{"it":{"id":"TX038","kind":"text","sub":"Gnostic","name":"Nag Hammadi Codices: Hypostasis of the Archons (NHC II,4), Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1; III,1; IV,1; BG 8502)","place":"Cairo","date":"2nd-3rd c. CE composition","oldest":"Codices buried c.350-400 CE, found 1945","inst":"Coptic Museum, Cairo","lang":"Coptic (from Greek)","src":[236],"lat":30.006,"lon":31.23,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"In December 1945 farmers near Nag Hammadi found a jar holding 13 books, including texts of a flawed creator served by Archons.","why":"It is one of 52 treatises found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and casts the creator as a blind, boastful ruler. Scholars read it as early Christian Gnostic thought; some modern writers see aliens.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":1,"yt":"Read the Hypostasis of the Archons.","rel":["TX046"],"hook":"Nag Hammadi's chief ruler boasts he alone is God. A voice answers: you are blind."},"S":{"236":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocryphon_of_John"]},"rec":{"id":"TX038","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA139","a":"Archons = controlling NHI; humans as engineered vessels for souls (close to Big Ski's thesis).","who":"John Lamb Lash; popular writers","main":"Platonising Christian/Jewish heterodoxy; demiurge from Plato's Timaeus.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocryphon_of_John","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1), Wisse tr.","q":"Yaltabaoth is told: \"Blow into his face something of your spirit and his body will arise\"","exact":"yes","tr":"F. Wisse (Brill copyright; short quote)","url":"http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html","mo":"body as vessel for soul"},{"ref":"Apocryphon of John (Wisse)","q":"\"This is the tomb of the newly-formed body with which the robbers had clothed the man, the bond of forgetfulness\"","exact":"yes","tr":"F. Wisse (short quote)","url":"http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html","mo":"souls_in_bodies"},{"ref":"Apocryphon of John (Wisse), Watchers-type episode","q":"Angels take the likeness of the women's husbands, create a \"counterfeit spirit\" and bring gold, silver, copper and iron [part paraphrase]","exact":"partial","tr":"F. Wisse","url":"http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html","mo":"giants_hybrids"}],"tr":[{"by":"J.M. Robinson (ed.)","yr":"1977","t":"The Nag Hammadi Library in English","lic":"copyright","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library"},{"by":"F. Wisse","yr":"1977/1996","t":"Apocryphon of John","lic":"copyright (Brill)","url":"http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html"}],"mo":[{"v":"souls_in_bodies","ev":"P024","n":"Platonic/Gnostic","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocryphon_of_John"},{"v":"souls_in_bodies","ev":"P053","n":"Gnostic","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocryphon_of_John"}],"tl":[{"comp":"2nd-3rd c. CE","old":"Codices c.350-400 CE","pub":"Berlin Codex acquired 1896; NHC found 1945","b":"S","url":"http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html"}],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Platonising Christian/Jewish heterodoxy; demiurge from Plato's Timaeus.","alternative_reading":"Archons = controlling NHI; humans as engineered vessels for souls (close to Big Ski's thesis).","alt_proponent":"John Lamb Lash; popular writers","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Translations by Robinson ed. 1977 (not PD).","key_theme":"Demiurge Yaldabaoth and Archons fashion Adam's body; true spirit from higher realm","language":"Coptic (from Greek)","physical_object_institution":"Coptic Museum, Cairo","composition_date":"2nd-3rd c. CE composition","oldest_ms_date":"Codices buried c.350-400 CE, found 1945","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0425","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocryphon_of_John"},{"id":"VTX038-2","t":"The Hypostasis of the Archons (Nag Hammadi Library), Gnostic Society Library","u":"http://gnosis.org/naghamm/hypostas.html"},{"id":"VTX038-3","t":"Wikipedia: Nag Hammadi library","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library"}],"sum":"# The Hypostasis of the Archons: The Nag Hammadi Text of the Blind Ruler\n\nSome of the pages may have been burned in a family oven. Muhammad Ali al-Samman, the Egyptian farmer who dug up a sealed jar of books near the town of Nag Hammadi in late 1945, later told the American scholar James Robinson that his mother had used some of them as tinder. Robinson identified the lost pages with what is now called Codex XII. What survived was still remarkable: twelve leather-bound papyrus codices and part of a thirteenth, holding 52 mostly Gnostic treatises, written in Coptic. They are now kept in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.\n\nOne of them is a short text with a long name: the Hypostasis of the Archons, usually translated \"The Reality of the Rulers.\" It survives in a single copy, in the second codex, and it tells the story of creation from the side of the people who say the creator got it wrong.\n\n## How the books were found\n\nThe story of the find is itself contested. Al-Samman told Robinson a complex account involving a blood feud, digging for fresh soil for his fields, and hesitation to break the jar for fear of a jinn inside. Robinson gave several versions of the interview, with between two and eight people present. An earlier investigator, Jean Doresse, who made inquiries between 1947 and 1950, recorded none of these details, only that a local farmer dug the books up from a graveyard near ancient tombs. Later scholars noticed that al-Samman also mentioned a corpse and a bed of charcoal at the site, and have suggested the find may have begun as grave robbing.\n\nMost of the books passed through a Cypriot antiques dealer in Cairo before the Egyptian Department of Antiquities held on to them, fearing they would leave the country. After the 1952 revolution they went to the Coptic Museum and were declared national property. One codex was sold abroad, bought by the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1951 as a birthday present for the psychologist Carl Jung, and returned to Cairo only in 1975.