388 LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM
which the savior turns human, forgets who he is, and falls into the sleep of
earthly things. Ultimately his parents, the father of truth and mother of wis-
dom, do not abandon him. They send messages. He wakes from the prison of
earthly things, steals the pearl, and returns to his royal parents with the prom-
ise of rising to his true parents of the spirit.
Whether this popular tale is an old Mesopotamian legend or a Jewish or
Christian story that has undergone a gnostic overlay, in the form in which it
survives it is a poetic culmination of gnostic principles, conveyed with a min-
imum of cosmogony and deific mischief. It has the stanzaic form of Jewish
poetry, without rhyme or fixed meter, where prosody is based largely on par-
allelistic couplets. The Song of the Pearl appears as a supplement to the apoc-
ryphal Greek Acts of Thomas. One version is in Greek and another slightly
different version in Syriac. Its date of composition, Bentley Layton suggests,
points to the Parthian dynasty of Persia (247 BCE-224 CE); or, if composed in
Edessa when the city was under Parthian control, before 165 CE.
THE SONG OF THE PEARL
3
DRESSING FORTHE JOURNEY
When I was a little child living
in my father's palace in his kingdom,
happy in the glories and riches
of my family that nurtured me,
my parents gave me supplies
and sent me out on a mission
from our home in the east.
From their treasure house
they made up a cargo for me.
It was big though light enough
so I could carry it myself,
holding gold from the highest houses- The Song of the Pearl: translated by Han J. W. Drijvers (Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament
Apocrypha, vol. 2,380-85), Robert M. Grant (Gnosticism, pp. 116-22), and Bentley Layton (The
Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions, pp. 371-75); trans-
lated by Willis Barnstone.