The library contained a wide array of books, many of them with understand
ings of God, the world, Christ, and religion that differed not only from the views of proto-orthodoxy but also from one another.1 There were new Gospels recording Jesus’ words, some of them containing his secret and “truer” teach
ings, delivered after his resurrection from the dead, Gospels allegedly written by his disciples Philip and John the son of Zebedee, by his brother James, by his twin brother Thomas. Even though forged, these books were obviously written seriously and meant to be taken seriously, as providing a guide to the truth. So, too, the other books in the collection, including several different and internally diverse mystical reflections on how the divine realm came into being. Most of these documents assumed that there was not simply one God over all who had created the world and made it good. Some of them were quite explicit: This
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creation was not good, not in the least. It was the result of a cosmic catastro
phe, brought into being by an inferior and ignorant deity who erroneously imag
ined he was God Almighty.
Such documents thus gave expression to what so many people over the course of history have known so well firsthand—the starving, the diseased, the crippled, the oppressed, the deserted, the heartbroken. This world is miserable. And if there is any hope for deliverance, it will not come from within this world through worldly means, for example, by improving the welfare state, putting more teach
ers in the classroom, or devoting more national resources to the fight against terrorism. This world is a cesspool of ignorance and suffering, and salvation will come not by trying to make it better but by escaping it altogether.
Some of the documents of the Nag Hammadi library not only express this view of the world; they also describe how such a world came into being in the first place, how we humans came to inhabit it (another cosmic catastrophe), and how we can escape. For many of these texts, this deliverance from the material world can happen only when we learn the secret knowledge that can bring salvation. (Recall: gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge; Gnostics are the ones who “know.”) Some of these texts—ones that are most clearly Chris
tian in their orientation2—indicate that Jesus is the one who brings this knowl
edge. But knowledge of what? It is not the kind of knowledge that one can attain by empirical observation and experimentation, not the knowledge of external phenomena and how to manipulate them. It is knowledge of ourselves.
Many of these texts preserve and present the view known to be held by groups of early Gnostics, that saving knowledge is “knowledge of who we were and what we have become, of where we were and where we have been made to fall, of where we are hastening and from where we are being redeemed, of what birth is and what rebirth.”3
According to this view of things, we do not belong here in this awful world.
We have come from another place, the realm of God. We are trapped here, imprisoned. And when we learn who we are and how we can escape, we can then return to our heavenly home.
No wonder these expressions of Gnostic religiosity have struck a resonant note among modern readers, many of whom also feel alienated from this world, for whom this world does not make sense, readers who realize, in some very deep and significant way, that they really don’t belong here. For some groups of early Christian Gnostics, we in fact do not belong here. Our alienation is real;
this is not our home. We have come from above, and above we must return.
Despite their inherent interest, many of these Gnostic texts are not simple to understand. And that, of course, is as it should be: If the knowledge necessary for salvation were simple and straightforward, we all would have figured it out long ago. But this is secret knowledge reserved for the elite, for the few, for those who really do have a spark of the divine within them, a spark that needs to be rekindled and brought to life through the gnosis (knowledge) from on high, brought from one who has come down from the divine realm to remind
us of our true identity, our true origin, and our true destiny. This divine emis
sary is no mere mortal. He is a being from the realm above, a divine emissary sent from the true God (not the ignorant creator who made this hateful material world in the first place) to reveal to us the true state of things and the means of escape. Those who receive, and understand, and accept these teachings will then be “Gnostics,” those “in the know.”
The intrigue of these Gnostic systems for general readers is thus obvious.
But why, as I indicated at the outset, have they created such scholarly befuddle
ment? Maybe the easiest explanation is that while it is one thing to summarize the gist of the teachings of one Gnostic group or another, it is another thing to plumb the depths of the texts themselves. And there is scarcely any religious literature written in any language at any time that can be more perplexing and deliberately obscure than some of the Gnostic writings of Christian antiquity.
To be sure, these are all available in good English translation. But even as translators try to present these texts in terms comprehensible to modern read
ers, they remain obtuse in places, as, for example, they detail the complex relations of incalculable divine beings described in the subtle nuances of highly symbolic language. Sometimes you may suspect the translation is bad, but in fact, most of the time the English translation is clearer than the Coptic of the texts themselves.
Not only are some of these original materials difficult to understand individu
ally: they are also difficult to place in relationship with one another. Scholars have concluded that there are numerous religious perspectives represented in the various Gnostic documents surviving from antiquity and that these perspectives are not always consistent with one another. Probably different documents come from different communities with different worldviews, mythological systems, beliefs, and practices. Some of the texts found at Nag Hammadi present or pre
suppose religious systems unrelated to anything else known from the ancient world; some of them are evidently not even Gnostic; some are almost certainly not Christian. Rather than one thing, then, the Nag Hammadi library contains numerous things, various perspectives presented in an array of texts including a whole host of lost Christianities. It is impossible to synthesize the views, presup
positions, religious perspectives of these into one monolithic system.4
As a result, scholars have enormous and ongoing disputes over them, in terms of the individual documents and the overall phenomenon traditionally called Gnosticism. Some of the major questions are: Is Gnosticism an appro
priate term for all the religions that we normally subsume under this name? Or are these religions so different from one another that we level out their differ
ences by calling them all Gnostic? When did these various religions come into being? Were some of them in existence before Christianity? Do they spring from some kind of Judaism? Or are they offshoots of Christianity? Or are they religions that sprang up at the same time as Christianity and were mutually influential with it (i.e., with non-Gnostic Christians picking up ideas from
Gnostics and Gnostics picking up ideas from non-Gnostic Christians)? Can we assign certain Christian Gnostic texts to known Christian Gnostic sects? Were there scores of Gnostic myths or just one overarching myth that was told in a variety of ways? And so on.5
Fortunately, I do not need to delve into these questions of scholarship here, many of which revolve around highly technical issues. My interests are much broader. I will be assuming that Gnosticism is a complex phenomenon with numerous manifestations (like Christianity, past and present), but that a num
ber of the texts of the Nag Hammadi library cohere together because they were rooted in the same basic Gnostic view of the world—even when that view comes to be manifested in a variety of ways. Moreover, I will assume that, based on these texts which do cohere (as opposed to others which assume dif
ferent perspectives), we can describe general characteristics of some Gnostic religions (while acknowledging that other characteristics might apply to other kinds of Gnostic religion), that these characteristics can in turn help explain the texts, and that we can get a general idea of how some forms of Gnostic Christianity relate to non-Gnostic Christianities, whether or not there were Gnostic groups before or independent of early Christianity. When I speak of the “Gnostic texts” in the discussion that follows, then, I will be referring only to those documents (mainly from Nag Hammadi) that cohere together and ap
pear therefore to represent a particular religious perspective. It must always be borne in mind that even as I speak of one form of the Gnostic religion, I do not thereby mean to say that Gnosticism was only one thing any more than Chris
tianity was.