EPILOGUE 789
Then in 1909 J. Rendel Harris discovered an old Syriac (Aramaic) manu-
script of the Songs of Solomon comprising forty songs (originally forty-
two; the first two are missing). These songs, carrying the false attribution to
Solomon, are among the most beautiful and profound songs of world religious
literature. Another long poem is the Song of the Pearl, contained in the apoc-
ryphal Acts of Thomas, a Syriac text that also exists in Greek. It is an extraor-
dinary narrative of a prince who seeks a pearl in Egypt, which he finds, thereby
bringing the soul from darkness into the kingdom of light. To these we must
add, again from Egypt, the Coptic Songbook of Manichaean poems, as well as
collections of Mandaean poems, songs, prayers, and narrative cosmologies that
first came into Europe through Portuguese monks returning from Asia.
Despite these accumulating discoveries, the quilt of gnostic scriptures was
thin. Because the destruction of the great ancient libraries and specifically of
gnostic sacred texts was so complete, our knowledge of essential ideas of gnos-
ticism still had to be detected from Christian writings against them. Then in
1945 in Egypt a farmer discovered near Nag Hammadi a buried cache of thir-
teen codices containing some fifty texts, in fourth-century Coptic translation
from Greek second- and third-century compositions. After a few decades of
hijinks, high adventure, and even the intervention of Carl Jung, these splendid
texts were finally translated into French, German, Italian, and English under
the title of the Nag Hammadi library.^24 Gnosticism had found a new voice.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found on the west bank of the Dead Sea in
1947 near Wadi Qumran, suddenly a fringe sect of Essenes, opposed to
Jerusalem, had abundant scripture from out of a vase. Similarly the gnostics, a
religion on the fringe, but one that had extended from the east coast of China
to the west coast of Portugal, came, after being concealed because of critical
danger, into light. These two instants of discovery were supreme in the resur-
rection of an apparently extinguished body of thought.
GNOSTIC STORIES AND TERMINOLOGY
Most of the gnostic texts have an engaging literary clarity. In these, abstraction
yields to striking metaphor. One example is the unsurpassed allegorical ad-
venture in the Song of the Pearl, or the divine orgy in the Origin of the World.