The Nonsense Bazaar 140 - The Nag Hammadi Codices
These days you can't shake a stick without running into some version of Gnostic Christianity. Why is that? Gnosticism is absolutely wild and psychedelic, that plays a part. But did counterculture collectively decide one day that Gnosticism was pretty groovy? Well, apart from fragments of texts, writings about Gnosticism from the Catholic church's perspective (heresy!), and underground currents of mystic knowledge, mainstream culture didn't really know anything about what the Gnostics believed until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices, a jar of 13 papyrus scrolls containing 52 books from Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and other mystic traditions. The collection was discovered in Egypt, 1946 by a pair of probable graverobbers, and wouldn't be fully translated and published until the 1970s. This week we're going to look at some core texts and definitely get some stuff wrong as we explore Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi Codices.
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