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.

From The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. Published by Vintage
Books. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.