"The Gnostic Bible," edited by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer

Behind the Gnosticism craze: A freedom-loving, feminist, gay-friendly anarcho Creator, or just another pompous ass telling us what to do? This massive collection has it both ways.

By Donna Minkowitz

Jan 22, 2004 | Imagine a Bible that begins like this:

God said, "I am the Lord thy God, and there are no other gods but me." Then a voice came out of the deepest heaven and said, "Thou liest, god of the blind!"

Or think about what church or shul would be like if the sacred text said this:

Then the authorities came up to their Adam. When they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became very excited and enamored of her. They said, "Come, let us sow our seed in her," and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches, she became a tree, and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully.

Gnosticism is the most radical religion I know, because it is the only one that entertains the idea that God is evil -- and wants us all to rebel against his bullying, rapacious, jealous rule.

There has been an enormous flurry of interest in this 2,000-year-old Judaism-based religion in the past few years. Witness the bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code," the groundbreaking work of Christianity scholar Elaine Pagels, the mega-popularity of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas (discovered in Egypt in 1945 and promoted in Pagels' 2003 bestseller "Beyond Belief"), and a cover story in Time magazine trumpeting the fact that "more and more people are turning to [those] ancient texts to develop their own religious rites." Of course, the extremely gnostic "Matrix" trilogy, with its notion that this world is an elaborate simulation created by evil forces to harm us, only made Gnostic mania burn even hotter.

Now biblical scholar Marvin Meyer and acclaimed poet and translator Willis Barnstone have published a huge collection of Gnostic sacred writings. These include not just the famous Jewish and Christian heresies from before the third century A.D. that are usually indicated by the G-word, but also medieval Manichaean, Cathar, Persian, and even Islamic and Chinese heresies that stem, in one way or another, from that original Middle Eastern manic Gnostic spark.

I was very excited to see all of these radical, anti-Yahweh religious texts assembled in one volume, some of them in English for the first time. I had never seen actual Manichaean or Cathar prayers and was particularly breathless to see work by the Bogomils, a Cathar group who allegedly permitted adherents to practice only homosexual sex in order to avoid procreating more beings enslaved to the evil God. (The word "bugger" supposedly comes from their name.)

I'm sad to tell you, based on this new edition, that it is heartbreakingly easy for radical, God-mocking heresies to turn into smarmy vanilla orthodoxy. Barnstone and Meyer's take on the Gnostic works, and many of the included works themselves, are reverential, conventional and, er, dull. How in the screaming heavens did this happen? For one thing, "The Gnostic Bible" is supposed to be a compendium for the layperson, but Barnstone and Meyer end up giving us the worst of both worlds, academia and uninformed pop culture. Their edition combines the sorts of things that give academic writing a bad name -- long, dry introductions to the texts, obtrusive footnotes that state the obvious -- with no effort to elucidate the really juicy and controversial points on which lay readers might like some guidance.

For example, they refuse to touch the burning question of whether Gnosticism was feminist, or whether some Gnostics, at least, organized their ancient communities in feminist ways. There is abundant evidence that many of the Gnostics saw God and the sacred in radically different gender terms than their ancient Jewish and Christian contemporaries. In one text, "The Secret Book of John," God (the good God, not the bullying one) says, "I am the father. I am the mother. I am the child." In several, Sakla, which means "Idiot," is said to have gone astray because he forgot that all of his power came from his mother, the celestial luminary Wisdom. Many of the writings portray both the good God and Sakla as hermaphroditic: The good God is the mother-father, and Sakla essentially fucks himself to create the material world and Adam and Eve.

Indeed, the Gnostics are refreshingly candid about sex in many of their writings, much more so than canonical Christian writers. Sakla is often said to be "an abortion" somehow delivered from his superior mother, and the evil Elohim -- remember the weird plural bits in the Book of Genesis that have God and his buddies having sex with "the daughters of men" to produce a race of giants? -- try to rape Eve's mouth and masturbate over the image of the heroic Norea, a bold human woman who also embodies the Female Spiritual Principle, a female divine entity important in the Gnostic celestial scheme. Norea, like a lot of other women in these texts, stands up to male power and wins: When Noah refuses to allow her entrance to his ark, she blows on it and sets it afire. When Sakla and his fellow rulers try to rape her, telling her that they've already done this to her mother, Eve, she defies them coolly: "You did not know my mother. Instead it was your own female [that is, the shadowy reflection with which Eve tricked them] that you knew."

Next Page: So Jesus kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth -- but the editors of "The Gnostic Bible" don't want to talk about it

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