“Help me,” Sana said. “I’ve heard the term Gnosticism, but I wouldn’t be able to define it.”
“Simply speaking, it was a movement that predated Christianity, ultimately merging aspects of pagan religions, Judaism, and then Christianity into a single sect. The name Gnosticism came from the Greek word gnosis, meaning intuitive knowledge. To the Gnostics, knowledge of the divine being was the end-all, and those who had the knowledge believed they had the spark of the divine to the point that people like Simon the Magician actually thought he was, at least partially, divine.”
“And you complain that my DNA science is complicated,” Sana scoffed.
“This isn’t all that complicated, but back to Basilides. He happened to be one of the first Gnostics also to be a Christian, although the name Christian didn’t yet exist. He believed Jesus of Nazareth was the awaited Messiah. Yet he didn’t believe that Christ had come to earth to redeem mankind from sin by suffering on the cross, like most of the rest of his fellow Christians did. Instead, Basilides thought that Jesus’ mission had been for the purposes of enlightenment, or gnosis, to show humans how to break free of the physical world and achieve salvation. The Gnostics like Basilides were really high on Greek philosophy and Persian mythology, but they were all very down on the material world, which they thought entrapped humankind and was the source of all sin.”
Sana bent over the letter to look at it more closely. From a distance the printing appeared uniform, as if done by a machine, but on closer inspection, slight variations proved that it had been done by hand. “Is this Coptic as well?” she asked.
“No, the letter is in an ancient Greek,” Shawn said, “which isn’t surprising. Greek, even more than Latin, was the lingua franca of the day, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean. As the name suggests, Alexandria was one of the centers of the Hellenistic world established by Alexander the Great’s military feats.”
Sana straightened back up. “Was this letter part of the codex or merely stuck into the book as an afterthought?”
“It certainly wasn’t an afterthought,” Shawn said cryptically. “It was done very deliberately, but not for the reason you might imagine. Remember how I described the codex’s cover? Along with other scraps of papyrus, this letter was sandwiched in behind the leather to make it what we would think of as a hardcover book. I’d heard that had been done with other volumes of this particular treasure trove of codices.”
“You found more than one?”
“No, I came across only this one codex. But I recognized it instantly. Here, sit down. I’ve got some explaining to do, especially since we’re not going home tomorrow as planned.”
“What are you talking about?” Sana demanded. “I’ve got to get back to rescue several experiments.”
“Your experiments are going to have to wait, at least for a day, or maybe two days at most.” Shawn placed his hand on Sana’s shoulder in an attempt to ease her down onto the couch.
“You can wait if you want, but I’m going back,” she said, making a point of pushing his hand off her shoulder. She wasn’t going to allow herself to be bullied.
For a moment wife and husband glowered at each other. Then both relented without a harsh word.
“You’ve changed,” Shawn commented at length. He acted surprised rather than angry at her unexpectedly rebellious announcement.
“I think it’s safe to say you’ve changed as well,” Sana responded. She made a distinct effort to keep any suggestion of irritation out of her voice. She didn’t want to get into a long, drawn-out emotional discussion at the moment. Besides, he was right. She had changed — not markedly, but in a very real way, a response to his changing.
“I don’t think you understand,” Shawn said. “This letter may very well lead me to the apotheosis of my career. To take advantage of it, I’m going to need your help for a day — two, tops. I have to see if the author, Saturninus, was telling the truth. I cannot imagine why he would have lied, but I have to be sure. To do that, we’re going to be flying to Rome early tomorrow morning.”
“Do you need my help literally or figuratively?” Sana questioned. To her it made a difference.
“Literally!”
Sana took a breath and eyed her husband. He seemed sincere, which changed things in her mind. He’d never actually asked for her help before. “All right,” she said. She sat down. “I’m not yet agreeing, but let’s hear your explanation.”
With rekindled enthusiasm, Shawn grabbed the desk chair and planted it in front of Sana. Sitting down, he leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “Have you ever heard of the Gnostic Gospels found here in Egypt at Nag Hammadi in 1945?”
Sana shook her head.
“How about the book The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels?”
Sana shook her head again with a touch of irritation. Shawn was always asking her if she read this treatise or that one, and invariably she’d have to say no. As a molecular biologist, she’d not had a lot of time to take many liberal-arts courses, and often felt inferior as a result.
“I’m surprised,” Shawn said. “Elaine Pagels was a bestseller, a real commercial hit that put Gnosticism on the map.”
“When was it published?”
“I don’t know, around 1979, I guess.”
“Shawn, I was born in 1980. Give me a break!”
“Right! Sorry! I keep forgetting. Anyhow, her book was about the significance of the Nag Hammadi find, which were thirteen codices, including this one I’ve come across today. This book was originally part of that find that in one fell swoop doubled the extant books about early Gnostic thought. In many ways the find was in the same league as the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Palestine two years later.”
“I’ve heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
“Well there are people who believe the Nag Hammadi texts are equivalently important for understanding religious thought around the time of Christ.”
“So, this book you found today is one of those codices found in 1945.”
“Correct. It’s known, appropriately enough, as the Thirteenth Codex.”
“Where are the others?”
“They’re here in Cairo at the Coptic Museum. Most had been confiscated by the Egyptian government after a few had been sold. Those that had been sold eventually made their way back here where they belong.”
“How did number thirteen get separated from the others?”
“Before I answer that, let me give you a thumbnail sketch of the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library. It’s fascinating. Two young fellahin boys named Khalifah and Muhammed Ali were out at the edge of the desert near modern-day Nag Hammadi, supposedly looking for a kind of fertilizing soil known as sabakh. Where they were looking was at the base of a cliff called Jabal al-Tarif, which, by the way, is honeycombed with caves, both natural and ancient man-made. Their method was to blindly poke deep into the sand with their mattocks. I don’t know how that helps, but to their surprise on the day of the discovery, instead of coming across the sabakh they were looking for, one of them heard a suspicious hollow clunk when he pounded his mattock into the sand. He cleared away the sand and came across a sealed earthenware jar about three to four feet in height. Hoping to find some ancient Egyptian antiquities, they found the codices instead.”
“Did they have any idea of the value of what they’d found?”
“Not a clue. They carried the cache home but dumped it next to the family’s cooking oven, where the mother used some of the papyri pages to start the family’s cooking fires.”