Gnosticism

Gnostic texts, in a sense, belong to the outskirts of Coptic literature. Their contents are highly idiosyncratic, and adherents of Gnostic sects must always have been relatively small in number. Then, again, these texts constitute a facet of Coptic literature that is characteristically Egyptian and very characteristically Coptic (for three general works on Gnosticism see Layton 1995; 2004; Robinson 1977). There is nothing quite like Egyptian Gnosticism in any other surviving literature, but, above all, nothing has done more to draw attention to Coptic and Coptic literature in the twentieth century, or perhaps ever, than the discovery of thirteen papyrus codices inscribed with Coptic Gnostic texts in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, ancient Chenobos-kion, in southern Egypt. The codices contain two to seven treatises. Several works appear more than once, the Apocryphon of John even in three versions, with a fourth being preserved in Berlin, bp 8502.

The Nag Hammadi discovery truly gave the study of Coptic a shot in the arm. The texts in question are presumably mostly, if not entirely, translations from Greek originals now lost. They are written in the Sahidic or Subakhmimic (Lykopolitan) dialects or mixtures thereof. The Greek originals presumably date to the second or third century, and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were copied probably in the late fourth century AD. Before the Nag Hammadi find a few Greek fragments and the codices Askewianus and Brucianus at the British Museum and a codex in Berlin, afore mentioned bp 8502, had come to light as Coptic witnesses of the Gnostic religion. The edition and study of the Nag Hammadi library in the last half a century has involved a flurry of activity that is now almost impossible to survey.

One way of defining Gnosticism is by comparing it with Manichaeism. Both are dualistic in the sense defined above. Knowledge of the complex way in which the world came into existence is a crucial component of Manichaeism. In that sense, Manichaeism is a type of Gnosticism. Among the differences between the two are the following. First, Gnostic thought seems more esoteric and abstract than Manichaean. Gnostic writings are on occasion so enigmatic that one almost suspects the presence of deliberate obfuscation. The world according to Mani may be full of concepts and entities, but even the most abstract of them appear to inhabit a material body Influence from the more abstract strains of Greek philosophy including Platonism plays a much more important role in Gnosticism than it does in Manichaeism. That must have been at least in part due to the fact that Greek had been an Egyptian language since the conquest by Alexander. As a consequence, Egypt was more imbued with Hellenic culture than Mani’s Babylonia and Persia.

The second difference is that Gnosticism was much more elitist and exclusive. In Manichaeism, certain classes of human beings constituted the elite, but the religion was designed to include everyone in some capacity. In fact, Manichaeans aggressively proselytized. By contrast, Gnostics seem to have taken satisfaction in maintaining a lifestyle and beliefs that set them apart from the hoi polloi. The third difference is that God is even more transcendent in Gnosticism than in Manichaeism. Both are dualistic in the sense of dissociating God from the principle of evil, but Manichaeism achieves this disconnect by making the force of evil almost into a god in its own right. Meanwhile, the good God is altogether aware ofthe world. Gnosticism, on the other hand, accomplishes the separation by the belief in a God who has not the slightest knowledge of the existence of the world. What created the world was an emanation that separated from him without his knowing and after several permutations produced an entity that created the world.

Fourth, Gnostic thought is much more fragmented than Manichaean thought, and more than one type of Gnosticism can be discerned. By contrast, there is only one unified Manichaeism. The reason is clearly that Manichaeism is mostly the product of a single mind, Mani’s, who was also its creator. No such single central figure can be identified in Gnosticism. Gnostic texts can be subdivided into types. One criterion of division is based on the degree of influence from Christianity (Krause 1979: 3, 707-8); some texts, remarkably, exhibit no such influence whereas many others do, and in some cases a text originally free of such influence may have been rewritten from a more Christian perspective.

In recent years, a new Gnostic text has come to light which has caused much excitement, namely the Coptic Gospel of Judas. There has perhaps not been as much emphasis as there might be on how its most unusual and most striking essential characteristic fully reveals the profoundly dualistic character of Gnosticism, namely the fact that Judas and Jesus were good friends. Dualism involves dissociating God from evil. Clearly, Judas is, in a way, the supreme personification of evil. It is easy to imagine how contact between Judas and the Son of God must have made Gnostics uncomfortable. What better way to address this discomfort than by the belief that Judas and Jesus colluded by tacit agreement and that Judas only pretended to betray Jesus to give the plot a most desirable twist?