The Nag Hammadi library in English

The definitive collection of Gnostic material. The fragmentary textual material we have is presented here in functional form with appropriate markers and suggestions for lacuna in the manuscripts. The introductions to the book, and to each piece therein, are very helpful even for those new to

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gnostic material. Richard's Smith's afterward is also very well done, and effectively illustrates where gnostic thought is interacting with our current culture, touching on, for example, writers and thinkers like Blake, Carl Jung, and even Philip K. Dick.

The writing of that afterward, however, effectively predates the Holy Blood and Holy Grail fiasco and the DaVinci Code delusions, and so does not (in my early edition, at any rate) deal with the popular rewriting of gnosticism in western 20th century new age culture's hokey image. Nevertheless, though Smith's afterward does not tackle the current revisionist version of gnosticism directly, readers will nevertheless discover that the Gnostics would have been the last people on earth to have any notion of a sacred feminine, (evidenced in passages such as Jesus' explanation in the Gospel of Thomas that women will need to become male in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven), and that texts like the Gospel of Mary are hardly the source of any secret perspectives on the historical Jesus or early Christianity. These texts are, to the contrary, the product of a community that merged bits of Greek philosophical ideas with Christian and Jewish narratives to produce their own idiosyncratic material that legitimized their theological claims.

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