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Home , Gospel of Truth, Nag Hammadi library, Valentinus (Gnostic)

AND THE OF TRUTH

BY

R. McL. WILSON

IN one of the earlier studies relating to the library it was suggested that a combination of the with the of John would produce the developed Valentinian system. In other words, the Gospel of Truth represents an early form of the system, before the incorporation of those Barbelognostic elements which occupy so large a place in the system that was known to . This suggestion, to my knowledge, has never been followed up in detail, although one has the impression that the Apocryphon would prove to be the dominant partner rather than the Gospel of Truth. Impressions, however, may be subjective and misleading, and have to be rigorously tested against the material available. What we do have is a paper by W. C. van Unnik, 1 in which he argues that the Gospel of Truth was written by himself, before the development of the typically gnostic dogmas. He notes that "what the ecclesiastical writers make the principal point of their description and attack is here entirely wanting." There is no elaborate doctrine of aeons, no mention of a in contradistinction from the highest God, and the primal sin is described not as the fall of but as proceeding from a not-knowing, a forgetting of the Father. Moreover we can see in the document "a certain reserve in its attitude to ," and "though the content of the Gospel of Truth is Gnostic, its is not emphasised." This position is shared by van Unnik's colleague, G. Quispel,2 who writes in the same volume, "It appears that the opinions which it embodies reflect a stage in the development of doctrine prior to the division of Valentinianism into different schools. That means that our Gospel of Truth is very old and must have been written about A.D. 150, presumably by Valentinus himself." The third contributor

1 The Jung (ed. F. L. Cross; London, 1955) 81-129; quotations from pages 98, 99, and IOI. 2 Jung Codex, 50. 134 R. McL. WILSON to the volume, H.-Ch. Puech, 3 agrees that the Gospel of Truth "must have been put together c. 150 A.o.", but is more reserved on the question of authorship: "Whether we reject or accept the plausible attribution to Valentinus himself of the letter to Rheginus, and perhaps also of the Gospel of Truth ... in any case it is highly probable that the whole content of the Codex Jung is the product of a single circle and that certainly three of the writings in it reproduce the Valen­ tinian doctrine in one of its most primitive forms." In his contribution to Hennecke-Schneemelcher,4 Puech writes that the document "is probably of Valentinian origin, and earlier than 180," but that one may hesitate to adopt van Unnik's conclusions in their entirety. The editors of the editio princeps 5 mention van Unnik's theory with respect, but are prepared to go no further than to say that the composition of the document may go back to about 150, and that the author may have been Valentinus or one of his immediate disciples. The theory has the general concurrence of Kendrick Grobe! and R. M. Grant, 6 although they do not agree on certain points of detail. Other scholars who have maintained a Valentinian origin, but without necessarily subscribing to the view that the work is by Valentinus himself, include A. D. Nock, H. Jonas, F. M. Braun and A. Orbe. 7 On the other hand, Ernst Haenchen 8 declared that the differences between the Gospel of Truth and Valentinianism were such that to pass from one to the other constituted a metabasis eis a/lo genos; but this is to ignore the possibility with which we began, that the differ­ ences are in large measure due to the assimilation into the developed Valentinianism of elements from some such system as that of the . H. M. Schenke, again, claimed that the Gospel of Truth shows nothing specifically Valentinian, and that its central ideas are more akin to the Odes of Solomon. 9 One problem here is

3 Jung Codex, 18-20. 4 Hennecke-Schneemelcher (E.T. ed. Wilson) I. 240f. 5 Evangelium Veritatis, ed. M. Malinine, H.-Ch. Puech, and G. Quispe! (Zurich, 1956) xivf. 6 K. Grobe!, The Gospel of Truth (London, 1960) 26; R. M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early (2d ed.; New York and London, 1966) 128ff. 7 Listed by Puech in Hennecke-Schneemelcher, 241 n. 2. 8 ZKG 67 (1955-56) 154; cf. also his survey in TRu 30 (1964) 47ff. 9 Die Herkunft des sogenannten Evange/ium Veritatis (, 1958). Links with the Odes of Solomon were also noted by F. M. Braun, RevThom 57 (1957) 597ff. and R. M. Grant, VC 11 (1957) 149ff. In an addition to the second edition of his Gnosticism (see above, n. 6) Grant writes, "What the Odes have in common with the Gospel of Truth is a speculative Jewish Christianity which comes close to Gnosticism but is not fully