The Gnostic Gospels

By Elaine Pagels

182 Pages | Copyright 1979, Vintage Books Edition 1989 | Softcover | Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. | ISBN: 9780679724532.

' Groundbreaking . . . the first direct look at texts termed heretical by early church fathers. '

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant unearthed what proved to be the Gnostic Gospels, the sacred books of one of the earliest Christian sects. This now-classic landmark study draws on those texts to illuminate the world of the first Christians and to examine the different ways, in which both Gnostics and the orthodox constructed God, Christ, and the Church. Did Jezus literally rise from the dead? Was there only one God, and could He be both Father and Mother? Whose version of Christianity came down to us and why did it prevail? Brilliant, provocative, and stunning in its implications, The Gnostic Gospels is a radical yet accesible reconsideration of the origins of the Christian faith.

From the Introduction (p. XVII):

" For I am the first and the last,
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin . . .
I am the barren one,
and many are her sons . . .
I am the silence that is incomprehensible . . .
I am the utterance of my name "

- Thunder, Perfect Mind, a Text from the Nag Hammadi find.