The Gnostic Gospels
A jar of lost books dug up in Egypt in 1945, and the hidden God, the fallen Wisdom and the spark they speak of.
The lecture, painted and spoken
Watch The Gnostic Gospels
The first three ideas play for anyone. Members watch all twelve, and every idea is written out below.
Your plan plays the whole lecture, all twelve ideas.
The twelve ideas
Each idea is one chapter of the film: its headline is the caption on the painting, and its words are what the Oracle says. The tag says what kind of claim it is: a fact from history, what a tradition teaches, what a symbol stands for, or a question for you.
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Fact
In 1945, a farmer found a jar.
In December 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman dug up a sealed clay jar at the foot of a cliff.
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Fact
Thirteen books, fifty-two writings.
Inside were thirteen leather-bound books holding fifty-two writings in Coptic, copied in the fourth century. Many had been lost for over fifteen hundred years.
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Tradition
Gnosis means knowing.
Their authors are often called Gnostics, from gnosis, knowing. Not knowing about, but a direct and inward knowledge of the divine, and of oneself.
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Fact
The Gospel of Thomas: hidden sayings.
Among them was the Gospel of Thomas, a hundred and fourteen sayings of Jesus. It begins: these are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke.
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Tradition
The kingdom is inside you.
In Thomas, Jesus says the kingdom is inside you and outside you. When you come to know yourselves, he says, then you will be known.
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Tradition
A hidden God beyond the maker.
Many of the books describe a true God beyond every name, and a lesser maker of this world, called in some texts the Demiurge, or Yaldabaoth.
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Tradition
Sophia: the Wisdom who fell.
In the Secret Book of John, Sophia, Wisdom, acts without her partner, and from her longing the flawed maker is born. Hers is a story of error, grief and return.
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Tradition
A spark of light in every soul.
The Gnostic hope was that a spark of the divine light sleeps in human beings, and that knowledge wakes it and leads it home.
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Fact
The bishops called them heresy.
Around 180 AD, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon wrote five books against such teachers. Their writings stopped being copied, and most of them vanished.
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Fact
Hidden, perhaps, to save them.
No one knows who buried the jar. One theory says monks from a nearby monastery hid the books after such writings were condemned in 367.
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Fact
Hermes was in the jar too.
The jar also held Hermetic writings, among them a discourse on the eighth and ninth heavens, a text no one had read in modern times.
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Reflection
What do you know without being told?
The Gnostics asked who we are, where we came from and where we are going. What do you already know, deep down, without being told?
Sources
- James M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English (1977)
- The Gospel of Thomas, sayings 1 to 3
- The Secret Book of John (Apocryphon of John)
- Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies (about 180)
- Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979)
- Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (2003)
What this lecture does not claim. Scholars debate whether "Gnostic" names one movement at all. The texts differ widely from one another, and who buried the jar is unknown.
The Hidden Gospels
The books buried in an Egyptian jar, and the knowing they spoke of.
In the dictionary
Common questions
Can I watch this lecture for free?
The first three ideas play for anyone. Members watch all twelve, and every idea is written out below. Every plan opens the whole lecture, and every other lecture in the hall, and a plan begins with seven free days.
Who made this lecture?
The Great Almanac wrote it from the sources listed on this page and tagged every idea, so history is never passed off as teaching. The paintings were made with an image model and the voice is the Oracle’s synthesized voice, as how we use AI explains.
Does watching send anything about me anywhere?
No. The only request the film makes is each idea’s spoken line, by its fixed number, and only after you press Play. Nothing about you goes with it.
