A Bloodless Thanksgiving

span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One of the 50 books found in the Nag Hammadi library is the "Prayer of Thanksgiving".  This prayer was offered before the partaking of the Holy Meal, which meant a meal without the blood of animals.  Sort of like having lunch on Melrose in Hollywood, these early Christians weren't a fan of killing animals to support human life.  Significant evidence exists to confirm that many early Christian sects as well as communities of Jewish Gnostics and Egyptians Gnostics, which are now grouped under the generic "Gnostic" label, were vegetarians.

Here's the ancient "Prayer of Thanksgiving" which was ceremonially offered before a Gnostic Holy Meal:

The Prayer of Thanksgiving

Translated by James Brashler, Peter A. Dirkse and Douglas M. Parrott

This the prayer that they spoke:

"We give thanks to You!
Every soul and heart is lifted up to You,
undisturbed name, honored with the name 'God'
and praised with the name 'Father',
for to everyone and everything (comes) the fatherly kindness
and affection and love,
and any teaching there may be that is sweet and plain,
giving us mind, speech, (and) knowledge:
mind, so that we may understand You,
speech, so that we may expound You,
knowledge, so that we may know You.
We rejoice, having been illuminated by Your knowledge.
We rejoice because You have shown us Yourself.
We rejoice because while we are in (the) body,
You have made us divine through Your knowledge.

"The thanksgiving of the man who attains to You is one thing:
that we know You.
We have known You, intellectual Light.
Life of life, we have known You.
Womb of every creature, we have known You.
Womb pregnant with the nature of the Father,
we have known You.
Eternal permanence of the begetting Father,
thus have we worshiped Your goodness.

There is one petition that we ask:
we would be preserved in knowledge.
And there is one protection that we desire:
that we not stumble in this kind of life."

The Significance of Nag Hammadi

Ancient cultures believed that God/s revealed "secrets" to certain special people according to the whatever purpose the God/s had for the revelations. The nature of many of these "secrets" was that not everyone was ready to hear them and even fewer would be able to understand them correctly. Gnostics believed they had been given a secret "gnosis", or knowledge, about many of life's Ultimate Questions. Some of this information, according to many of the most well-known Gnostic teachers, would have been very dangerous to people who might not be able to handle the truth. So, many Gnostic teachers were very deliberate about how they shared these secrets with the uninitiated.

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), the Masons or the Scientologists -- you'd be right on! Most cults follow some form of the same organizational features. Well, at least the ones that succeed share many similarities.


Orthodox Christianity, of course, shares many of these same features. Sometimes, when studying early Christianity, it becomes difficult to determine who was influencing who when it came to how what we know call the "Orthodox" church operated and how the so-called "Gnostics" operated. It is important to note here that there were as many tribes of Christianity as their were charismatic and/or well-organized Christian teachers. So, this whole conversation of "Gnostic" versus "Orthodox" is simply a convenient way to talk about them.

The question I want to answer with today post is, "Why are we hearing so much about the Gnostics now when I don't remember hearing much about them until just a few years ago?

The simple answer to this question is, "Because of a place in Egypt called 'Nag Hammadi.'"

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant named ironically "Muhammed" was digging around in the sand and discovered a clay vase. Little did Muhammed know that inside that vase, Christian monks had hidden 12 leather bound papyrus codices containing several volumes of forbidden Gnostic teachings that had been banned by the leadership the Orthodox Christian church as heresy.

So, why didn't we hear anything about this in 1945?

Well, you would have if you'd been an antiquities scholar, an archaeologist or a theologian. Due to a complex drama that unfolded related to these documents, the Nag Hammadi Library wasn't made publicly available until 1975.

The Nag Hammadi Library is now considered to be one of a handful of the most significant archaeological finds in history and is rivaled only by the Dead Sea Scrolls for Biblical scholars and theologians.

Okay, but I don't remember hearing anything in 1975 either...

The popularization of the Nag Hammadi Library began with a single scholar with a penchant for being able to place the Nag Hammadi texts into an accessible form for laypersons. You know, dummies like us! That single scholar was Professor Elaine Pagels, a Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her seminal work, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), put forth the argument that at least one of these texts, The Gospel of Thomas, deserved to be considered as one of the earliest Christian "gospels". Orthodox scholars, of course, haven't been too keen on that suggestion.

To me, the most important achievement of Pagel's work has been to help create a renewed interest in trying to understand the origins of the many modern manifestations of Christianity, including the notion that early Christians were anything but unified in their beliefs about even most fundamental questions of what it was that Yeshua bin Joseph (Jesus) actually taught to his disciples.

In the last several years, Dan Brown's novels, particularly The Davinci Code, took many of the Gnostic controversies and turned them into a first class theological thriller.

The signficance of the Nag Hammadi, then, has been enormous because it has opened up a dialog about what it means to be a Christian today and if there is room in Christianity for a point-of-view that has re-emerged as powerfully as ever after being buried for over 1,500 years.

Nag Hammadi also plays a central role for the Neo-Gnostic seeker because it is from the Gnostics that the Neo-Gnostic has been granted permission to work out their own salvation without fear or trembling!

Gnow Gnothing Gneo-Gnostics: The 4G Gnetwork

Religion knows things.  Lots of things.  Very small things like what to eat and what to wear.  Very big things like how to get to Heaven and/or avoid an eternity in Hell.  Ancient Gnostics knew quite a lot, too, but they held their gnosis with a different spirit than their Orthodox brethren.  The Gnostics were more fluid where the Orthodox were rigid and employed the same sort of organizational controls as any other tightly managed religious cult.

As a self-described Neo-Gnostic, my only claim of genuine gnosis is that I truly don't anything.  Oh, I accept many things as being "true" -- such as my own existence, the need to figure out how to sustain myself if I want to see how far I can take this thing called being human and that there seem to be some observations from which we can draw some inferences about a few things.  But, when it comes to the Ultimate Questions like is there something like the God of the major religions that wants us to do very specific things while on Earth or if there's an Afterlife where I'll still have my human personality -- I simply DON'T KNOW.

This is where I'll begin this journey that I call the Not-So-Secret-Gnosis of the Gneo Gnostic -- with this first affirmation of Neo-Gnosticism: 

I do not know the answers to life's Ultimate Questions and yet I choose to live by faith that I will be Eternal.