"A Gnostic Primer"
Written and Compiled by John Lash

A Reading Plan for the Nag Hammadi Library

Introduction

The first thing anyone confronts in attempting to read the Nag Hammadi Library is the chaotic and incoherent nature of the materials, to say nothing of their density. On the first approach to these arcane texts, even the most dedicated reader may easily be overwhelmed. Attempting to go deeper, s/he is likely to become even more overwhelmed. What is to be done?

Few people today have time to study these texts in depth, yet many people who are attracted to the radical religious message of the Gnostics could benefit from accessing the gems buried in this hodgepodge of third-hand theology, mythical lore and mystical speculation. The core teaching of Gnosis is there, a message from the Mysteries, if only we could get to it. All the material in the Coptic Gnostic corpus is difficult, but there is a way to make the task of reading easier and more productive. To this end, I propose a reading plan that will effectuate a shift from the burdens of study to bursts of discovery. The system proposed leads the reader into the material in a way that selects and highlights the essential elements of Gnosis.


The Breakdown

The tactical reading program I propose is based on a banal feat of organization: listing the texts alphabetically. This is not done in any edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC). Rather, the texts are always listed sequentially by Codex, such as V, and document in Codex, such as 5: thus V, 5, which is the Apocalypse of Adam. The Nag Hammadi Library in English (hereafter NHLE) presents a Table of Contents arranged in this manner. The problem is, if you have been riffling the book and caught sight of a passage that engages you in, say, The Apocalypse of Peter, you have to go back to the T of C to find how to get to that text, and this involves perusing the contents until you locate it: VII, 3, about halfway down the list). Going through the Table of Contents time and time again is a tedious and exasperating chore. On the other hand, if you just riffle the book, you will find that the NHLE is long and complicated. Even though it consists of only 52 documents, it seems to go on forever!

I don´t think it's feasible for anyone to read the NHLE from page one, straight through to the end. In the first place, you will never get through it, you will get buried, wallowed down in the material. There is no advantage in reading straight through the book because there is no sequential sense in the Codices. In fact, it is much better to read them non-sequentially. With the reading plan it is possible both to develop a comprehensive overview of the texts, and to appreciate each single text according to its specific character. With the three-level breakdown, reading is easier and more productive.

Now what about those "bursts of discovery?"

Most of the Gnostic corpus is terribly obscure, incoherent and awkwardly translated. But there and again, every reader will stumble upon a passage that stands out vividly. It bursts out of the dense mass of the text. Perhaps just one sentence will resonate in an otherwise baffling fog of words, or a brief passage of Gnostic myth will capture the imagination. For instance, the line "Spiritual love is wine and fragrance," stands out in the Gospel of Philip. The textual location is II, 3, 77.35: Codex II, document 3, page 77, line 35. Every single line in the NHC can be located in this way. This convention is convenient because it follows the order of the Codices listed in the Table of Contents. Within each Codex, the texts are paginated uniformly, not individually. In NHC II are seven documents running to 145 pages. II, 3, the Gospel of Philip comprises pages 51 - 86. The individual texts (called "tractates") are like chapters in a book. The Nag Hammadi Codices are the earliest surviving examples of leatherbound, paginated books.

Granted, it is handy to be able to designate the exact location of a line in the NHC, but this system does not help us with overall orientation to the material. I suggest that detecting and developing the "bursts" is the best way to get oriented. It is the vivid, outstanding sentences or passages that count most in how one builds up a solid understanding of the material. In continued reading, what you can get from the NHC comes through sudden flashes of this kind rather than extensive, line-by-line comprehension. To keep track of the flashes, and to build comprehension based on these sporadic insights, you have to be able to return to the text where the flash happens. This is how the alphabetic list is helpful.

I have made an alphabetical list of texts for the NHLE 1991, the edition most widely used outside scholarly circles. This is the paperback edition most people own. The list can be printed out, folded to a column, and kept in the book, even used as a bookmark. I suggest that readers keep this list handy for immediate access to any text.

