Another Disciple Is Heard From

The Dead Sea Scrolls got all the publicity. But more useful to students of early Christian history is a cache of Coptic papyri unearthed near Nag Hammadi in northern Egypt in 1945, the remnants of a library used by a community of Gnostics in the 5th century. The texts are copies of sacred writings from earlier centuries, when the church was struggling to disentangle itself from the early heresy of Gnosticism, which blended Christian ideas with mystical elements from pagan religions of the East. Published last week was the first English translation of one of the most important Nag Hammadi documents--The Gospel of Philip (Harper & Row; $3.75), edited and annotated by British Scholar Robert McL. Wilson.

Rambling Sermon. Compared with the chronological accounts of Jesus' life in Mark or Luke, The Gospel of Philip is not a Gospel at all, and deserves no place in the New Testament canon. In form it is a rambling, epigrammatic sermon or epistle on certain Christian teachings, interpreted from a Gnostic viewpoint. Composed about the middle of the 2nd century, the Gospel could not have been written by Philip the Apostle, who is recorded in John as one of the first disciples gathered by Jesus and as an onlooker at the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In stead, following a custom of the early Christian era, it was written by some unknown author who sought to give his own writings the ring of authority by purporting to speak in some measure for the Apostle. Unlike the already translated Gospel of Thomas, from the same Nag Hammadi collection, Philip contains no sayings of Jesus that scholars are tempted to consider genuine. Nonetheless, the author knew his New Testament; the Gospel is larded with references to the four Evangelists and to a number of the epistles of Paul.

Wilson argues from internal evidence that Philip was probably written by a disciple of the shadowy but formidable heretic Valentinus, the 2nd century priest who stood as candidate for the bishopric of Rome before lapsing into Gnosticism. In his works, which were savagely attacked by such early Christian apologists as St. Irenaeus, Valentinus argued that the real God was hidden to men's eyes; earth, the realm of evil, had been created by a lesser, malevolent deity. Jesus had been sent by the hidden God to redeem the world from this demiurge, and had imparted a secret wisdom, or gnosis, to the select few who were destined to be saved.

The author of Philip shares these bizarre views. But he also regards himself as a true Christian, writing: "For the Father anointed the Son, and the Son anointed the Apostles, and the Apostles anointed us. He who is anointed possesses the All. He possesses the resurrection, the light, the Cross, the Holy Spirit." Wilson notes that much of the Gospel "could probably have been read without misgiving by a Christian of the period, and certainly some of the themes appear in other works which have never been considered anything but orthodox." For example, Philip paraphrases St. John's Gospel on the importance of the Eucharist: "But what is this which will inherit? That which belongs to Jesus with his blood. Because of this he said 'he who shall not eat my flesh and drink my blood has no life in him.' He who has received these has food and drink and clothing."

Beauty & Wisdom. But no orthodox believer would have accepted Philip's erroneous teaching--common to much Christian apocrypha--that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' consort, or this exotic thought: "Philip the apostle said: 'Joseph the carpenter planted a garden because he needed the wood for his trade. It was he who made the Cross from the trees which he planted. And his seed hung on that which he planted. His seed was Jesus, but the planting was the Cross.' " True believers would also have suspected as Gnostic this reference to a secret knowledge possessed by a Christian elite: "For the Son would not become Father except he clothe Himself with the name of the Father. This name those who have it know indeed, but they do not speak of it. But those who have it not do not know it."

For all its doctrinal errors, the Gospel of Philip has many passages of surprising beauty and even wisdom. Translator Wilson believes that it is the product of a sincere effort by an early Gnostic Christian to remove what he thought was the essence of Jesus' teaching from the "Jewish envelope" in which it had come down through the Apostles. "Compared with the faith of a Paul," Wilson writes, "[the religion of Philip] may represent a decline; in the light of Christian history as a whole it may be condemned as false, indeed, a travesty of the truth." Yet Wilson also believes that "for the author this was a faith in which he found a meaning for life."

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