GNOSTICS & NAG HAMMADI

 

Let us begin with a Gnostic prayer of thanks for the divine Knowledge revealed to men. The prayer is actually a Hermetic work, included with the Gnostic literature found in the desert at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

 

The Prayer of Thanksgiving,

 

The Prayer of Thanksgiving

 

This is the prayer they spoke:

“We give thanks to you!

Every soul and heart is lifted up to You,

Undisturbed name, honored with the name ‘God’

And praised with the name ‘Father,’

For to everyone and everything

Comes the fatherly kindness and affection and love,

And any teaching there may be that is sweet,

And plain, giving us mind, speech, and Knowledge:

Mind, so that we may understand You,

Speech, so that we may expound You,

Knowledge, so that we may Know you.

We rejoice, having been illuminated by your Knowledge.

We rejoice because You have shown us Yourself.

We rejoice because while we were in the body,

You have made us divine through Your Knowledge.

 

“The thanksgiving of the man who attains to You

Is one thing: that we Know You.

We have Known You,

Intellectual light. Life of life,

We have Known You.

Womb of every creature,

We have Known You.

Womb pregnant with the nature of the Father,

We have Known You.

Eternal permanence of the begetting Father,

Thus have we worshiped Your goodness.

There is one petition that we ask:

We would be preserved in Knowledge.

And there is one protection that we desire:

That we not stumble in this kind of life.”[1]

 

 

Nag Hammadi Library - Gnostics

 

With the discovery of the “Nag Hammadi Library” we have recovered many of the writings used by the early Gnostics. Before this collection was found the Church had insured that all we possessed of the Gnostics were quotations contained in criticism by the Church itself. With this greater understanding of the ideas prevalent in the time of the formation of the early Church we can assess the importance the Delphic maxim played in contemporary religious thought. There were fifty-two tractates bound in twelve books, of which we have previously only had hints of in the literature of the early Church. The most important and earliest of these is the Gospel of Thomas where we find the following:

Jesus said, “the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to Know Yourselves, then you will become Known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father.”[2]

 

Another is the Gospel of Phillip: which says:

“Is it not necessary for all those who possess everything to Know Themselves? Some indeed, if they do not Know Themselves, will not enjoy what they possess. But those who have come to Know Themselves will enjoy their possessions.”[3]

This stress on possessions was to alleviate the fears of the “rich man” who might wish to join the sect.

 

There is another work found at Nag Hammadi, the Dialogue of the Savior, in which is a dialogue between Matthew and Jesus:

Matthew said, “Lord, I wish to see that place of life, that place in which there is no evil, but rather it is the pure light.”

The Lord said, “Brother Matthew, you cannot see it, as long as you wear the flesh.”

Matthew said, “O Lord, even if I cannot see it, let me know it.”

The Lord said, “Every one of you who has Known Himself has seen it.”[4]

 

In a tractate called Allogenes (or the Outsider) the identification of God with the Knowledge of Oneself is made clear;

“He (God) is primary revelation and Knowledge of Himself, as it is He alone who Knows Himself.”[5]

 

Yet the Gospel of Truth is “gospel” in the sense of “good news” about Jesus, about the eternal and divine Son, the Word who reveals the Father and passes on Knowledge, particularly Self Knowledge. For through this Self Knowledge the Gnostics know who they are, where they have come from, and where they are going; they realize that they themselves are essentially sons of the Father, that they are of divine origin, that their past and future rest in the divine.[6]

 

“It is within Unity that each one will attain himself; within Knowledge he will purify himself from multiplicity into Unity,..”[7]

 

As for the difference between the Gnostic and their opponents, from the Authoritative Teaching we have the difference spelled out as a matter of Knowledge;

As for those who contend with us, being adversaries who contend against us, we are victorious over their ignorance through our knowledge, since we have already known the Inscrutable One from whom we have come forth.”[8]

 

The Book of Thomas the Contender is supposed to be a dialogue between Jesus and Thomas the Twin. This is the Thomas who is credited with writing the Gospel of Thomas referred to in the beginning of this section and more extensively in the next. Jesus speaks:

‘Now since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself that you may understand who you are, in what way you exist, and how you will come to be. Since you are called my brother, it is not fitting that you be ignorant of yourself. And I know that you have understood, because you have already understood that I am the Knowledge of the Truth. So while you accompany me, although you are uncomprehending, you have (in fact) already come to Know, and you will be called “The one who Knows Himself”. For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has Known Himself has at the same time already achieved Knowledge about the Depth of the All. So then, you, my brother Thomas, have beheld what is obscure to men, that is, what they ignorantly stumble against.[9]

 

There is much, much, more about Self Knowledge to be gleaned from the Hag Hammadi Library. Indeed, enough to demand a separate work devoted to the subject.