The alphabetic list helps, not only to find the material, but also to find one's way into the material.(I made this discovery by serendipity, by the way. It goes without saying that I would not have realized what I discovered if I had not had some years of intensive study behind me.) The breakdown I propose consists of three stages of reading, with texts alphabetically listed at each level. From the total of 52 documents, I have made three lists, keeping the documents in each list in alphabetic order. I also cut out minor and neglibable texts. This reduces the corpus to 32 documents in three modules or reading levels. It so happens that the alphabetic order provides the optimal sequence for working through the materials. How this is so will become evident as we explore the levels.

This recondite material requires a special reading tactics.Generally, it helps to know what you're getting into before you start reading, what type or genre of text you're tackling, and how long it is. All the material in the NHL is difficult, but the difficulty diminishes as we learn from one text how to approach the succeeding one. This is the advantage of the three-stage, alphabetic order.

The three tables list the 32 NHC documents in the reading plan, with page numbers in the NHLE, and conventional abbreviations of titles. The length and type (genre) of each text is described after the title in bold. Following a colon is the page in the NHLE where the text begins. The number of pages, given next, is not the leaves of the papyrus pages, but the actual pages in the English translation. Documents vary from one and a half pages to about forty. It is helpful to know how long the document is before you get into it. Next comes the genre. There are six types: revelation discourse, dialogue, homily, sayings, apocalypse, and cosmological exposition. Then I I use CORE:, followed by details, to indidcate the radical (i.e., Pagan, pre-Christian) elements in a text, especially elements that reflect the teachings of the Mystery Schools. Finally, there is a brief note on the physical state of the text. Thus:

9. The (First) Apocalypse of James: page 260. Six pages, revelation discourse with dialogue. CORE: facing the Archons, commission to secret knowledge. Somewhat damaged.

Throughout the commentaries in the reading plan, I will sometimes cite the five volume paperback edition of the Coptic Gnostic Library (CGL, Leiden, Boston and Koln, 2000). Each of these five volumes contains individually paginated books from the master hardback edition. For instance, CGL II contains four different books bound together; volumes XXXI, XX, XXI and IV of the hardback edtion. CGL II, 2, refers to the 2nd book in that volume. Like the master collection, the five-volume CGL presents the Coptic text on the left hand page, with line-by-line translation on the righthand page, plus long commetaries, glossaries in Greek and Coptic, etc. In many places the translations differ from what is found in the popular NHLE.

The advantage of the CGL (apart from having the Coptic, if you want to get into that) is that the text is more readable and accessible because it is dispersed line by line, rather than packed into standard blocks as in the NHLE. With the NHLE the reader can get mired in the density of the prose blocks. This is, I believe, a huge disadvantage of anyone seriously committed to penetrating these arcane materials. It is much easier to follow a difficult passage when you see the text broken into short, poetry-like lines, as it is in the original Codices. Since it is unlikely that most readers will have the time or resources for a full plunge into the CGL, I will occasionally draw from those volumes some points that may support clarification and comprehension of the NHLE.

Here is the breakdown in three stages:

"The Mysteries and the Master"

"The Sense of Cosmic Order"

Reading in Depth

This three-stage reading plan showcases the essential material in the NHC by highlighting the "bursts," the vivid and outstanding elements in each text—but it could be argued that these are my bursts, and other readers will have different responses, resulting in different highlights. Granted, this is certainly true, and I do not claim that my bursts are superior to anyone else's. What I do claim, however, is that my bursts are definitive because they have been repeated hundreds of time in countless readings of these texts. The elements I emphasize are sharply delineated and the teaching points have been rigorously test-driven. They are not the only highlights a reader will encounter in the Gnostic corpus, but they are the highlights that define the essential message of Gnosis.

Having said that, I ought to explain the method I use for developing the "essential message of Gnosis." Throughout Metahistory.org, I have often noted a strange fact: scholars who spend their lives delving into Gnostic materials to fathom the origins of Christianity, not only ignore the critique of Christanity contained in those materials, but they also ignore the Gnostic message as such, apart from its use to explain and legitimate Christianity , and to delineate its historical origins. Experts do not regard the Sophia Mythos as a genuine visionary scenario in its own right, distinct from the Judeo-Christian creation myth, nor do they consider the bizarre subject of the Archons to be worthy of serious scholarly analysis.

