INTRODUCTION 27These little books constituting The Gnostic Bible are a privilege to transfer into
English. Though heterogeneous, they have a common flame of belief, a myth-
ical memory of creation and gods, and a poetry that goes through all forms.
The purpose of cosmic tale, exegesis, and sermon is to convert you, the ancient
and now modern reader; to bring you along to a secret knowledge available
within you. These scriptures have a generosity of spirit, and while they are not
immune to issuing religious warnings, light overcomes darkness, and spirit
rises internally above the confines of its earthly body. These are texts written
by passionate philosophers and allegorizing exegetes. In these disparate
groups, from China to Provence, who held that we are sparks of light caught
in a perishable body, there is a constant excitement of the new and a freedom
to invent and to contend with all dark error. The Cathars, the last major gnos-
tic speculation, recalled and reinvented scripture, and their troubadours com-
posed and sang with satiric fun and shocking candor—all while the swords of
the Albigensian Crusade (1209) prepared to extinguish them.
Now these ancient heresies, preserved in a variety of versions, survive as
profound, powerful utterances. From the first-century Gospels of Thomas
and John and the Book of Baruch to the twelfth-century Gospel of the Secret
Supper, these copied and recopied and translated scriptures have haphazardly
come down to us. Buried by a cliff in Egypt or discovered in an Inquisition
archive on the Cathars, they are as fresh as outrage. We have a world literature
of cosmogonies and diatribes, delicious songs of Solomon from the Syriac, es-
sential metaphysical speculation, and the cunning whisper of the spirit. They
are not ordinary. They are for your eyes to hear.