by Michael Haag
According to Christian legend, St Mark the Evangelist brought Christianity to Egypt in the mid-first century AD. This mosaic in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice shows Mark (on the left) arriving by sea at Alexandria with its Pharos, and then (on the right) teaching the gospel in the city. But the New Testament makes no mention of this except for one controversial verse which can be interpreted as meaning that both Mark and Peter came to Egypt together along with a woman so well known that it was not necessary to mention her name – Mary Magdalene?
Mosaic of St Mark arriving at Alexandria. Tour Egypt.
In pharaonic times travellers between the great cities of Heliopolis, the religious centre of Egypt, and Memphis, its political capital, took the ferry at Babylon to cross the Nile. A settlement, perhaps even a town, sprang up on this spot on the east bank of the river opposite the southern tip of Roda island which the Greeks would later call Babylon in Egypt, probably a corruption of Roda’s ancient name of Per-Hapi-en-Yun, House of the Nile of Heliopolis.
According to Jewish tradition, when the prophet Jeremiah escaped to Egypt in the sixth century BC after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians he preached and settled at Babylon; the Copts add that the presence of Jews here drew the Holy Family to Babylon during their flight into Egypt to escape Herod. For the same reason, say the Copts, Peter and Mark came here, arguing that Babylon is no metaphor for Rome but means Babylon in Egypt with its ancient Jewish and Christian associations. Retracing the flight of the Holy Family, pilgrims from all over Christendom came to this place they called Babylon right through the Middle Ages and travellers today can still see the remains of the Roman fortress of Babylon, built by Augustus in the first century BC, its towers framing the entrance to the Coptic Museum.
But the verse contains a further puzzle: ‘The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son’. That is the King James Version and many other translations also have the word church, but in the original Greek the word church is not there. More literally the verse should read ‘She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, salutes you, and so does Mark my son’. There is no doubt that the feminine is intended; the Greek word for likewise chosen, or the chosen-together one, is feminine. So some translations have inserted church, which is feminine in Greek;just as Peter opens chapter 5 by exhorting Christian elders in Asia Minor, so it can be argued that he ends chapter 5 by sending them greetings from similar people, members of the church, at Babylon. On the other hand numbers of scholars take the Greek as they find it and say it means she, but then they have the problem of who she can be. Some say she is the wife of Peter; they were known to travel about together, and that the person called Mark would be their son, though more usually ‘Marcus my son’ is thought to be Mark the Evangelist, the author of Mark’s gospel, ‘my son’ meaning ‘dear to me’. Others say that the mysterious she is some other woman who is so well-known that it was not necessary to mention her name. Could she have been Mary Magdalene?
Leaving that argument aside, we otherwise do not know how or when the Christian message was brought to Egypt, but Babylon might well have been a staging post for anyone coming overland; otherwise Alexandria would have been the natural port of entry and Christianity would have developed there, ultimately spreading throughout the country. Alexandria was the second largest city of the Roman Empire after Rome itself and with its great Library and its Museum, its scientists, mathematicians, poets and philosophers, it was the propagator of Hellenism and the intellectual and cultural capital of the Graeco-Roman world. The city’s Hellenised population, predominantly Greek but also Egyptian and with the largest Jewish community outside Palestine, was famous for adapting, synthesising and propagating religious and philosophical ideas. But while the writings of various Church Fathers in Asia Minor and Europe were known from the earliest dates, such as those by Clement of Rome at the end of the first century, by Polycarp in Smyrna in the early second century, and by Irenaeus in Lyons towards the end of the second century, no Christian voices seem to have been heard from Egypt apart from Clement of Alexandria at the very end of the second century.
Yet the Roman emperor Hadrian encountered a significant Christian community when he visited Egypt in AD 130-131; in Alexandria he disputed with scholars at the Museum, while at the temple of Serapis, the Hellenised version of Osiris and the husband-brother of Isis, he confused Christians with worshippers of the pagan god.
Those who worship Serapis are Christians, and those who call themselves bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis. As a race of men they are seditious, vain and spiteful; as a body, wealthy and prosperous, of whom nobody lives in idleness. Some blow glass, some make paper, and others linen. Their one God is nothing peculiar; Christians, Jews and all nations worship him. I wish this body of men was better behaved.
Though a great social and cultural gap lay between Alexandria with its Greek-speaking population and the rural hinterland inhabited by indigenous Egyptians whose Coptic language had been spoken since pharaonic times, by the early third century AD Christianity filled the countryside too. (Copt comes from qibt which is a corruption by the invading Arabs of Aigyptos, the Greek for Egypt.) Also from the beginning of the third century Alexandria’s churchmen and its Catechetical School would take centre stage in the great theological battles of Christendom, debating, developing and refining the faith, and deciding the New Testament canon.