Everyone who delves into the Gnostic corpus ought to be aware of one extraordinary fact that no scholar will address: the two main components of the Gnostic message, the critique of salvationism and the Sophia Mythos, are interlocked. Let's call these the critical component and the imaginal component. (Special terms such as "imaginal" are defined in the glossary appended to the reading plan.) The imaginal component presents the scenario of Sophia's plunge from the Pleroma, the cosmic center. By a side-effect of her action, an inorganic species emerges and comes to inhabit the solar system, apart from the sun, moon, and earth. This is imaginal material, part of the "sci-fi theology" of Gnosticism. You can take it or leave it, but it is not going to disappear any time soon. Mystery School teaching on deviation comprises (I estimate) about one-sixth of all the material in the corpus.

The critique of the redeemer complex in the NHC makes the Archons instrumental in implanting and spreading the redeemer pathology. They are the intrapsychic cross-species agents of Error whose main expression is salvationist ideology framed in totalitarian religion. The Archons are deeply implicated in what we believe about ourselves, about human potential, God and the Gods. No scholar is willing to take the disclosure of the Archons on face value. But I would argue that to understand the Gnostic message and approach first-hand experience of Gnosis, we must be willing to consider—that is, provisionally adopt and think through—the primary noetic principle: Not all that operates in the human mind originates there.

Whoever cannot face this proposition will not get much satisfaction from reading the NHC in the kind of depth allowed by this three-stage plan.


Reading with Discernment

The essential message of Gnosis is non-Christian in the sense that it rejects both the incarnation of a superhuman savior god and universal atonement by the suffering of the savior. Yet there are passages in the NHC that explicitly declare both of these propositions! It may seem utterly perserve to select only those elements that support a non-Christian argument and use them to develop a "radical Gnostic message," but at least I do so in an honest and transparent way. All scholars use the Lego method, but they do not build anything out of the Lego pieces. They merely select similar Lego pieces and place them in boxes which they label Valentinian, Christian Gnostic, mythological Gnosticism, anti-Jewish polemic, Alexandrian School, Platonizing Sethian, Christian Apocalypse, Wisdom literature, and more.

This happens because it is the way scholars can control the impressions made on them by the diversity of the materials. These labels cannot be applied to a single text, only to certain elements in a text. I believe that the diversity of the NHC is due to three factors: the "Greek originals" that got translated into Coptic, the filtering effect of the translators, and the extreme conditions of translation.

What about those "Greek originals," then? They were likely to have been rough class notes on oral teachings given in Egypt and the Levant in the first centuries of the Christian Era, but including citations of written works as well. In any case, they were student material with some passages of verbatim instruction from telestai, Gnostic teachers in the Mysteries. When verbatim instruction dominates a text, scholars designate it as a "revelation dialogue." It is more than likely that the Egyptian scribes who translated the originals from Greek into Coptic understood little of the meaning of these second- or third-hand documents. Moreover, the conditions of translation must have been stressful. The execution of some texts is hurried, the lettering slurred by speed. Scholars note that the several scribes who did the translations spoke a dialect of Coptic, Sub-Akhmimic, but they translated in another dialect, Sahidic, to conform to religious convention. Hold on, it gets worse.

I will not expand here on the niceties of the Coptic language, for there are none. Coptic is a dog's breakfast, vomitted up, re-seasoned, and hastily scarfed down. It was invented in the 2nd century CE to transcribe Egyptian heiroglyphs found on amulets and in magical texts. In its earliest form it used various letters from the Demotic alphabet (an older Egyptian device to translate hieroglyphs), but eventually only six of these were retained. These were merged with the Greek alphabet, with all characters written in capital letters. The Coptic of the NHC consists of 24 Greek letters and six Demotic letters: shai (SH), fai (F), horeh (H), djandja (DJ), kyima (G) and ti (TI).

