The Gnostic Gospels

Two of the thirteen manuscripts of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Gospels mention burial on a mountain until the end of time. One of them says:

"Write down (the things that I) shall (tell) you and of which I shall remind you for the sake of those who will be worthy after you. And you will leave this book upon a mountain and you will adjure the guardian, 'Come, Dreadful One.'"

In a part of the Nile Valley in Egypt, cliffs rise abruptly to the desert above. A section of cliff on the right bank, marking the limit of the Nile Valley is called Jabal al-Tarif. A protruding boulder broke off in prehistoric times from the cliff face and fell onto a shallow grade of fallen rock below the cliff face. Under the northern flank of one of the huge pieces of this shattered bounder, a sealed clay jar containing the Nag Hammadi library was placed in hiding by careful hands, a millenium and a half ago.

In December, 1945, two brothers, Muhammad and Khalifah Ali, peasants from the Nag Hammadi region of Upper Egypt, came to Jabal al-Tarif to get nitrates to carry back on their camels to fertilize their fields. Digging around the base of the boulder, they came upon the jar. At first Muhammad Ali was afraid to break open the sealed jar for fear a djinn, genie, might be closed inside, but thinking on the other hand that it might contain gold, he smashed it with his pickaxe. Out fluttered some golden particles that swirled into the sky - perhaps papyrus fragments, for inside the jar was neither gold nor a djinn, but books of papyrus. His were the first hands to touch those manuscripts since the hands of the unknown person who prepared them for hiding in the jar around the year 400. Muhammed wrapped the books in his tunic, and took them home to his hut in al-Qasr which in ancient times was a site called Chenoboskia, home to many gnostics and Christians.

After this, a combination of circumstances resulting from ongoing blood feuds made the dissemination of the Nag Hammadi books haphazard and difficult to trace. Some were burned up by Muhammed Ali's mother who thought they were worthless and perhaps a source of bad luck. Some were sold to neighbors and friends for next to nothing. Some were sent to Cairo through connections, and though some of the gospels traveled the world, even going as far as Ann Arbor, MI. Those that survived their travels have ended up in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Unlike many ancient texts, the Nag Hammadi texts are not scrolls; they are codices, very early books bound up in a way that makes them precursors to our modern books. This form made them easy to read and store, which is the reason the codex form eventually made scrolls obsolete. The books are written in Coptic, a language that derives from the combination of Egyptian language and Greek letters; it developed after the rise of Greece's influence in the ancient world, and especially after Alexander the Great's annexation of Egypt. The Nag Hammadi codices range in dates from the second to the fourth century, and some of the texts themselves may be copied from earlier versions or originals that date to before the second century.

The texts include a range of ideas, mythologies, and characters, but they are unified in their gnostic orientation which underlies all of the texts. Gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge: gnosis, which is applied to this ancient theology because of the belief of the faithful that they were privy to salvific knowledge which together with practices would serve to redeem the faithful at the end of time.

Their central idea was that radically dualistic: that this world was the product of a foolish creator who did this work of creation without the permission of the highest, ultimate, actual God. In order to put an end to the ongoing process of misbegotten, physical creation, the highest God had to initiate cunning countermoves among human beings, the apex of physical creation, without the foolish creator's consent. The highest God did this by providing humankind with a divine substance called spirit, spark, soul. This substance enabled humanity to see through the contamination of this fallen realm and perceive our true goal: a return to the spiritual realm of the highest God, often called the Kingdom of Light.

Gnostics believed that this divine reunion would come at the end of time. Their behavior and attitudes reflected this. Gnosticism is comprised of three main components: an estrangement from the mass of humanity, belief in an ideal order that completely transcends life as we know it, and a lifestyle radically different from the norm, often involving renouncing the goods people usually desire and longing rather for ultimate liberation from all worldly things, even life itself. Gnosticism awaited and worked for not an aggressive revolution but rather a withdrawal from involvement in the contamination of worldly ways that destroys clarity of vision. Such an ascetic view point is by no means unique in religion, even Western religion, but its centrality as not only a practice, a means, but also as part of the end, an element of the goal, make gnosticism more reminiscent of Eastern Buddhist and Daoist traditions. Because mysticism was an essential element in Gnosticism, its language is mystic as well, and that makes it very difficult to talk about Gnosticism in clear, ordinary terms.

These ideas were too radical to become mainstream in the religions and philosophical schools of the day, but gnosticism became an influential element in those theologies nonetheless, and is perceptible in what remains to us of Neoplatonism, some aspects of Christianity, and even apparent in ancient Jewish sects like the Essenes of Qumran at the Dead Sea. Eventually gnosticism was declared heresy by both philosophical schools and Christian church leaders, while the Jewish-oriented gnostics like the Essenes died out. And it was around the time gnosticism was officially condemned that the jar at Nag Hammadi, containing Christian gnostic books, was buried.

Summed up in such dry terms can make the gnostics sound crazy, cultish, and simplistic. But the idea of withdrawing from the madding crowd, finding peace and spiritual harmony with what is highest in life, in simple, ascetic living is a timeless, fundamentally human one - we see even in entirely secular, Western, modern terms in Yeats' Lake Isle of Innisfree which we heard earlier.

As well, we may remember that popular movements that had theological depth, compassion, and even social justice agendas, have shared elements of the gnostics belief in simple, renunciatory living and looking for righteousness at the end time, including the Shakers in America, and even to some degree the Quakers. And the gnostics shared an element of our Universalist history; they believed that the instances of evil prevailing in the world were contrary to the world's true, essentially good nature. This is what we see reflected in our reading from the Gospel according to John, the only Christian text in the Bible that reflects a significant gnostic approach to Christian understanding and history. And it is the power, the strange wisdom, the surprising gender issues, the complex understanding of life and the strong response to suffering and evil that make parts of many of the gnostic gospels fascinating across theologies, world views, politics and of course more than a millennium.

