Few titles in early Christian writing cause as much confusion as the Gospel of the Egyptians. The name belongs to two different works. One is a Greek gospel from the second century, now lost, that church writers quoted in bits. The other is a Coptic book found in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. The two texts share a name and a country, but little else.
Many popular accounts mix them up, and the result is a book that never existed. So it helps to take them one at a time. First comes the Greek gospel, with its short and puzzling talk between Jesus and a woman named Salome. Then comes the Coptic book, a long hymn to the unseen God and to Seth, the third son of Adam. Exploring the Apocrypha gives the wider picture of such books.
Two Texts Called the Gospel of the Egyptians
Ancient books often got their names from the people who used them. The Gospel of the Hebrews, for instance, was the gospel of Jewish Christians. In the same way, the Gospel of the Egyptians seems to have been the gospel of Christians in Egypt, probably before the four gospels won out there.
The Coptic book got the same name for a different reason. Its closing lines call it “the Egyptian Gospel” and “the holy, secret book”. Modern scholars therefore gave it the old title, although it is not a gospel in any normal sense. It tells no story of the life of Jesus. For that reason, many now prefer the name the text gives itself, the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit.
The Greek Gospel of the Egyptians and Salome
The Greek Gospel of the Egyptians survives only in quotations. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian teacher who wrote around 200 CE, cites it several times in his Miscellanies. Origen and Hippolytus also mention it. Still, no copy of the whole book has ever turned up, and you can see the few surviving fragments side by side.
The quotations all come from one scene. Salome, a follower of Jesus, asks him how long death will hold power. “As long as women bear children,” Jesus answers. Then he adds, “I came to destroy the works of the female.” Salome replies that she did well, then, not to give birth. Jesus tells her to eat every plant but the bitter one.
The strangest line comes at the end. Salome asks when she will know the things she asked about. Jesus says it will happen when she tramples on the garment of shame, when the two become one, and when the male with the female is neither male nor female. The same idea turns up in The Gospel of Thomas, in saying 22, and in an early sermon known as 2 Clement.
How Early Readers Used the Gospel of the Egyptians
These sayings mattered because of a fierce debate about marriage. Some Christian groups, called Encratites from the Greek word for self-control, rejected sex and marriage altogether. For them, having children only fed the cycle of birth and death. They read the words of Jesus to Salome as a plain command to stop.
Clement disagreed. He did not call the gospel false, but he read it another way. In his view, the works of the female meant desire, anger and greed, not childbirth. Death, he argued, follows birth by nature, and Jesus was simply stating a fact. So the same lines served both sides of the argument.
Other readers also valued the book. Clement names a teacher called Julius Cassianus who quoted it in his case against marriage. Hippolytus says the Naassenes, a sect he attacked, drew on it for their teaching about the soul and its changes. By the third century, however, most church leaders treated it with suspicion. The Secret Gospel of Mark shows how Clement dealt with another gospel outside the four.
The Coptic Book From Nag Hammadi
The second text comes from the great find of 1945. That year, farmers near Nag Hammadi dug up a jar holding thirteen leather-bound books. Two of those books contain this work, in two separate Coptic translations of a lost Greek original. Both copies date from the fourth century. An overview of the Nag Hammadi library lists all the books and what each one contains.
The book belongs to a family of texts that scholars call Sethian. Sethian Gnostics saw themselves as the spiritual children of Seth. In their view, Seth passed on a hidden knowledge that the rest of humanity had lost. The Secret Book of John comes from the same family and shares many of its figures.
Unlike the Greek gospel, this book says nothing about marriage or about Salome. Instead, it gives a sweeping account of heaven before the world began. Then it ends with prayers and hymns meant to be spoken aloud.
Heaven Before the World
The book opens with the Great Invisible Spirit, a God beyond all names. From this Spirit come three powers: the Father, the Mother and the Son. The Mother bears the name Barbelo. Next come a self-begotten Son and a host of lesser beings, and each one praises the one before it.
Four great lights stand at the centre of this heaven. Their names are Harmozel, Oroiael, Daveithai and Eleleth. Heavenly Adam, his son the great Seth and the children of Seth each have a place among them. Together they form the true spiritual race.
Then trouble begins. A lower power named Saklas appears, and he makes the world we know. He boasts that he is the only God. A voice from above answers him at once, and his boast shows how little he sees. Readers of other Gnostic texts will know him as the Demiurge, the flawed maker of matter.
Seth Puts On Jesus in the Gospel of the Egyptians
The boldest idea in the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians concerns Jesus. The book does not treat him as the main figure. Seth is. When his spiritual race is in danger, Seth comes down to save it. On the way he passes through floods, fires and the rule of false powers.
To do this, Seth takes on a body. The text says he put on the living Jesus like a garment, and through him nailed the powers to the cross. So Jesus becomes the vessel of Seth. This is a daring claim, and it shows how freely the Sethians reworked Christian ideas.
Seth also brings a baptism. Believers who receive it, the book says, will never taste death. Scholars think real Sethian groups practised such a rite, with water and with the so-called five seals. Yet the meaning of that phrase is still unclear.
Hymns, Vowels and a Hidden Book
Much of the text reads like worship. Long strings of vowels fill whole lines, with letters such as I, E, O and U repeated in patterns. Ancient readers probably sang or chanted them. Similar vowel chants also appear in Greek magical papyri from the same period.
The book closes with a note on how it came to be. The great Seth, it says, wrote it and hid it on a mountain called Charaxio, to be found at the end of time. Then a scribe adds his own words. He calls himself Eugnostos, “in the flesh Gongessos”, and sends greetings to his fellow believers. His small signature is one of the few personal touches in the whole library.
Why the Gospel of the Egyptians Still Matters
Neither text ever came close to the Bible. Even so, both show how varied early Christianity was, especially in Egypt. In the second century, one group of Christians there read a gospel in which Jesus urged Salome to give up childbirth. Two hundred years later, other readers copied a book in which Jesus was the garment of Seth.
The shared title, moreover, holds a lesson for modern readers. When an author says a text teaches something, it is worth asking which text is meant. Many claims about the Gospel of the Egyptians blend the two works together. Kept apart, each one becomes clearer and more interesting. The relevance of the Nag Hammadi library today explores why these finds still draw readers.
Finally, both texts deal with an old question: how can a person escape death? The Greek gospel answers with self-denial, while the Coptic book answers with baptism and hidden knowledge. Neither answer won the day, but both still speak to anyone curious about the roots of Christian thought.
Check out the author’s book here: The Gnostic Gospels.
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