I have argued that Coptic is not really a language at all, rather, a kind of stenographic shorthand. About one in every five Coptic words is a loan from Greek. Some proper Coptic words show Egyptian derivation and some are just wild cards. Coptic is heavily compounded, with the definite article, the Greek letter PI, attached to the word it indicates: PIEIOT, "the father." EIOT is pronounced yot. Pie-yot, "the father." This is the paltry term used for the supreme being in the NHC. Many Coptic words have vowel clusters that look wierd: OYOEIN, "light," pronounced woyn. (Here scholars are guessing: no one really knows how these bizarre-looking words were pronounced.) Many words are appended with an awkward slug of consonants. ROME (ro-may) means "human being." Add MNT in front and it becomes MNTROME, "humanity." Add the negative indicator AT and it becomes MNTATROME, "inhumanity." Bear in mind, also, that the grammatical constructions of Coptic do not lend themselves to fine and sophisticated phrasing of abstract ideas. Add to the Kafkaesque grammar the masses of orthographic errors and variations found through the corpus and you have the happy horror that is the Coptic Gnostic Library.

So much for the filtering of the scribes, whoever they were. Getting through the translations is an obstacle course that would try the Terminator, but then you fetch up in the content. Take The Prayer of the Apostle Paul, NHC I,1, written on the flyleaf of Codex I, called the Jung Codex because it was acquired (illegally) by C. G. Jung. It consists of forty-six lines. At first glance this snippet of Coptic writing appears to present clear textual evidence that the Apostle Paul, the zealous preacher of the New Testament, was a Gnostic. Elaine Pagels, for one, has made a strong case for the Gnostic Paul. But neither the Pauline Acts or letters, nor the Gnostic treatises, are in any instance signed by authors. They are traditionally attributed to authors, that's all. Attributions to a "Paul" occur in the NHC, but Gnostics were known for attributing writings to all kinds of people, real and imaginary. The Prayer is not proof, either that a Gnostic Paul existed historically, or that such an individual, if he did exist, is identical to the presumed historical Paul of the New Testament. Inference is not evidence, but most of the evidence in the NHC is pure inference.

Pr Paul, as it is abbreviated, refers to “Jesus Christ, the Lord of Lords, the King of the Ages,” and so appears to be as orthodox as you can get. But “Jesus” and “Christ,” in Gnostic texts cannot be assumed to denote either the historical Jesus or a divine person, “The Christ.” Radical Gnostic teaching rejects the incarnation of Divinity in human form, and warns that the Archons, through their powers of “simulation” (hal in Coptic) insinuate a false image of Divinity into our minds. The great challenge of the Coptic Gnostic materials is to read beyond the inferences to the essence of the Gnostic message as such.

The Prayer of the Apostle Paul is routinely categorized as a “Christian Gnostic” text, but that label is just another filter on content already blurred under several layers of filtering. The “prayer” contains trace elements of a purely Gnostic nature, for instance: “Grant what no angel eye has seen and no archon ear has heard.” This lines refers to surveillance by the Archons or Watchers known from the Book of Enoch, an arcane text that presents some parallels to Gnostic material. That humanity is being observed and manipulated by a non-human species, is one of the secret teachings of the Mysteries, and by no account an accepted premise of Christian doctrine.

To read the NHC with discernment we must realize that almost nothing is straightword in these materials, yet the message of Gnosis was is clear and explicit when it comes up. The genuine teachings of the Mysteries can be extracted from this pitiful mess of scribal pottage. The three-stage reading plan is designed to build the skills for discernment, text by text. At the end of the day, the reader gets out of the Gnostic corpus whatever the "bursts" call forth in the reader's mind. Here is Dick's "plasmate" in action. As I wrote in another piece (Approaching Gnosticism) in Metahistory.org:

When all is said and done, approaching Gnosticism involves an act of faith, indicated by Gnostics as Pistis Sophia, “confidence in the indwelling wisdom.”

You have to believe that you can discover innately whatever you are seeking to know through an external quest for knowledge.

jll: May 2005 Flanders-Andalucia