Gender was understood theologically by the gnostics. When they spoke of female, they meant being involved with the world and earthly things, including such essentials as giving birth, raising families. They associated male with the higher dimension and spiritual concerns. Yet while their language bought into that old, hierarchical, male-female, sky-earth, earthy-spiritual dichotomy, their polity was remarkably liberal. Women could attain that spiritual maleness just as much as any male, and likewise any male could be "female", inextricably bound up in worldly concerns. Moreover, according to some gnostic gospel, women could attain spiritual enlightenment, sometimes called 'putting on the perfect man,' better or faster than some men. In the Apocryphon of John, we see words and theology that echo part of one of our modern hymns which we are singing today.

"This is the first power which was before all of them and which came forth from his mind, She is the forethought of All, her light shines like his light, the perfect power which is the image of the invisible Spirit who is perfect...This is the first thought, his image; she became the womb of everything for it is she who is prior to them all, the Mother-Father, the first man, the holy Spirit, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one, and the eternal aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth."

Probably the most remarkable example of this complex gender understanding is in the Gospel according to Mary - Mary Magdalene that is.. Even that a gospel of Mary exists at all is entirely unprecedented in the history of Christianity. This gospel generally takes the form of dialogue among the apostles, of whom Mary Magdalene is one:

"Peter said to Mary, ' Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the Savior which you remember - which you know but we do not, nor have we heard them.' Mary answered and said, 'What is hidden from you I will now proclaim to you.'" (and she goes on to teach them of a vision she had of the Lord explaining the seven powers of the soul.)

What makes the gospel most unique, however is not the attributions to Mary, not the highly gnostic discussion of the soul's powers, but its up-front, sensitive and feminist treatment of sexual politics and the question of whether women leaders could have a role in the faith. At the end of Mary's account of her vision, the gospel says:

"When Mary had said this, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, 'Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas.' Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things. He questioned them about the Savior: 'Did he really speak with a woman without our knowledge and not openly? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?'

Then Mary wept and said to Peter, 'My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior?' Levi answered and said to Peter, 'Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect man and acquire him for ourselves as he commanded us, and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said. And they began to go forth to proclaim and to preach."

Still, in the end, it is not the politics of the gnostic texts but the ideas and theology and poetic expression that give them their greatest power. In one text marvellously-titled The Thunder: Perfect Mind, an unidentified female figure gives a strange, paradoxical soliloquy which makes very little clear except the transcendence of the one speaking. But the language and ideas are reminiscent of some of the most evocative and compelling portions of the Bible: Lamentations, Psalms, Ecclesiastes.

"I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name....
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one."

Whether we hear there words that remind us of God, or life, or ourselves or, most recently for me: Bill Clinton, those words speak powerfully of the contradictory, uplifting, fearful, conflicted experience which may be for all of us at one time or another, life at its most crucial.

There is too much in the gnostic gospels to be in any way well summed up and represented in anything so short as a sermon. But any attempt even to highlight the Nag Hammadi texts would be incomplete without mention of one of the most fascinating and inspiring fo the books: the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas is a sayings source, which means it has no narrative and almost no dialogue, but rather a list of ideas and pieces of wisdom from Jesus, most of which begin: "Jesus said," or, "And he said...". Its authorship is attributed to Didymos Judas Thomas, that is Judas the twin, known in the Syrian church as the brother of Jesus who founded the churches of the East. Many of the sayings in this gospel have parallels in the New Testament gospels, but many others are again, unique and uniquely fascinating.

For example, our understanding of the gnostic desire to unite with the higher realm, and the gendered conception of the soul make the first part of Jesus' words fairly intelligible to us when he says in response to a question as to whether the saved shall enter the kingdom of light as children:

"When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the
outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below,
and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the
male not be male nor the female female; ..."
so far, more or less, so good. But then he goes on:
"and when you fashion eyes in place of an eye and a hand in place of a
hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a
likeness; then will you enter the kingdom."

Unless he is prophesying the advent of Pablo Picasso and Cubism, even the most learned theologians are still essentially at sea about just what Jesus means with that conclusion.

But for all the times that the mystical language of gnosticism floors us, helped by the fact that we still know very little about the beliefs, traditions, history and practices of the gnostics themselves, there are also pieces of wisdom which leap out from the page, across the centuries, and resonate within us because they seem true, now and always. Saying 70 in the Gospel of Thomas:

"Jesus said, 'That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves. That which you do have within you will destroy you if you do not bring it forth from within you."

There are still aspects of the Gnostic Gospels that are troubling, sexist, bizarre. More than once in the gnostic texts renunciation of family and childbirth are urged or required. Theirs are unmistakably words from a different era facing different choices and with some different values. But that is true of any religious text from any where, any time, especially for we judgmental Unitarian-Universalists. Like the Koran, the Bible, the Vedas, the writings of Lao-Tse, the Talmud, the Gnostic Gospels hold at least mystery and at best, at times, enlightenment, when we set ourselves to learn what we may from them. And regardless of whether we read them once, or many times, or only hear of them in a sermon, they remind us that the spirit has striven among humankind since there was a humankind, and that humanity has always known that we struggle against evil in our lives and within ourselves, that we wish or pray for a better life for everyone, that light and air are blessings in which we would all like to dwell forever, and that once upon a time some people believed that you could merely renounce the world and bring about its betterment. We UU's believe that the saving of the world requires engagement in it, in some ways we know we fundamentally differ with the gnostics. But we share with them a belief in the life of the mind, in the equality of the sexes, in the essential goodness of the cosmos and humanity. It is a holy marvel to read words, arguments and agreements, across millennia and learn from others who wondered too.

Amen.