Read Online Not in God's Name by Jonathan Sacks - Free Book Online

honeycombed with caves, for the soft soil they used to fertilise their crops. As they were digging, their spades hit a red earthenware jar containing thirteen papyrus books bound in leather. From there on the story becomes obscure. The brothers had been involved in a blood feud and were afraid that the police, investigating murder, would find the manuscripts and confiscate them. Eventually the manuscripts found their way onto the black market, but as news of their existence leaked out, the Egyptian government eventually tracked most of them down and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
    Part of one of the codices was smuggled out of Egypt and placed for sale, attracting the attention of a Dutch scholar, Gilles Quispel, who pieced the fragments together, deciphered one of the texts and realised that it was an edition of a text hidden for manycenturies, the
Gospel of Thomas
. Altogether the Nag Hammadi manuscripts represent Coptic versions of fifty-two early Christian texts, many of them hitherto unknown, including the
Gospel of Truth
, the
Gospel to the Egyptians
, the
Secret Book of James
, the
Apocalypse of Paul
and the
Apocalypse of Peter
.
    Written in Coptic, they were translations, dated between 350 and 400 CE , of originals written in Greek and dating back to the second century. The reason they had been hidden soon became clear. They embody a theology radically at odds with the beliefs that became mainstream Christianity. Indeed, many of the newly discovered texts had been denounced as heretical by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, around the year 180.
    These two libraries, hidden for centuries, belong to two quite different religious traditions, one Jewish, the other Christian. But they have one very unusual feature in common – one of the reasons that they were hidden in the first place. Judaism and Christianity are both monotheisms, but the Qumran sectarians and those of Nag Hammadi were
dualists
. They believed not in one power governing the universe, but in two.
    Among the Qumran scrolls is one describing a war between the Children of Light (the Israelites or such of them as remained after their various defeats and exiles) and the Children of Darkness, the Ammonites, Moabites, Amalekites, Philistines and their allies. The Children of Light would be victorious, darkness would be vanquished, and peace would reign for ever.
    The Nag Hammadi gospels are more radical, turning the conventional world of the Bible upside down. In them, the creator of the physical universe was not God but a demiurge, a secondary power, a fallen angel who had got out of hand. It was he who made the material world with its disease and death, violence and pain. The true God had nothing to do with the physical universe but lived in heaven in a realm beyond time, death and change. For the Nag Hammadi sectarians the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament Gospels are, in significant ways, completely false. The real hero of the Garden of Eden was the serpent. It was hewho opened Adam’s and Eve’s eyes to the truth. As for the New Testament, the
Gospel of Thomas
offers the startling revelation that the only disciple who truly understood Jesus was Judas, seen in the canonical Gospels as the traitor who betrayed him.
    Where did these strange ideas come from? They are clearly not indigenous to Judaism or Christianity, because dualism is not monotheism. Jews first encountered them during the period of Persian rule in the form of Zoroastrianism. This ancient faith divided the supernatural powers into two, Ahura Mazda, the god of light, and Ahriman, the god of darkness, ‘the accursed destructive Spirit who is all wickedness and full of death’. 2 Aided by an army of demons and seven archfiends, Ahriman wages war against the light, changing his form into anything he chooses, from lion to lizard to handsome youth. As time proceeds and Ahriman senses his inevitable defeat, he gathers his strength for a final confrontation, during which the sun and moon