While Gnosticism is ancient, most don’t grow up with it as their faith tradition – the good news is that means that most of its adherents are so because they’ve chosen to be so, as opposed to being dragged out by their parents, or family. A sometimes downside to that is that our view of Gnosticism and Gnostic scripture especially- is heavily and often unconsciously, informed by how we have viewed other scriptures, and in the cases of most- a lot more literally.
The difficulty arises when we don’t know, as Jason from our podcast Talk Gnosis puts it – ‘who or what is in the room with us’. People who move from tradition to tradition, may encounter the same problems that had them depart their origin point, but not realize it has retained artifacts of their tradition of origin, or the assumptions made by those who teach it, which can become our assumptions and go wherever we go. There’s also an analogy or element of the ‘dry drunk’ – who breaks free of substance use but is still enmeshed in the behaviours that helped make it so intractable for so long.
Contrary to how Evangelical Christianity often represents Christian history- a literal view of scripture, and concepts like Sola Scriptura etc, is a very very narrow answer to the question of how Christianity has viewed its own texts across its own context and time. Origen of Alexandria put forward that scripture could be read in three ways – literal, moral, and allegorical. Literal is often the lowest form of reading the Word – but it still has its time and place.
Reading ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’ and ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ literally, is for the best. But magic comes to the surface when we go a bit deeper and ask respectively ‘What have I done to support the thriving of another?’ or ‘What have I done today to give to someone something that they lacked?’. The hard saying of ‘unless you hate your mother and your father’ opens up to ‘Set aside the labels that make one person more worthy of your compassion than another’. We also become so familiar with scripture that there are times where we look past it, instead of into it or into ourselves. Familiarity breeds contempt as the old saying goes- and it becomes easy to dismiss the wisdom of scripture when we’re no longer looking at meaning and opportunity for encounter, but for compliance.
Thwarting these dangers becomes more accessible when we look at scripture through multiple lenses and angles. We know ourselves and others by nuance, complexity and context, but we don’t always seek to know the Divine in the same way.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so wise that I can learn nothing from the components of my former life (I grew up going to Baptist bible camp and Calvinist Sunday services)- after all, it was there I found my faith – but now the who or what is in the room with me is a matter of choice and perspective.
In terms of Gnostic scripture and the Nag Hammadi Texts – some of our approaches to scripture are explored as I recall in our Intro course – as Scripture is the subject of our Eighth Principle –
“We affirm the use of sacred writings that reveal the Divine message of love and compassion throughout history. We especially revere the Christian New Testament, the writings of the Old Testament and others, the Nag Hammadi Library texts and the Corpus Hermeticum as potent sources for this teaching.”
One of the most common perspectives in the AJC is that we take scripture as myth, symbol and allegory, rather than doctrine and dogma. By myth we don’t mean the now-common definition of something that isn’t real, but rather something which ‘always is but never was’. It has the ability to convey truth independent of its relationship to historical fact.
Gnostic scripture is the product of experience, not a replacement for it- and it becomes a way through metaphor, poetry, and paradox to give us a means to try and to grasp the ungraspable and reflect back or make comprehendible our relationship to the Divine, to the Self, and to the Other in a given moment.
When we hear the word love, it automatically evokes and invokes our experiences, ideas and relationships, each of which is very different at times from person to person, and those experiences are hard sometimes to convey in words – and yet, centuries of very different humans, in very different times and contexts, have all used the sonnets of Shakespeare, to convey that which otherwise would by hard to communicate- and in those words, the shape of the thing becomes apparent.
Much like say for example, my wedding vows – they’re not my relationship, but they express it, give it shape, and become a window to see it through. Scripture is iconography in language. The picture of my wife in my wallet is not my wife but is a window through which I can see and encounter all of my experiences, my hopes, the things I cannot express.
Lastly- as for text for beginners- picking up the Gnostic Bible was a good call – it’s structured IMO more towards practice, less chapter and verse, and more for poetic flow, so I find it a good companion reading in the context of ritual, prayer or meditation. You might also want to accompany it with Meyer’s Nag Hammadi Scriptures or Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Library– both of which are solid academic collections. This isn’t to say that the Gnostic Bible isn’t but the structure is different.
Another book I’d highly recommend because it has some great approaches to reading scripture is Carl McColman’s Read the Bible like a Mystic – while it is focused on the Bible, the same principles and approaches he discusses there are useful for looking at any sacred text, including the Nag Hammadi corpus. It is especially helpful if one has a difficult history with the scriptural approaches of one’s faith or church of origin.”
+ Shaun, Mar Iohannes
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