The Banned Books of the Bible

In December 1945 a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for fertilizer at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif cliff near Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, when he struck a sealed clay jar. Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. His mother reportedly burned some of the pages for kindling. What survived changed the study of early Christianity: fifty-two texts, most of them Gnostic, most of them known before only from the attacks of the church fathers who condemned them.

What "banned" means

Nobody held a single vote to ban these books. The canon formed over centuries, and the criteria were apostolic authorship, wide use, and agreement with the rule of faith taught by the bishops. Texts that placed the kingdom inside you, that distinguished the creator from the highest God, that gave Mary Magdalene the leading role, or that made priests unnecessary failed the last test by definition. Bishops wrote against them, Athanasius's Easter letter of 367 told Egyptian monks which books were allowed, and owning the others became dangerous. Somebody, probably monks from the nearby Pachomian monastery, sealed their library in a jar rather than burn it.

The texts you should know

• The Gospel of Thomas. One hundred fourteen sayings of Jesus. The kingdom is inside you. Read the full guide.
• The Gospel of Philip. A Valentinian collection of reflections on the sacraments and the bridal chamber, the reunion of the divided self. It calls Mary Magdalene the Savior's companion and says names are given in a language that deceives. Truth is behind the names.
• The Apocryphon of John. The full Sethian map: the Monad, Sophia's fall, Yaldabaoth, the archons, the spark in Adam. Summary here.
• The Hypostasis of the Archons. Genesis retold from the human side: the rulers try to keep Adam and Eve ignorant and the spirit in the woman wakes them.
• On the Origin of the World. A parallel creation account with a long portrait of the Demiurge and the archons.
• The Gospel of Truth. A Valentinian meditation, possibly by Valentinus himself, on forgetting as the origin of the world and knowledge as its undoing.
• The Treatise on the Resurrection. Resurrection as something that happens now, in knowledge, not later, in the flesh.
• The Thunder, Perfect Mind. A poem in the voice of a divine feminine speaker: I am the first and the last, I am the honored one and the scorned one, I am the whore and the holy one.
• The Apocalypse of Peter. A Gnostic text in which the living Jesus laughs above the cross while a substitute suffers, and the bishops of the emerging church are called dry canals.

Not in the jar but part of the same library of the excluded: the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, and the Pistis Sophia.

What they have in common

Different schools, different myths, one orientation. The world was made by a lesser power. The highest God, the Monad, never demanded sacrifice. A spark of the fullness lives in every person. The fall is forgetting, salvation is remembering, and Christ is the one who came to remind. See What Is Gnosis.

Reading them today

Every one of these texts is now published in translation and most are free online. The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James Robinson, and The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer, are the standard collections. Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels is the best short introduction to why they matter.

Or start with a minute at a time. The Awakened Monad channels take the buried texts one passage at a time, in plain language, for people who always suspected the official story was missing something.