15. The Gospel of Philip
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1 he Gospel of Philip is not a traditional gospel with good news on
I the life and death of Jesus; rather, it is an anthology of Christian
JL. gnostic aphorisms, parables, narrative dialogues, and sayings of
Jesus, which have the quality of gnomic poetry:
Winter is the world, summer the other realm.
It is wrong to pray in winter.The pieces, strung together as a sacramental catechesis, are short, and they
may be taken from larger texts that have not survived. Separations in the
texts vary according to scholarly edition, but they are, by content, largely self-
evident. The book is pseudepigraphically attributed to the messenger Philip,
who is mentioned by name only once, and this is certainly not a work in
any way connected with Philip. Here, as in other apocryphal works, it is
Philip who informs us that Joseph was the carpenter who made the cross on
which his son Jesus was hung.
Unlike many gnostic texts, this eclectic book contains patches of gnostic
tale, but it does not tell or invent any extensive myth. Although it contains no
single long poem or narration, the work has, despite its eccentric order, a cu-
mulative strength of insight, wit, and aphoristic incision. It is strongest when