DeConick A.D

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PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
books of Jeu and Pistis Sophia. Both Jeu and Pistis Sophia come from the
third and fourth centuries, and they share a similar mythology, theology,
and set of rituals.
The two books of Jeu contain standardized hymns, prayers, and chants,
along with hand-drawn maps and seals of the heavenly realms and the secret
names of their inhabitants. They list plant materials and ritual objects
to be used in water ceremonies. The focus of this liturgy is on cleansing
the soul and then enabling it to ascend into the heavenly realms to
enter the house of the true God.
Pistis Sophia comprises lengthy dialogues between Jesus and a handful
of his disciples, including Mary Magdalene. It functioned as a catechism
or primer for initiates.
The existence of these books points to the existence of a Gnostic church
in the late third and early fourth centuries that centered on the worship
of the God Jeu and Jeu’s Father. Jesus is the knower of truth, the revealer
of Gnostic secrets. Jesus is not Jeu. Jesus is the heavenly messenger sent
down to earth from the Father. He is called the Living Jesus and the Word
of Life. He comes from the Father, from the realm of light, to share the
Son Jeu’s hidden knowledge. The Son Jeu is the only one who knows directly
the true, unapproachable Father God, the divine eternities, and the
path of immortality. The group calls this knowledge the mysteries of Jeu.
The modern publication of these books caused quite a buzz among
academics and laypeople. Nothing like them had ever been seen. Their
contents matched nothing mentioned by the leaders of the Apostolic
Catholic churches, such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, or Hippolytus. Nonetheless,
scholars at the time proposed that Valentinus must have composed
at least portions of them, that they had to be derived from the Ophian
Gnostics, or that the Sethians must be involved.
When serious objections to these proposals were raised, arguments that
the books were not Valentinian or Ophian or Sethian, the inquiry lost
steam. Scholars did not know what to do with them, where to locate
them historically, or how to understand them theologically because they
couldn’t be pigeonholed. They didn’t match any religious categories that
were known at the time.
When the Nag Hammadi collection surfaced in the mid-1940s, work
on Jeu and Pistis Sophia ground to a complete halt. These books have
become the most neglected and misunderstood set of Gnostic texts ever
recovered from antiquity.