Making Mary Male: the Categories ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in the Gospel of Thomas
The Coptic Gospel of Thomas is one of the most spectacular of the fifty-two tractates filling the thirteen codices of the Nag Hammadi library. Discovered in December 1945 by several Egyptian fellahin, the Nag Hammadi tractates were subjected to a variety of political and scholarly ploys, and were not made available in their entirety until the very end of 1977, when the last of the volumes of manuscript pages in the Facsimile Edition and the one-volume edition of The Nag Hammadi Library in English finally appeared.1 One of the very first of the documents to be published was the Gospel of Thomas, and its appearance has already stimulated the production of numerous articles and monographs by the scholars who have recognized its significance for our knowledge of Christian origins and early church history. Since the time of its initial publication scholars have suggested a variety of interpretations of the Gospel, and to date no consensus has been reached. Yet, in my estimation, a reasonably strong case can be made that the Gospel of Thomas, in its present form, belongs at least on the periphery of Christian Gnosticism, and to that extent the Coptic text may be termed a gnosticizing gospel.2
The Gnostic Gospels
As discussed in The Da Vinci Code...Long buried and suppressed, the Gnostic Gospels contain the secret writings attributed to the followers of Jesus. In 1945 fifty-two papyrus texts, including gospels and other secret documents, were found concealed in an earthenware jar buried in the Egyptian desert. These so-called Gnostic writings were Coptic translations from the original Greek dating from the time of the New Testament. The material they embodied - poems, quasi-philosophical descriptions of the origins of the universe, myths, magic and instructions for mystic practice - were later declared heretical, as they offered a powerful alternative to the Orthodox Christian tradition. In a book that is as exciting as it is scholarly, Elaine Pagels examines these texts and the questions they pose and shows why Gnosticism was eventually stamped out by the increasingly organised and institutionalised Orthodox Church.
Light from the Ancient East
need not be dwelt upon. Happily there is nosuch want here. Translating, indexing, and the other qualities of a good book are all here, and here in their perfection. We note also an item in the translator’s preface, to wit, that there is in preparation a Lexicon of Patristic Greek, and that many workers are gathering material for it. This is good news to the student. We note incidentally a fact which shows how difficult it is even for an expert to keep pace with the progress of discovery in recent times. Dr. Deissmann says (p. 5): ’No tablets have yet been found to enable us to date exactly the years of office of the Procurators Felix and Festus, or of the Proconsul Gallio, which would