missionary in Thailand, or the member of a village church on the coast of Greece. Yet Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree that such diversity is a recent—and deplorable—development. According to Christian legend, the early church was different. Christians of every persuasion look back to the primitive church to find a simpler, purer form of Christian faith. In the apostles’ time, all members of the Christian community shared their money and property; all believed the same teaching, and worshiped together; all revered the authority of the apostles. It was only after that golden age that conflict, then heresy emerged: so says the author of the Acts of the Apostles, who identifies himself as the first historian of Christianity.

But the discoveries at Nag Hammadi have upset this picture. If we admit that some of these fifty-two texts represent early forms of Christian teaching, we may have to recognize that early Christianity is far more diverse than nearly anyone expected before the Nag Hammadi discoveries.
²⁶

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians
since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these—the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure—emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. Before that time, as Irenaeus and others attest, numerous gospels circulated among various Christian groups, ranging from those of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, to such writings as the
Gospel of Thomas
, the
Gospel of Philip
, and the
Gospel of Truth
, as well as many other secret teachings, myths, and poems attributed to Jesus or his disciples. Some of these, apparently, were discovered at Nag Hammadi; many others are lost to us. Those who identified themselves as Christians entertained many—and radically differing—religious beliefs and practices. And the communities scattered throughout the known world organized themselves in ways that differed widely from one group to another.

Yet by
A.D.
200, the situation had changed. Christianity had become an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, who understood themselves to be the guardians of the only “true faith.” The majority of churches, among which the church of Rome took a leading role, rejected all other viewpoints as heresy. Deploring the diversity of the earlier movement, Bishop Irenaeus and his followers insisted that there could be only one church, and outside of that church, he declared, “there is no salvation.”
²⁷
Members of this church alone are orthodox (literally, “straight-thinking”) Christians. And, he claimed, this church must be
catholic
—that is, universal. Whoever challenged that consensus, arguing instead for other forms of Christian teaching, was declared to be a heretic, and expelled. When the orthodox gained military support, sometime after the Emperor Constantine became Christian in the fourth century, the penalty for heresy escalated.

·  ·  ·

The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical “blasphemy” proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them. Although gnosticism is perhaps the earliest—and most threatening—of the heresies, scholars had known only a handful of original gnostic texts, none published before the nineteenth century. The first emerged in 1769, when a Scottish tourist named James Bruce bought a Coptic manuscript near Thebes (modern Luxor) in Upper Egypt.
²⁸
Published only in 1892, it claims to record conversations of Jesus with his disciples—a group that here includes both men and women. In 1773 a collector found in a London bookshop an ancient text, also in Coptic, that contained a dialogue on “mysteries” between Jesus and his disciples.
²⁹
In 1896 a German Egyptologist, alerted by the previous publications, bought in Cairo a manuscript that, to his amazement, contained the
Gospel of Mary
(Magdalene) and three other texts. Three copies of one of them, the
Apocryphon
(Secret Book)
of John
were also included among the gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi fifty years later.
³⁰

But why is this astonishing discovery at Nag Hammadi only now becoming known for the first time? Why did we not hear news of the Nag Hammadi discovery, as we did about the Dead Sea Scrolls, some twenty-five years ago? Professor Hans Jonas, the eminent authority on gnosticism, wrote in 1962:

Unlike the Dead Sea finds of the same years, the gnostic find from Nag Hammadi has been beset from the beginning to this day by a persistent curse of political roadblocks, litigations, and, most of all, scholarly jealousies and “firstmanship” (the last factor has grown by now into a veritable
chronique scandaleuse
of contemporary academia).
³¹

Access to the texts was deliberately suppressed not only in ancient times but, for very different reasons, in the more than thirty years since the discovery.
³²
In the first place, villagers
from Upper Egypt and the antiquities dealers who were trying to get rich from the manuscripts hid them to avoid confiscation by government authorities. Their value became clear when the French Egyptologist Jean Doresse saw the first of the recovered manuscripts in 1947 at the Coptic Museum in Cairo. When the museum’s director, Togo Mina, asked him to examine it, Doresse identified the manuscript and announced that this discovery would mark an epoch in the study of the origins of Christianity. Fired by his enthusiasm, Mina asked him to look at another manuscript, held by Albert Eid, a Belgian antiquities dealer in Cairo. Following this meeting, Mina went to see Eid to tell him that he would never allow the manuscript to leave Egypt—it must be sold, for a nominal price, to the museum.

But still the majority of the find remained hidden. Bahīj ‘Alī, a one-eyed outlaw from al-Qaṣr, had acquired possession of many of the codices in Nag Hammadi and went to Cairo to sell them. Phōcion Tano, an antiquities dealer, bought all that he had, and went to Nag Hammadi to see if he could find more. While Doresse worked in Cairo through the air raids and bombings of 1948 to publish the manuscript of Codex III, the Minister of Public Education negotiated to buy Tano’s collection for the museum. Tano worked fast to prevent the government from interfering, by saying that they belonged to a private party, a woman named Dattari, an Italian collector living in Cairo. But on June 10, 1949, Miss Dattari was unsettled to read the following report in Cairo’s French newspaper:

The acquisition of these precious documents by the Egyptian government is in process. According to the specialists consulted, it has to do with one of the most extraordinary discoveries preserved until the present by the ground of Egypt, surpassing in scientific interest such spectacular discoveries as the tomb of Tutankhamen.
³³

When the government nationalized the collection in 1952, government officials claimed the codices, packed in a sealed suitcase. They paid Miss Dattari nothing—although her asking
price had been about £100,000. When she retaliated with a lawsuit, she succeeded only in delaying research for three years by gaining a court injunction against it; she lost the case.

But the government failed to confiscate Eid’s part of Codex I. In 1949 Albert Eid, worried about government intervention, flew from Cairo to America. By including the manuscript in a large collection of export items, he succeeded in smuggling it out of Egypt. He offered it to buyers for as much as $22,000, but since at least one prospective buyer refused, fearing that the Egyptian government would resent the sale, he returned disappointed to Belgium, where he placed it in a safe-deposit box protected by a secret password.