But early Church writers had nothing to say about the first two centuries of the Christian era in Egypt, nor about that version of Christianity called gnosticism which we now know flourished in Egypt as late as the fourth century – a silence so deafening that scholars believe that the evidence of early Christianity in Egypt was deliberately destroyed or censored by the Church itself.
Rediscovering the Lost World of Egyptian Christianity
Written works in the ancient world were laboriously produced by hand, scribes writing on papyrus, parchment or paper in the form of scrolls or on sheets that were then bound together as books. These latter, known as a codices in the plural, codex in the singular, were a Roman invention of the first century AD and within three hundred years had overtaken the use of the scroll, their rise associated with the growth of Christianity which favoured the codex for ease of reading of its sacred texts.
Under normal conditions scrolls and codices were highly perishable and the works they contained would not survive unless of sufficient interest to warrant repeated reproduction. Though gnosticism was widespread in Egypt where it flourished as part of the broad stream of Christian belief, its writings suffered increasingly from an active campaign against them by the Latin church in the West where they were condemned as heretical. And so in addition to the usual dangers of perishing through neglect they were actively destroyed.
A bronze head of the Roman emperor Hadrian found in the Thames in London and now in the British Museum. Hadrian, who during his reign travelled from one end of his empire to the other, from Britain to Syria, visited Egypt in 130–131 as part of a lengthy tour of Rome’s eastern provinces which included visits to Athens, Palmyra and Jerusalem. He was attempting to assimilate all the peoples of the empire into one common Hellenistic religion, but in fierce reaction to this the Bar Kokhba revolt broke out in Judaea in 132. After suppressing the revolt Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, an entirely Roman city filled with pagan temples. The revolt marked the final breach between Jewish and gentile Christians.
Bronze head of Hadrian. Wikimedia Commons.
In the course of centuries the destruction was so thoroughgoing that nothing seemed to have survived of gnostic writings; what was known about gnosticism came only from its enemies, people like the late second-century theologian Tertullian from Carthage in North Africa, the first churchman to write extensively in Latin and who has been called the father of Latin Christianity, and Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who wrote Against Heresies in about AD 180.
But in 1773 a codex known as Pistis Sophia was discovere
d in Egypt, though it was not translated from the Coptic until 1851 when it was published in German. Another codex which included the Gospel of Mary Magdalene was acquired in 1896 by a German Egyptologist from an antiquarian dealer in Cairo who said it had been found in Akhmim near Sohag in Upper Egypt. Unfortunately numerous vicissitudes, including two world wars, prevented its translation and publication until 1955.
The Nag Hammadi Library
By that time a momentous find had been made also in Upper Egypt. In 1945 two fellahin, the Egyptian word for peasants, were looking for fertiliser in an ancient burial site near Nag Hammadi where the desert cliffs which press close to the delicate green fields that run like a ribbon along the Nile are riddled with tombs. In a land where wood is a rarity, animal dung has traditionally been used for fuel and so other fertilisers have been sought. One of these has been the debris of the past that covers ancient towns and villages or fills burial sites. Over the centuries the debris disintegrates into a kind of earth called sebakh containing as much as 12 per cent potassium nitrate, sodium carbonate and ammonium chloride.
What the fellahin found instead was a large sealed earthenware jar containing twelve Coptic leatherbound codices, each containing several treatises, along with some loose manuscript pages, that had been preserved in their airless and bone-dry environment. With the intention of selling off their find bit by bit, the men, who were brothers, hid them at home where their mother, fearing they carried evil powers, burnt several of the manuscripts. Fortunately a local Coptic priest recognised their significance; today the Nag Hammadi codices are housed at the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
The gnostics were all but silenced for 1600 years until Muhammad al-Samman and his brother discovered their hidden trove of gospels in 1945, completely revolutionising our understanding of early Christianity. This photograph taken in 1977 shows him standing with the cliffs of the Jabal al-Tarif at Nag Hammadi in the distance behind him.
Muhammad Al-Samman. Le Gnosticisme Universal.
The codices comprise fifty-two mostly gnostic treatises dating to the third and fourth centuries AD, though these were translations from the original Greek of a yet earlier date, among them the Gospel of Thomas composed in about AD 80 and therefore at least as old as any of the canonical gospels. The full collection was published in facsimile and English translation between 1972 and 1984.
The Nag Hammadi Library, as the find is known, probably belonged to the nearby Pachomian monastery of Pbow (present-day Faw Qibli) whose monks, rather than burn their books after bishop Athanasius of Alexandria condemned the use of non-canonical works in 367, put them aside until the climate changed. But it never changed.
Among the works in the library were the Dialogue of the Saviour, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas, all extensively featuring Mary Magdalene, as do the gnostic works acquired earlier, Pistis Sophia and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, comprehensively reversing the silence about her which overtook the New Testament beginning with Acts.