\n\nWhy were they buried? Robinson suggested they belonged to a nearby monastery of the Pachomian order and were hidden after Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria condemned the use of non-canonical books in a letter of 367 CE. Later work has strengthened that monastic link. Others propose instead that a wealthy private owner had them made and was buried with them. The manuscripts themselves date from the third and fourth centuries.\n\n## What the text says\n\nThe Hypostasis was written in Greek in the second or third century CE; what survives is a Coptic translation. Quotations here are from Bentley Layton's translation, published through the Coptic Gnostic Library Project at Claremont. It opens with the boast of the world's ruler:\n\n\"Their chief is blind; because of his power and his ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his power, 'It is I who am God; there is none apart from me.'\" A voice answers from incorruptibility: \"You are mistaken, Samael\", which, the text explains, means \"god of the blind.\"\n\nWhat follows is a retelling of the first six chapters of Genesis with the moral turned inside out. The rulers, or Archons, see a divine image reflected in the waters and fall in love with it, but cannot grasp it. So they model a man out of soil in its shape. Yet \"they could not make him arise because of their powerlessness.\" Only when a spirit descends and enters him does Adam stand and live.\n\nThe Archons forbid the tree of knowledge, but the snake, here called \"the instructor\", tells the truth: \"With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you.\" Eating the fruit is a step toward knowledge, not a fall. The rulers respond by throwing humanity \"into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that their mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs.\" When they plan a flood, a girl named Norea, the sister of Seth, asks to board Noah's ark. When he refuses, she blows on it and burns it.\n\nThe second half is a dialogue. The Archons try to seize Norea, she cries out, and the great angel Eleleth comes down. \"His appearance is like fine gold and his raiment is like snow,\" she says. Eleleth tells her how the rulers came to be: the heavenly figure Sophia tried to create alone, and her product became \"an arrogant beast resembling a lion,\" the chief ruler, also called Yaldabaoth. His son Sabaoth repents and is set over the seventh heaven, where he makes himself \"a huge four-faced chariot of cherubim.\" Eleleth promises that a \"true man\" will come, that humanity will be \"freed of blind thought,\" and that the rulers will lose their power.\n\n## How it is read\n\nScholars class the Hypostasis as Sethian Gnostic, part of a tradition that saw the material world as made by a flawed creator lower than the true God, and taught salvation through knowledge. The text draws on Jewish tradition, Greek and Egyptian myth, and Plato's dialogues, especially the Timaeus, with its idea of a craftsman god. Yaldabaoth is read as a mocking caricature of the God of the Old Testament. The \"true man\" is usually taken to be Jesus, and the text quotes and praises Paul, though scholars still debate whether the Christian elements are additions to older material. Its heroes are female; its villains, who try to assault both Eve and Norea, are male.\n\nIt sits beside related books. The Apocryphon of John, also in the second codex, tells a fuller version of the same myth and was attacked by the church father Irenaeus around 185 CE, which dates its composition to before then. Four copies of it survive, three of them from Nag Hammadi.\n\nSome modern writers read the Archons as non-human controllers who keep humanity distracted and use human bodies as vessels. That reading is interpretation, not evidence; the text itself offers no physical trace, and scholars read it as religious thought rooted in Plato and Genesis. Still, the book's own description is stark enough. Its rulers made people, could not make them stand, and then kept them busy so they would never look up.\n\nPicture the scene the text keeps returning to: a vast, dark surface of water, and on it the reflection of a light from above that the rulers of the world could see but never hold.","qs":["The chief ruler claims to be the only God and is called blind for it. Why would a religious text mock the being who made the world?","The jar was buried, perhaps after a bishop condemned such books in 367. What is lost when a community has to hide its scriptures?","Some readers today see the Archons as aliens. What does that reading keep from the text, and what does it leave out?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Apocryphon_of_John.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apocryphon_of_John.jpg","title":"Apocryphon of John.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","cap":"The Secret Book of John (Apocryphon of John) is a 2nd-century AD Sethian Gnostic text of secret teachings."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/Codex_Tchacos_p33.jpg/1280px-Codex_Tchacos_p33.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Tchacos_p33.jpg","title":"Codex Tchacos p33.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"WolfgangRieger","cap":"Page from Codex Tchacos."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Zampieri_St_John_Evangelist.jpg/1280px-Zampieri_St_John_Evangelist.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zampieri_St_John_Evangelist.jpg","title":"Zampieri St John Evangelist.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Domenichino","cap":"","alt":"Nag Hammadi Codices: Hypostasis of the Archons (NHC II,4), Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1; III,1; IV,1; BG 8502): Zampieri St John Evangelist"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"350 CE","h":"Codices buried c.350-400 CE, found 1945","s":[313]},{"v":"Coptic (from Greek)","h":"Language","s":[313]},{"v":"Coptic Museum, Cairo","h":"Where the physical copy is held","s":[313]}],"hs":{"313":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocryphon_of_John"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX038.webp","w":800,"h":800,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Apocryphon_of_John.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}