Index
Preview:
she sometimes Achamoth, and is that the same as Achmoth, Echmoth, Echamoth, Chokhmah, or Hokhmah? The titles of the Gnostic books are rendered inconsistently—is the Apocryphon of John the same as the Secret Book of John, or is that the Secret Revelation of John? And what about the Apocryphon of James? Is that the same as the Apocalypse of James, and is that the First Apocalypse of James or the Second Apocalypse of James? What is an apocryphon, and which James is this, anyway? (To answer a couple of these questions, the Apocryphon of John, the Secret Book of John, and the Secret Revelation of John are all different titles for a single text. The James titles refer to three different texts.)
Gnostics texts are complex entities, often written in layers, our surviving texts being based on earlier texts. The hostile accounts of the heresy-hunting church fathers like Irenaeus and Hippolytus have often played on these complexities and emphasized the philosophical jargon and multilingual names in their efforts to discredit the Gnostics. Modern scholars have had to choose whether to leave Gnostic terms in
their untranslated Greek forms or to find an English equivalent, and they have been far from consistent in their choices. In addition, terminology from the study of the New Testament and early Christianity—exegesis, recensions, eschatology, Urtexts, sitz-in-leben, pseudepigrapha, dominical sayings, and so on—has wormed its way into the available books on the Gnostics.
Similar problems hold true for the historical successors, predecessors, and cousins of the ancient Gnostics, like the Manichaeans, Mandaeans, Cathars, and Hermetists, each of which is essential to understanding Gnosticism. Yet, more than two hundred years after the Western rediscovery of original Gnostic texts such as Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu, no dictionary of Gnosticism has been available, no reliable basic guide to assist the beginning student, whether at graduate level or for spiritual study. A Dictionary of Gnosticism aims to correct this problem, to fill the deficiency, as the Gnostics would have it.
Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, we had only the hostile accounts of the early church fathers along with a few
original texts that represented a late stage of Gnosticism and in any case had not received enough scholarly attention. It was in December 1945, that the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered. Mohammed Ali es-Samman and his brother Khalifah Ali, two Arab camel drivers, were out looking for fertilizer at the bottom of the high chalk cliff of Djebel-el-Tarif. They found a large earthenware jar, which they smashed open, slightly wary of what they might find, only to discover twelve books. (One of the books had another pamphlet bound into it, so the books are now numbered as being thirteen in total.) These are codices, not scrolls. Scrolls are continuous sheets rolled up rather like rolls of wallpaper, but a codex is a manuscript book, copied by hand before the invention of printing, but bound in essentially the same way as the modern book. The pages of the codices are made from papyrus cut into sheets and bound between leather covers that have a clasp extending from the back to the front, making the codices resemble modern briefcases. All of the Nag Hammadi codices are written in the Coptic language, which is the final form of the ancient Egyptian language, by
