Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not
bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to
them, "Why do I not love you as (I love) her?"
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.
the gnostic is one has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we
were... whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is
rebirth.
Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of
gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says:
Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by
taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own
and says, "My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body." Learn the sources of sorrow:, joy,
love, hate . . . If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.
self-knowledge is
knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.
Second, the "living Jesus" of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and
repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes
as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains
enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal--even
identical.
Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way: he remains
forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic Gospel of
Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both
received their being from the same source:
Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the
bubbling stream which I have measured out.... He who will drink from my mouth will become as I
am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him."
Does not such teaching--the identity of the divine and human. the concern with illusion and
enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord, but as spiritual guide sound more
Eastern than Western? Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the "living
In his recent popular study, The American Religion, Harold Bloom suggests a second characteristic
of Gnosticism that might help us conceptually circumscribe its mysterious heart. Gnosticism, says
Bloom, "is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the self, and [this] knowledge
leads to freedom...." 9 Primary among all the revelatory perceptions a Gnostic might reach was the
profound awakening that came with knowledge that something within him was uncreated. The
Gnostics called this "uncreated self" the divine seed, the pearl, the spark of knowing:
consciousness, intelligence, light. And this seed of intellect was the self-same substance of God, it
was man's authentic reality; it was the glory of humankind and the divine alike. If woman or man
truly came to gnosis of this spark, she understood that she was truly free: Not contingent, not a
conception of sin, not a flawed crust of flesh, but the stuff of God, and the conduit of God's
immanent realization. There was always a paradoxical cognizance of duality in experiencing this
"self-within-a-self". How could it not be paradoxical: By all rational perception, man clearly was
not God, and yet in essential truth, was Godly. This conundrum was a Gnostic mystery, and its
knowing was their greatest treasure.
The creator god, the one who claimed in evolving orthodox dogma to have made man, and to own
him, the god who would have man contingent upon him, born ex nihilo by his will, was a lying
demon and not God at all. Gnostics called him by many names -- many of them deprecatory --
names like "Saklas", the blind one; "Samael", god of the blind; or "the Demiurge", the lesser power.
Theodotus, a Gnostic teacher writing in Asia Minor between A.D. 140 and 160, explained that the
sacred strength of gnosis reveals "who we were, what we have become, where we have been cast
out of, where we are bound for, what we have been purified of, what generation and regeneration
are." 10 " Yet", the eminent scholar of Gnosticism, Elaine Pagels, comments in exegesis, "to know
oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis.... Self-
knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical." 11
The Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic texts found preserved in the Nag Hammadi Library, gives
these words of the living Jesus:
Jesus said, `I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the
bubbling stream which I have measured out... 12
Christ came to rectify the separation... and join the two components; and to give life unto
those who had died by separation and join them together. Now a woman joins with her
husband in the bridal [chamber], and those who have joined in the bridal [chamber] will not
reseparate. 21
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