Gnosis, Lost Gospels

<P>Greetings subscribers of: http://finalbookofdaniel.com

<P>

03-28-01 newsletter update

Well, I was sitting, languishing for an hour in front of this computer wondering 

what I should write. The mind seems to be a blank at this time. So perhaps I 

will ramble about whatever comes to mind. Also note that I no longer posses a 

computer, so do not any longer have unlimited internet contact ability.

I know some of you are quite depressed lately, for I telepathically sense it 

through the collective Mind. Be of good cheer! It seems many people get 

depressed at this time of year; it’s a cyclical thing. The mind gets befuddled 

and confused, and hope trickles to the lower abyss of negativity and drabness. 

There are some Christian Gnostic scriptures I would like you to read, if you are 

interested, so they are available here with the links to where they can be 

found. 

When the early church was starting its spread in influence, there existed many 

more scriptures floating around than we have today in the current canon of the 

Christian Bible. In the first two centuries after Christ, as the church 

developed and gained political power over Rome, there came a perceived need to 

establish “orthodoxy.” The scriptures and gospels that were finally “authorized” 

were those which served to give political power and control of the Church over 

the masses. The first three gospels are synoptic (general view of the whole). 

The gospel of John is actually a gnostic gospel. 

“Gnosis” means “knowledge” (of insights into the spirit). It posses more divine 

wisdom and knowledge than the first three, and not surprisingly was almost left 

out of the canon by the Church fathers. As you will see, the Gnostic scriptures 

paint a quite different view than what we are being taught today regarding sin, 

salvation, heaven and hell.

This battle in the early years between orthodoxy and gnosis -- practical and 

secret teachings of Christ that could lead to enlightenment – led to a rift that 

left most of these early gospels to be burned en mass, and a movement that 

nearly disappeared from existence. You see, to gain control of the masses, with 

the idea that salvation was only possible within the church, they had to stamp 

out the scriptures that implied one could gain salvation one one’s own, through 

knowledge. They – the scriptures and anyone who claimed to be a Gnostic – were 

thereafter considered “heretical.”

But truth cannot be held under the water for long; truth will always resurface. 

Thank God for "new age" (a term that makes fundamentalists cringe -- lol).

In 1945, the unearthed discovery came of many of these gospels at least 1800 

years old -- and other writings which were then called The Nag Hammadi Library, 

and the Gnostic Gospels. These contain plenty of secret esoteric knowledge Jesus 

gave to his apostles. 

Therefore, I suggest you read many of these lost teachings, which will, if you 

are a sincere seeker of truth, help you awaken from the darkness of spiritual 

ignorance. 

Here is the URL for the list of all these writings:

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlalpha.html

You will find that these teachings are very similar – almost identical – to Sufi 

(Muslim), Kabbalah (Jew), Yoga (Hindu) and shaman (Native American); in other 

words, the mystical branches of all the major religions. It is no surprise or 

coincidence, for instance that all these philosophies believe in reincarnation, 

and possibilty for huns to attain direct and immediate union with God, or 

Theosophy. I have.

Here is the best site on the internet for Gnostic insight. It has all the 

gospels posted for your reading enjoyment: 

http://www.gnosis.org

For more sites, just type "gnosis" into your search engine.

I highly recommend the gospel of Thomas; it speaks as I would speak, and you can 

take my word for it, the teachings are truth.

I include here today an excellent introductory article by Elaine Pagel:

*********

“1945 an Arab peasant made an astonishing archeological discovery in Upper 

Egypt. Rumors obscured the circumstances of this find--perhaps because the 

discovery was accidental, and its sale on the black market illegal. For years 

even the identity of the discoverer remained unknown. One rumor held that he was 

a blood avenger; another, that he had made the find near the town of Naj 

'Hammádì at the Jabal al-Tárif, a mountain honeycombed with more than 150 caves. 

Originally natural, some of these caves were cut and painted and used as grave 

sites as early as the sixth dynasty, some 4,300 years ago. 

Thirty years later the discoverer himself, Muhammad 'Alí al-Sammán; told what 

happened. Shortly before he and his brothers avenged their father's murder in a 

blood feud, they had saddled their camels and gone out to the Jabal to dig for 

sabakh, a soft soil they used to fertilize their crops. Digging around a massive 

boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar, almost a meter high. Muhammad 'Alí 

hesitated to break the jar, considering that a jinn, or spirit, might live 

inside. But realizing that it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, 

smashed the jar, and discovered inside thirteen papyrus books, bound in leather. 

