Gospel of Truth

The Gospel of Truth opens by naming itself good news for those who have received grace to know the Father, then spends most of its length describing what not knowing him is like. Error is pictured as a fog that thickened around the world in place of truth, and as a nightmare people mistake for waking life, full of terrors and phantoms and flight, until the one having the nightmare wakes and finds there was nothing there. The world itself is said to have come from that forgetting rather than from a deliberate act of the Father, and it is oblivion, not matter, that the text treats as the real problem.

Against this it sets the Word, sent to give shape to the ignorance and swallow it up, and knowledge of the Father as what actually reverses the forgetting. Those who receive this knowledge are not merely informed of a fact; they are called by name, the way a father calls a child he already knows, and the text says plainly that a name is given to a thing that already exists rather than invented for it. The redeemed are pictured resting in the Father the way exhausted people rest, and the closing image is of a household set in order, each thing restored to the place from which it had strayed.

There is no cosmogonic myth of aeons falling and being restored, no demiurge, and no elaborate genealogy of divine emanations of the kind Irenaeus attacks at length elsewhere in his account of Valentinian teaching. What the text offers instead is closer to spiritual instruction than to myth, which is part of why calling it Gnostic tells a reader less than reading what it actually says.

Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180 CE against what he calls Valentinian heresy, mentions in passing that the group possesses its own Gospel of Truth, differing greatly from the four gospels the church received from the apostles. He gives no summary of its contents and does not say who wrote it beyond attributing it to the followers of Valentinus. For eighteen centuries that sentence was the entire record of the work's existence.

In 1945 a jar of Coptic codices was found near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, and one of them, later called the Jung Codex after the psychologist whose institute in Zurich acquired it in 1951 as a gift, opens with a text that calls itself, in its own first lines, the gospel of truth. Whether this is the same composition Irenaeus meant is not something the text itself settles, since it never repeats that phrase as a formal title elsewhere and Irenaeus quotes nothing from it that can be matched word for word against the Coptic. Scholars who find the general Valentinian character of the two descriptions close enough treat the identification as likely; those who note how little Irenaeus actually says treat it as unproven rather than false.

The same uncertainty carries into authorship. Harold Attridge and George MacRae, introducing the standard English translation, observe that the text's style and ideas sit close enough to the handful of fragments known to be Valentinus's own writing that he remains a real candidate as author, though they stop short of calling this established. Irenaeus's own attribution, to Valentinus's followers rather than to Valentinus himself, is the more cautious position and the one most scholars still hold. Both readings agree the work is Valentinian; they disagree about how close it stands to the school's founder.