The Arab peasant who in 1945 changed European history

[DieFree]

Have you heard about this famous Arab peasant? 

In 1945, in rural upper Egypt, an Arab peasant named Muhammed al-Samman was searching for lost gold when accidently discovered what is now called the Nag Hammadi.

What a powerful force, these texts found in Nag Hammadi! They have caused theologians to question the entire basis of Western Christianity. But for a long time they were not fully appreciated: fought over by antique hunters, left in humid New York vaults, stolen by Egyptian government officials and now sitting in a humble Egyptian library, diligently studied over by professors and scholars who frantically try to learn Coptic to understand them even more.

Written in Coptic, in translation from Greek, and hidden away by some monk or holy person 1600 years ago, the Nag Hammadi proclaim the truth of Christ but in a fundamentally different manner than traditional Christianity. According to these Nag Hammadi texts, which call themselves "secret gospels," Christ came from heaven not to free man from original sin but to wake him up to his divine nature. Man, the texts say, is in an inferior material world controlled by a lesser, arrogant God who is jealous of man because the God of the All, a divinity of inscrutable power, wisdom and goodness, choose to bless man, or at least certain types of man, with divine powers. But the twist is the lesser God "created" man and thought man was creating in his image, but then Adam and Even discovered differently, after eating from the tree of knowledge, at the urging of the serpent. Jealous and outraged, the lesser God kicked them out of the Garden and blinded them to their divine nature: an eternal sleep he wanted for them because if man wakes his material world and its majesties lose power. He, that God, is dead. 

So Christ came to "wake" up sleeping man, a mercy and blessing from the God of the highest, a rebellion against the Master of the Material world, the Demiurge. Christ was killed but according to these "secret gospels" his resurrection is not so much a future physical event but an internal state among certain believers, who because of this are baptized into his Church (some from birth, blessed with spiritual foreknowledge and others involuntarily in a moment of indescribable joy and vision). These people, who can come from every cross-section of human society including women, are entitled to leadership of the Church based on original, creative revelation due to direct contact and inspiration with the divinity through Christ the medium. 

These texts, often called "gnostic" and seeming to have eastern influences, were denounced as heresies by the early Church and 1600 years ago the patriarch of Alexanderia in Egypt had a letter read in every church on easter denouncing the Gnostics as arrogant heretics, and he pursued the destruction of these gospels with such thoroughness that they vanished from the Earth until the Arab peasant found them in 1945 --- some loyal group had hidden the texts for safe keeping, a re-emergence at a more opportune time. The time of the Lion.  Anyway, the patriarch here, his name I forget, declared that because the universe had four corners and four principle winds, there could be only 4 gospels. Hmmm, interesting logic there. But inspired by this idea, he gathered 4 gospels and declared them the only true gospels and these ended up forming the New Testament --- the bedrock of Western Christianity. 

But the New Testament is now shadowed by the Nag Hammadi gospels. Indeed, some of the gospels found here, like the Secret Gospel of John which you can listen to on YouTube, seem to pre-date the gospels of the New Testament based on carbon-dating science. For many readers, they offer a vision of Christianity that is compelling: a non-dogmatic, universal church based on creative interaction with the divinity and faith as an active, internal state rather than a static event celebrated through visible acts of worship. This Church is not one that is interested in the Ceasars of this material world, underlings of the Demiurge, and for that reason is quite the threatening church. And hence why it was suppressed: but that Arab peasant, who at first was afraid to open to the glistening jar because he thought they were jinns, unsuppressed and freed the Western imagination regarding Christian faith. Where this leads is our future history!