Returning to his home in al-Qasr, Muhammad 'All dumped the books and loose 

papyrus leaves on the straw piled on the ground next to the oven. Muhammad's 

mother, 'Umm-Ahmad, admits that she burned much of the papyrus in the oven along 

with the straw she used to kindle the fire. 

A few weeks later, as Muhammad 'Alí tells it, he and his brothers avenged their 

father's death by murdering Ahmed Isma'il. Their mother had warned her sons to 

keep their mattocks sharp: when they learned that their father's enemy was 

nearby, the brothers seized the opportunity, "hacked off his limbs . . . ripped 

out his heart, and devoured it among them, as the ultimate act of blood 

revenge." 

Fearing that the police investigating the murder would search his house and 

discover the books, Muhammad 'Alí asked the priest, al-Qummus Basiliyus Abd 

al-Masih, to keep one or more for him. During the time that Muhammad 'Alí and 

his brothers were being interrogated for murder, Raghib, a local history 

teacher, had seen one of the books, and suspected that it had value. Having 

received one from al-Qummus Basiliyus, Raghib sent it to a friend in Cairo to 

find out its worth. 

Sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo, the manuscripts 

soon attracted the attention of officials of the Egyptian government. Through 

circumstances of high drama, as we shall see, they bought one and confiscated 

ten and a half of the thirteen leather-bound books, called codices, and 

deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. But a large part of the thirteenth 

codex, containing five extraordinary texts, was smuggled out of Egypt and 

offered for sale in America. Word of this codex soon reached Professor Gilles 

Quispel, distinguished historian of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands. 

Excited by the discovery, Quispel urged the Jung Foundation in Zurich to buy the 

codex. But discovering, when he succeeded, that some pages were missing, he flew 

to Egypt in the spring of 1955 to try to find them in the Coptic Museum. 

Arriving in Cairo, he went at once to the Coptic Museum, borrowed photographs of 

some of the texts, and hurried back to his hotel to decipher them. Tracing out 

the first line, Quispel was startled, then incredulous, to read: "These are the 

secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, 

wrote down." Quispel knew that his colleague H.C. Puech, using notes from 

another French scholar, Jean Doresse, had identified the opening lines with 

fragments of a Greek Gospel of Thomas discovered in the 1890's. But the 

discovery of the whole text raised new questions: Did Jesus have a twin brother, 

as this text implies? Could the text be an authentic record of Jesus' sayings? 

According to its title, it contained the Gospel According to Thomas; yet, unlike 

the gospels of the New Testament, this text identified itself as a secret 

gospel. Quispel also discovered that it contained many sayings known from the 

New Testament; but these sayings, placed in unfamiliar contexts, suggested other 

dimensions of meaning. Other passages, Quispel found, differed entirely from any 

known Christian tradition: the "living Jesus," for example, speaks in sayings as 

cryptic and compelling as Zen koans: 

Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will 

save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring 

forth will destroy you." 

What Quispel held in his hand, the Gospel of Thomas, was only one of the 

fifty-two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (the usual English transliteration of 

the town's name). Bound into the same volume with it is the Gospel of Philip, 

which attributes to Jesus acts and sayings quite different from those in the New 

Testament: 

. . . the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her 

more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The 

rest of [the disciples were offended] . . . They said to him, "Why do you love 

her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not 

love you as (I love) her?" 

Other sayings in this collection criticize common Christian beliefs, such as the 

virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, as naïve misunderstandings. Bound 

together with these gospels is the Apocryphon (literally, "secret book") of 

John, which opens with an offer to reveal "the mysteries [and the] things hidden 

in silence" which Jesus taught to his disciple John. 

Muhammad 'Alí later admitted that some of the texts were lost--burned up or 

thrown away. But what remains is astonishing: some fifty-two texts from the 

early centuries of the Christian era--including a collection of early Christian 

gospels, previously unknown. Besides the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of 

Philip, the find included the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel to the Egyptians, 

which identifies itself as "the [sacred book] of the Great Invisible [Spirit]." 

Another group of texts consists of writings attributed to Jesus' followers, such 

as the Secret Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Letter of Peter to 

Philip, and the Apocalypse of Peter. 

What Muhammad 'Alí discovered at Nag Hammadi, it soon became clear, were Coptic 

translations, made about 1,500 years ago, of still more ancient manuscripts. The 

originals themselves had been written in Greek, the language of the New 

Testament: as Doresse, Puech, and Quispel had recognized, part of one of them 

had been discovered by archeologists about fifty years earlier, when they found 

a few fragments of the original Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas. 

