A Quick Review of The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 6/17/2007 11:16 PM 
Categories: Gnostic Gospels, Judaism, Paul, The Satyricon, Christianity, Roman Religion, Scholarship
Categories: Gnostic Gospels, Judaism, Paul, The Satyricon, Christianity, Roman Religion, Scholarship
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The Nag Hammadi Scriptures is a fresh translation of the texts found in James M. Robinson's The Nag Hammadi Library (many of them are also found in Bentley Layton's Gnostic Scriptures, and William Barnstone's The Other Bible; Marvin Meyer has done the bulk of the translating in this new book, and I have to guess much of it is based on his translation work from his book with Barnstone, The Gnostic Bible (which covered Gnosticism beyond the Nag Hammadi texts.) In this book, Scriptures, his fellow translators are Einar Thomassen, Wolf-Peter Funk, Michel Roberge, Birger Pearson, John D. Turner, and Karen King — with essays by Elaine Pagels and Marvin Meyer. Meyer has spent most of his career as a translator, and the rest of the list are respected Coptologists and Gnosticism scholars. I haven't picked over the translations, but all I'd expect to find are the kind of professional grouses one has with other scholars.This book is not like any of the others because it contains the Greek fragments of the Gospel of Thomas (email me if my brain has slipped a cog, here...), it also contains the Gospel of Judas and, for the first time anywhere, the Book of the Stranger (also called the Book of Allogenes in early reports on the Codex Tchacos.) With this book you can now read all four texts from the Tchacos codex in one place.
If anything, the new text, the Book of the Stranger shows the terrible shape the Codex was in more than the Gospel of Judas did (watch for the brackets that mark missing text in the Gospel of Judas and other ancient texts.) Judas is missing parts of lines, parts of paragraphs, portions of pages .... Stranger is missing most of itself, what can be read fills all of two printed pages.
What little is left looks very interesting, like Judas it appears to be from the Sethian branch of Gnosticism, and I hope to see more about it once the critical edition of Codex Tchacos comes out. (To do real work with any ancient text specialists need photos rather than transcriptions ... and in some cases, only looking at the text, in person, will do.)The essays look readable and informative, the footnotes are worthwhile (look for a reference to Petronius' Satyricon in the Gospel of Thomas
, and non-specialists will find the translations are a bit less stodgy and technical than the ones in The Nag Hammadi Library (although I suspect that will remain the standard translation for specialists.)Gnosticism is not a reader-friendly subject, I'm pleased to see historians writing books that attempt to make it as accessible as possible.
This weekend I was reading another move-along-nothing-to-see-here essay on the Gospel of Judas. (I misplaced the link and among the legion of such posts and sites I doubt I could find it again.) It did make me think of two rebuttals:
- By theology, Christianity tends to be interested in its founder and the first few generations of Christians. But to a historian, Christianity as it is now depends on much of what followed that time, what even later generations make of the traditions and messages passed down to them. Gnosticism knocks what we thought about the path of that development on its ear — rather than being an aberrant backwater, it's right in the thick of what Christianity made of its Jewish roots (and whether to reject them or not) and of the Greek and Roman culture, religion, and education that surrounded it (and whether to reject them or not). If you want to know how and why Constantine's Christianity took the shape it did, you need to understand something about Gnosticism.
- I have read one study of the relationship between Paul's wittings and the Gospel of Thomas and heard one colleague talk of looking for historical material in one part of the Nag Hammadi Library (an effort I've heard no more about.) No historian thinks the Gnostic Gospels were written by the actual Philip, John, or Mary (we don't think the canonical Gospels were written by the names ascribed to them, either — a bit more than a century after the disciples' deaths there's a bit of a scrabble among local traditions to pin their teachings and traditions to the name of one or another disciple ... Rome gets Peter, Alexandria gets Mark ... the less lucky get Bartholomew and Philip.
) That said, there has yet to be a careful effort to sift Gnostic texts for what they can tell us about early Christian traditions — as my field has spent a century doing with the four gospels. Until that cautious, painstaking effort has been made I cannot accept any a priori dismissals.
-Kushana
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