 

 

The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus and Self Knowledge.[10]

 

There were many finds of papyrus fragments during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries from the sands of Egypt. Kept from destruction by the dry climate these fragments offered tantalising evidence of a body of literature hitherto unknown. The puzzle of trying to interpret these often minute fragments taxed the knowledge of many scholars. The rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus in upper Egypt yielded a vast trove of papyri in various conditions, from almost complete correspondence to tiny scraps, sometimes containing a part of a word or only a letter or two. The task of arranging the pieces to fit into coherent form was, and still is, enormous. When parts of the works were missing scholars had to make educated guesses, or restorations, as to the missing contents. Their experience in working with the surviving literature of the period gave them a fair idea of the probable contents of these fragmented works. Sometimes their restorations were correct, sometimes not, as later, more complete finds would verify.

 

We have a particularly good example of this happening with the find of a complete work only previously known by a hand-full of fragments from Oxyrhynchus. From another site in Egypt near Nag Hammadi came a find of a library of early Christian and Gnostic books. Among them was a work now called the Gospel of Thomas. Though not a gospel in the common Christian sense, like the four in the New Testament, it was a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Many of the Sayings or Logion are actually found in the New Testament, many differ but slightly, and some are completely new to us.

 

The following is the latest and most authoritative translation of our passage.

 

The Nag Hammadi Library, second revised edition, James M. Robinson, ed. The Gospel of Thomas, [II, 2] trans. Helmut Koester and Thomas O. Lambdin

 

[3] Jesus said; If those who lead you say to you;

‘See, the kingdom is in the sky’,

then the birds of the sky will precede you.

If they say to you; ‘It is in the sea’,

then the fish will precede you.

Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you,

and it is outside of you. When you come to

know yourselves, then you will become known

and you will realise that it is you who are

the sons of the Living Father. But if

you will not know yourselves, you

dwell in poverty and it is you who

are that poverty.[11]

 

Gospel of Thomas, Commentary on Self Knowledge

 

“They will not say, ‘Lo, here’ or ‘There,’ for behold the kingdom of God is within you.” Lk. 17:21

The Greek version of Thomas says that the kingdom is within; the Coptic adds that it is also outside, perhaps because the Naassenes spoke of the kingdom as ‘hidden and manifest at the same time.”

 

The kingdom within is the equivalent of self-knowledge. “When you know yourselves, then you will be known.” This reminds us of Paul’s expression, ‘Now knowing God, or rather having been known by God” (Gal. 4:9), and ‘Then I shall know, just as I have been known” (Cor. 13:12). The Gnostic emphasis is different, however. For Paul God now knows men; they will know Him in the eschatological future. The Gnostic lays stress on knowing the self in order to be known, and his idea of knowing the self is an old Greek notion, expressed, for example, by the Delphic oracle; it is not characteristically Christian. The Gnostics will know that they are sons of the living Father; Christians will “become” sons of their father in heaven (Mat. 5:45) or of the Most High (Lk. 6:35) - and they do so by loving their enemies, not by knowing.

 

The Gnostic says that self-knowledge results in freedom from poverty, rather in the way that Paul speaks of slavery to “poverty-stricken” celestial spirits as having been ended by Christ (Gal. 4:3 - 10). Paul also says that Jesus, “though he was rich, became poor, so that you might be made rich by his poverty” (2 Cor. 8:9). Once more, the Christian emphasis is on the action of God in Christ. The Gnostic emphasis is on man’s knowledge, even though this knowledge comes from revelation.

 

...It is evident that the knowledge is not ordinary human wisdom but something derived from revelation.[12]

 

 

The Gospel of Thomas is translated in the following works and editions.

 

The Gospel According to Thomas, Guillaumont et. al. Harper & Row, 1959.

 

The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, Jean Doresse, Hollis & Carter, London, 1960

The introduction and translation of the Gospel of Thomas is in Appendix II. pp. 333>.

 

The Nag Hammadi Library, James M. Robinson, General Editor, Harper & Row, paperback, 1981.

 

The Nag Hammadi Library, second revised edition, James M. Robinson, General Editor, Pub. E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1988

 

The Secret Sayings of Jesus, Grant & Freedman, Fontana, Glasgow, 1960

 

An interesting work on the Nag Hammadi library is The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels, E., Pelican, 1979