Metalogos The Gospels of Thomas & Philip & Truth

(1) Are the Coptic Gospels Gnostic?
‘The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of
apocrypha is a constant quantity.’
— James Joyce, Ulysses
Ever since the initial announcement of the
Nag Hammadi find, and unto the present day, the
library as a whole has been consistently called
‘gnostic’, both in the scholarly literature and in the
popular press. 1 To begin with, the entire
Nag Hammadi Library was so labelled in the
Preface to the first bilingual editions of Thomas
(1959; Biblio.6)— which classification was
subsequently accepted by virtually everyone who
looked into the text. Thus, representative of almost
all subsequent publications was the report of
Robert M. Grant & David Noel Freedman, The
Secret Sayings of Jesus (1960): ‘[Regarding] the
1 The citations in Recent Scholarly Comments, in the Introduction above,
are but notable exceptions— which the student will encounter only by an
extensive review of the more academic literature. More typical are the
prejudicial titles of Elaine Pagel’s best-selling The Gnostic Gospels (1979);
E.J. Brill’s entire scholarly series, Nag Hammadi Studies: The Coptic
Gnostic Library; and The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the
Nag Hammadi Codices, General Editor James M. Robinson (2006 edition)
— for these last two, more appropriate titles would surely be The Coptic
Monastic Library etc.
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