Nag Hammadi and Related Literature

This essay examines the imagery of gender and sexuality in four documents from the Nag Hammadi library. The selected works share a religious emphasis on the saving power of religious knowledge or gnōsis, but represent distinct literary genres and differing religious perspectives on gender, sexuality, and divine–human relations. The essay analyzes each text’s uses of gender imagery in literary context and in relation to key religious ideas, such as the relation of the divine and human; social relations between individuals or groups; and the experiential domain of ritual, religious experience, and/or sexual relations. It also considers the ways these four texts illustrate some of the distinctive ways in which Nag Hammadi literature employs the imagery of gender and sexuality to articulate distinctive conceptions of difference and to engender salvation among their knowing readers and hearers.

Saintly Sexlessness. Notes on the Apophthegmata Patrum

The textual proximity of “woman” and “apocryphal literature” in a fragment included in the Apophthegmata Patrum may seem paradoxical. Abba Sopatrus’ apophthegm must be understood against the background of the theological debates of Origenists and non-Origenists during the 4th – 6th centuries, in Northern Egypt, and consequently needs to be exegetically enframed between Emperor Justinian I. (l. 482-565; r. 527-565) Edictum contra Origenem and Archimandrite Shenute of Atripe (348-466)’s Contra Origenistas. In fact, the contemporary Gnostic literature was able to generate heretical sexual imagery. The Apocryphon of John (II, 1; III, 1; IV, 1; BG 8502, 2), included in the Nag Hammadi Library, explains in a sexual manner the origin of evil. Abba Sopatrus’ apophthegm testifies about the proximity of Christianity and Gnosticism in Northern Egypt during the period of the Desert Fathers, and also about the effort of the abbas to establish firm limits against sexual lust and the lust of the erroneous dogmata. Both posed tremendous potential danger of disintegrating the monks’ peace of mind and peace of soul.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About the Nag Hammadi LIbrary

Tony Burke responds to two recent articles on the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library—“Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices” by Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount, and “How Reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” by Mark Goodacre.