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The Lost Gospels of the Desert Fathers: Commentary on the The Nag Hammadi Scrolls aka The Gnostic Gospels

"...While Christianity was assuming the form of a 'normal religion,' at least among its adherents, some people within the Christian community resisted submitting to the requirement for conformity demanded by the new authority. These people wanted to discover for themselves the answers to certain questions. They would not accept unequivocally the so-called revealed knowledge handed down by the Church Fathers, but took upon themselves a personal search for truth through the direct experience of the divine presence." June Singer...Seeing Through the Visible World
  • What is Gnosticism
    A collection of codices discovered sealed in a large jar in a cave near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi (aka Chenoboskion in ancient times) in 1945 has forever changed our ideas about early Christianity. These documents now know as the Nag Hammadi Library, were made famous by Elaine Pagels in her best-selling book called The Gnostic Gospels

    The orgin of these more than 1500-year old documents is still a mystery, but they are thought to have been hidden by Egyptian desert monks from nearby Pachomian Monastery to save them from destruction by officials of the early Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt.
  • The Sciences of Sacred Scriptures
    "Historical critical studies of sacred texts began in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and should be understood as an extension of the scientific method. The primary focus of these studies was the Bible, though attempts were made to apply these methods to other sacred texts as well. In this approach, the Bible is treated not as the inerrant work of God but as a text created by humans in particular historical and cultural contexts to advance different human purposes. Careful philological analysis of ancient languages is combined with archeological and historical research to decode the probable authorship and purposes of different material in the biblical anthology."
  • Bart D. Ehrman...Lost Christianities
    "No form of lost Christianity has so intrigued modern readers and befuddled modern scholars as early Christian Gnosticism. The intrigue is easy to understand, especially in view of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library.... When that group of field hands headed by Mohammed Ali uncovered this cache of books in Upper Egypt, the world was suddenly presented with hard evidence of other Christian groups in the ancient world that stood in sharp contrast with any kind of Christianity familiar to us today. There was no Jesus of the stained glass window here, nor a Jesus of the creeds--not even a Jesus of the New Testament. These books were fundamentally different from anything in our experience, and almost nothing could have prepared us for them"
  • June Singer...Seeing Through the Visible World
    "...While Christianity was assuming the form of a 'normal religion,' at least among its adherents, some people within the Christian community resisted submitting to the requirement for conformity demanded by the new authority. These people wanted to discover for themselves the answers to certain questions. They would not accept unequivocally the so-called revealed knowledge handed down by the Church Fathers, but took upon themselves a personal search for truth through the direct experience of the divine presence.

    These dissenters acquired the name Gnostic because they were seeking a special kind of knowledge concerning the nature of God and the relationship of the divine and human levels of consciousness. This special knowledge was called gnosis. It was not the knowledge that was transmitted through a sacred priesthood, nor by books filled with statements that were not to be questioned, nor through laws that were promulgated by officially recognized sectarian authorities. The kind of knowledge they sought would come from within themselves, for they understood God as being everywhere in the universe, including within the inner recesses of the individual. The Greek word gnosis most clearly expressed this kind of knowledge, for it means an inner knowing that is communicated directly from the divine origin in the human being, or--in another view--from the divine in the human being...."
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