Gospel of Philip

Read straight through, the text lurches. A sentence on baptism is followed by a remark about the meaning of a foreign word, then a short parable, then a flat doctrinal assertion, with nothing joining them. The standard explanation is that the work is not a composition at all but a florilegium, a set of extracts copied out of one or more longer treatises, whose compiler kept the sayings and discarded the argument that once held them together. On that reading the incoherence is not a failure of the author but a fact about how the book was made. A minority of scholars still argue for a single designed discourse with an associative rather than linear logic, and the question is not settled.

The material behind the extracts is Valentinian. Valentinus was an Alexandrian teacher active in Rome around the middle of the second century; Tertullian, a hostile witness, says he was passed over for the bishopric there and turned against the church in consequence. The school that carried his name produced the most intellectually ambitious Christian theology of its period, built on a fullness of divine beings, a fall within that fullness, and a redemption understood as the recovery of what had been lost from it.

Much of the book is preoccupied with words. It argues that names given in the world are unreliable, that terms such as God, Father, Son and Spirit deceive those who hear them in their ordinary sense, and that truth had to be spoken in worldly language because there was no other way to reach people who live in the world. That suspicion of religious vocabulary, held by a text that is itself nothing but vocabulary, is the closest thing the collection has to a governing idea.

The Gospel of Philip names five rites: baptism, chrism or anointing, eucharist, redemption and the bridal chamber. This is the earliest Christian text to set out a sequence of that shape, and it is the reason the book matters to historians of liturgy quite apart from anything it says about doctrine. The ranking is explicit, with the bridal chamber placed above the rest, and the anointing given more weight than the baptism that precedes it, which is the reverse of the emphasis found in most later Christian practice.

What the bridal chamber actually was is genuinely unresolved, and the disagreement is old. One line of reading takes it as a distinct ritual, performed on initiates, perhaps involving a chamber, a kiss or an anointing, and standing as the culminating sacrament of a Valentinian community. Another takes it as an image: the reunion of the divided self with its heavenly counterpart, of which any earthly ceremony is only a picture. A third position, which has gained ground, is that the distinction is anachronistic, and that a rite and the metaphor it enacts were not separable in the minds of the people who used the term.

The uncertainty is not evasion by commentators. The text nowhere describes a procedure. It speaks of the bridal chamber constantly and defines it once, and the surrounding excerpts are exactly the kind of allusive material a community writes for people who already know what is being referred to. The one firm point is that the language draws on ordinary marriage while insisting the mystery is not that of ordinary marriage, and that whatever was meant, it was held to be undefiled rather than transgressive.

One short passage has done more to make the Gospel of Philip famous than everything else in it. It calls Mary Magdalene the companion of the Saviour, using a loanword from the Greek koinonos, a term for a partner or associate that is used in the period for business partners and for spouses alike and does not by itself settle which is meant. It then says that Christ loved her more than the other disciples and used to kiss her often, and here the papyrus is damaged. The word naming where he kissed her is lost.

The lacuna falls at exactly the point that would decide the question. Translators supply mouth, cheek, forehead or hand, and print the supplement in brackets to mark it as conjecture; the manuscript itself gives none of them. A related consideration is that the same text treats the ritual kiss as something exchanged among the perfect as a means of grace, which makes the gesture, wherever it landed, an image of shared spiritual conception rather than a report of private conduct.

Popular writing has treated the passage with a confidence the page does not support. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and the works it drew on present the text as evidence that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child. The manuscript supplies neither a marriage nor a child, and the second-most-quoted line is itself a bracketed guess about a hole in a fourth-century Coptic book. What the passage does establish, and it is not nothing, is that some third-century Christians ranked Mary Magdalene above the male disciples, and that other Christians of the same period resented it, since the text has the disciples ask why Christ loves her more than them.