NONFICTION - June 28, 1987

THE GNOSTIC SCRIPTURES: A NEW TRANSLATION WITH ANNOTATIONS AND INTRODUCTIONS by Bentley Layton (Doubleday: $35; 470 pp.). Before the triumph of Christian orthodoxy in the 4th Century, the Christian groups that would eventually define orthodoxy contended against a number of other sects, schools and movements wholly or partly inspired by Jesus. About 25 years ago, new interest arose in these groups--in the diverse, eclectic movement, called gnosticism--as the first translations began to appear of lost treatises from that long-ago period. These documents, written in Coptic, the Egyptian language of that era, had been unearthed in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Their publication in translation--including the first-ever copies of the Gospels of “Thomas,” “Philip” and “Truth’ both aided the study of Christian origins and provided the first-ever primary documentation of the beliefs of ancient sects that are of considerable interest in their own right.

Bentley Layton, a Yale historian, has produced perhaps the best gnosticism source book to date by assembling excellent examples from the Nag Hammadi cache and supplementing them with the long-known critiques by church fathers. He explains well the basic gnostic myth of, first, a misbegotten creation (creation not as the act of a sovereign God but as something like an accident that befalls God or the gods) and, second, the supposed human need to discover and recapture one’s pure and divine roots through gnosis , which Layton defines as “acquaintance” rather than “knowledge,” the more common translation. The bewildering names of the many divine entities of gnosticism have always needed the kind of “cast of mythic characters” that Layton provides for each text.

Layton chooses gender-inclusive translations without abandoning traditional religious terms. He might be faulted for stretching the gnostic borders to include Hermetic writing (about the god Hermes, rather than about Jesus) or for implying that the school of gnostics that associated itself with the apostle Thomas always called him the “twin” of Jesus.

But to end on a note shared by gnostics and orthodox Christians, my questioning resembles “the speck in your sibling’s eye” (“Thomas” saying No. 26). I found no beams in the book.