About the dating of the manuscripts themselves there is little debate. 

Examination of the datable papyrus used to thicken the leather bindings, and of 

the Coptic script, place them c. A.D. 350-400. But scholars sharply disagree 

about the dating of the original texts. Some of them can hardly be later than c. 

A.D. 120-150, since Irenaeus, the orthodox Bishop of Lyons, writing C. 180, 

declares that heretics "boast that they possess more gospels than there really 

are,'' and complains that in his time such writings already have won wide 

circulation--from Gaul through Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor. 

Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the Gospel of Thomas, 

suggested the date of c. A.D. 140 for the original. Some reasoned that since 

these gospels were heretical, they must have been written later than the gospels 

of the New Testament, which are dated c. 60-l l0. But recently Professor Helmut 

Koester of Harvard University has suggested that the collection of sayings in 

the Gospel of Thomas, although compiled c. 140, may include some traditions even 

older than the gospels of the New Testament, "possibly as early as the second 

half of the first century" (50-100)--as early as, or earlier, than Mark, 

Matthew, Luke, and John. 

Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts 

tell the origin of the human race in terms very different from the usual reading 

of Genesis: the Testimony of Truth, for example, tells the story of the Garden 

of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the serpent, long known to 

appear in Gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam 

and Eve to partake of knowledge while "the Lord" threatens them with death, 

trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them 

from Paradise when they achieve it. Another text, mysteriously entitled The 

Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a 

feminine divine power: 

For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. 

I am the whore and the holy one. 

I am the wife and the virgin.... 

I am the barren one, and many are her sons.... 

I am the silence that is incomprehensible....

I am the utterance of my name. 

These diverse texts range, then, from secret gospels, poems, and 

quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origin of the universe, to myths, magic, 

and instructions for mystical practice. 

Why were these texts buried-and why have they remained virtually unknown for 

nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on 

the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical 

for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like 

them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as 

heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long 

known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as 

heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote 

attacking them. Bishop Irenaeus, who supervised the church in Lyons, c. 180, 

wrote five volumes, entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called 

Knowledge, which begin with his promise to set forth the views of those who are 

now teaching heresy . . . to show how absurd and inconsistent with the truth are 

their statements . . . I do this so that . . . you may urge all those with whom 

you are connected to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against 

Christ. 

He denounces as especially "full of blasphemy" a famous gospel called the Gospel 

of Truth. Is Irenaeus referring to the same Gospel of Truth discovered at Nag 

Hammadi' Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the Gospel of Truth, 

argued that he is; one of their critics maintains that the opening line (which 

begins "The gospel of truth") is not a title. But Irenaeus does use the same 

source as at least one of the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi--the Apocryphon 

(Secret Book) of John--as ammunition for his own attack on such "heresy." Fifty 

years later Hippolytus, a teacher in Rome, wrote another massive Refutation of 

All Heresies to "expose and refute the wicked blasphemy of the heretics." 

This campaign against heresy involved an involuntary admission of its persuasive 

power; yet the bishops prevailed. By the time of the Emperor Constantine's 

conversion, when Christianity became an officially approved religion in the 

fourth century, Christian bishops, previously victimized by the police, now 

commanded them. Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal 

offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, 

someone; possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the 

banned books and hid them from destruction--in the jar where they remained 

buried for almost 1,600 years. 

But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard themselves as 

"heretics. Most of the writings use Christian terminology, unmistakable related 

to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus that are 

secret, hidden from "the many" who constitute what, in the second century, came 

to be called the "catholic church." These Christians are now called gnostics, 

from the Greek word gnosis, usually translated as "knowledge." For as those who 

claim to know nothing about ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, 

"not knowing"), the person who does claim to know such things is called gnostic 

("knowing"). But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language 

distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge ("He knows 

mathematics") and knowing through observation or experience ("He knows me"), 

which is gnosis. As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as 

"insight," for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to 

know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny. According 

to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160), the 

gnostic is one has come to understand 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. 

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. 

What Muhammad 'All 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 dramatic 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." 

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." 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. 

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. 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 

worshipped 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 represents 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. 

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." 

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.”

Take care, seekers of truth! Perhaps next time I will discuss more about the 

Second Coming…

Daniel

http://finalbookofdaniel.com