Foundational Gnostic Texts
The voices of the Gnostics, and the witnesses who preserved them.
For most of history the Gnostics were known only through the writers who attacked them. The recovery of Coptic codices from the eighteenth century onward, and later the Nag Hammadi library, allowed Gnostic voices to be heard directly. This shelf gathers the Gnostic sources and classic studies that are free to read in the archive.
At its centre are the Pistis Sophia, a long revelation dialogue on the fall and redemption of Sophia, and the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings of Jesus. Around them are G. R. S. Mead’s Echoes from the Gnosis, small volumes that present hymns and fragments such as the Hymn of the Robe of Glory, the classic surveys by Mead and C. W. King, the Mandaean John-Book, and Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies.
Read the primary texts before the surveys, and read the heresiologists last and critically: Hippolytus preserves valuable summaries of lost systems, but as a hostile witness. Remember that “Gnosticism” is a modern umbrella term for movements that differed widely. Several of the studies here predate the Nag Hammadi discoveries of 1945 and should be read as early scholarship, still valuable for their translations and for the history of how the Gnostics were rediscovered.
On This Shelf (17)
Philosophumena, or The Refutation of All Heresies
Hippolytus