Gnostic Gospels
The usual understanding of the word gospel is that it is a narrative account of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus which is what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the gospels of the New Testament, are. The New Testament is otherwise made up of letters, mostly written by Paul, which again root themselves in biography and history. As for other ways of interpreting human experience, the New Testament limits itself to a single apocalyptic work, Revelation.
This seems to have been the settled format by the end of the second century, at least everywhere that looked to Rome and fell within the geographical area of the Acts of the Apostles and the voyages of Paul.
But Egypt was different. The apocalyptic tradition largely rejected in the West flourished in Egypt along with other writings such as teachings, sayings, sermons, manuals of initiation and magical incantations that were not necessarily pressed into biographical and historical narratives or any sort of realism. Sometimes the sensation is of passing through the twelve hours of night, those hours of the Amduat, that part of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead which serves as a guide for navigating through the dark night of the underworld, filled with deities, demons and monsters, before being reborn in the morning with the rising sun. Egyptians had long known about that spiritual journey, that voyage through darkness into light – and the temples of the old gods, of Isis and Osiris and all the rest, were still filled with their ancient priesthoods. The gnostic Gospel of the Egyptians ends with this trinity comprised of the initiators of redemption, ‘the great, invisible, eternal Spirit; his only-begotten Son, the eternal light; and his great, incorruptible consort, the incorruptible Sophia’ – in which Jesus is the light of enlightenment and his consort is Sophia whom the Egyptians identified with Isis, the goddess who helps lead the dead through the perils of the night, and whom the gnostic gospels identified with Mary Magdalene.
A codex from the Nag Hammadi find. The codex, that is binding pages in book form rather than using a continuous scroll, was introduced to Egypt by the Romans and became popular because Christians found it easy to read, readily transportable and the most convenient way to spread the word.
Nag Hammadi codex. Le Gnosticisme Universal.
What are called gnostic gospels are therefore not necessarily narrative gospels in the New Testament sense but in the original sense of the word; they are the good news, god-spell in Old English, a direct translation from the Greek evangelion (from where we get our word evangelist), the good message of salvation delivered by Jesus, the secret of how to escape this world and become one with the primal God.
Gnosticism in Outline
Gnosticism is a version of Christianity that has been suppressed or has otherwise failed to survive. But for hundreds of years the gnostics practised their rituals and beliefs alongside other Christians, principally in Egypt but also elsewhere in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. The destruction and loss and only recent discovery of their works makes it seem that they belonged to a category apart. But at the time the gnostics were part of the inclusive atmosphere of early Christianity in Egypt and they held beliefs that anyone was free to follow. Indeed some scholars argue that gnosticism was the original form of Christianity.
Gnosticism can be one of two things or both. Gnosticism is the belief that people have a divine capacity within themselves and that they can come to understand that the kingdom of God is already upon the earth if they can come to perceive the world that way. Jesus himself saw the kingdom of God as at hand.
Gnosticism can also be seen as a belief that differentiates the God of this world, the God of the Old Testament, from a higher more abstract and primal God, a belief that regards this world as the result of an accident and under the rule of a defective or evil demiurge, or a series of such powers or archons, whose aim is to keep the human soul trapped in his material body, forever separated from the upper world of the spirit.
Gnosis is Greek for knowledge, in this case the intuitive process of knowing oneself, and thereby knowing human nature and human destiny, and at the deepest level knowing God. Instead of seeing God and humanity as separate, the gnostics saw the self and the divine as one. Instead of discussing evil in terms of sin and repentance, the gnostics said the world was an illusion from which the escape was enlightenment. Jesus did not offer salvation by dying on the cross; he was a spiritual guide. ‘If you bring forth what is within you’, said Jesus according to the Gospel of Thomas, ‘what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’
Knowledge, Mystery and Evil
During the Hellenistic period the word gnosis took on a specific association with the mysteries and became synonymous with the Greek term mysterion. This gnosis was a secret knowledge that explained the way to salvation from this material world, something that a worshipper could find by attending a mystery of Isis, for example, or by hearing Paul.
Paul spoke of this quest when he told of his encounter with Jesu
s, his direct and personal vision of the divine, and explained that the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection would ‘deliver us from this present evil world’ (Galatians 1:4). And like the gnostics he spoke of hidden wisdom. ‘Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory’ (1 Corinthians 2:6-7).
Some have asked whether Paul was a gnostic or had gnostic tendencies. Valentinus, one of the greatest gnostic figures, was proud to say that his own teacher had been taught by Paul; and the gnostics held Paul in high regard, not because he was a follower of Jesus but because Jesus had revealed himself and his secrets to Paul. What this really tells us is that early Christianity was extremely fluid and that someone like Paul can be seen as the prototype of orthodoxy or the prototype of what became a heresy.