Table Of ContentThe Crucified Book
DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION
Series Editors
Daniel Boyarin
Virginia Burrus
Derek Krueger
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
The Crucified Book
Sacred Writing in
the Age of Valentinus
Anne Starr Kreps
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means
without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www .upenn .edu /pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812253870
Ebook ISBN: 9780812298482
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kreps, Anne Starr, author.
Title: The crucified book : sacred writing in the
age of Valentinus / Anne Starr Kreps.
Other titles: Divinations.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of
Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Divinations: rereading late
ancient religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021042878 | ISBN 9780812253870
(hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Valentinus, active 2nd century. | Gospel of
truth—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Valentinians. | Sacred
books—History and criticism. | Books—Religious aspects—
Christianity. | Church history—Primitive
and early church, ca. 30–600.
Classification: LCC BT1475 .K74 2022 | DDC 273/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042878
ϩⲙ̄ ⲡⲣⲡⲙⲉⲉⲩⲉ
Fr. David W. Johnson, S.J., Ph.D.
Contents
Introduction 1
PART I. VALENTINUS AND THE VALENTINIANS
Chapter 1. The Joyful Gospel 17
Chapter 2. The Valentinian Gospel as a Scriptural Practice 42
PART II. IRENAEUS, EPIPHANIUS, AND THE RABBIS
Chapter 3. The Gospel of Truth According to
the Christian Heresiographers 63
Chapter 4. Rabbis Who Published and Perished 92
Conclusion. The Iconic Book 116
Notes 123
Bibliography 153
Index 175
Acknowledgments 185
Introduction
Bibliomorphosis
Romans crucified prisoners naked. Several ancient sources attest to this practice.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Josephus describe the condemned having their
clothing removed before being led away to execution.1 The Gospel accounts of
Jesus’s crucifixion report that soldiers divided his clothing at the base of the cross,
indicating that Jesus may have died naked. This prospect vexed early Christians
who were wrestling with the theological implications of his physically humili-
ating death. As artistic representations of the crucifixion emerged, a loincloth
was placed around the crucified Jesus, thus balancing the physical suffering of a
human Jesus with the dignity of divinity. The cross symbolically projects, in the
words of Robin Jensen, “significant valence, both positive and negative depending
on where or when it turns up, how it is used, what it looks like, and who sees it.”2
The Gospel of Truth clothes Jesus, not to preserve some bit of dignity, but
to reframe the entire crucifixion as an act of publication. This second- century
text, named after its opening words, “the gospel of truth is joy,” was found in
two Coptic translations among the Nag Hammadi codices. It exhibits features of
Valentinian Christianity and is often attributed to the early Christian Platonist
Valentinus himself.3 The Gospel of Truth presents a visually jarring image of Jesus
crucified, wrapped in a book, reading aloud from his own heart as he dies. The
text reads: “Jesus appeared. He rolled himself up in that book and was nailed
to a tree and published the edict of the Father on the cross. Oh! Such a great
lesson! Gliding down to death, while eternal life clothes him. After he divested
himself of perishable rags, he took on himself imperishability. It is that which is
not possible for anyone to take from him. After setting out onto the empty paths
of fear, he left the power of those who were naked by the power of forgetfulness.
He was knowledge and completion, reading out the contents of the heart.”4 In
this passage, the book replaces clothing. Jesus is “divested . . . of perishable rags”
while the book is a garment that cannot be taken. As the book covers Jesus, Jesus
2 Introduction
publishes the book, and the words no longer distinguish the body of Jesus from
the book. In the Gospel of Truth, Jesus is crucified in a book and as a book, “read-
ing aloud the contents of his heart.”
The Gospel of Truth provides an intriguing look into the literary landscape
of early Christians. It was composed around the time Irenaeus was mounting his
defense of a fourfold Gospel. Yet, just as Irenaeus asserted that the number of
Gospels could be no greater nor fewer than four, the Nag Hammadi texts, the
Gospel of Truth among them, demonstrated that for many Christians, the num-
ber of Gospels was indeed greater than four. The Gospel of Truth invites readers
to examine this alternative scriptural world.5 It is overtly self- reflective about its
own textuality. The text is replete with multiple, sometimes bizarre representa-
tions of sacred writing, including the description of Jesus wrapped in a scroll,
nailed to the cross, speaking.
Ancient Christian documents that narrate Jesus’s death each have a different
idea about the last words of Jesus. Paul was not interested in Jesus’s last words,
only the fact that he died. The Gospel of Truth continues Paul’s focus on the cross,
but also includes speech. Why is it that the Gospel of Truth is not interested in
what Jesus says, but simply that he speaks? Why do the specific contents of the
revelation remain obscured? Why does the text consider speaking on the cross
to be an act of publication? What was a book for its Christian audience that it
could be described as an article of clothing? What does the image of Jesus as a
crucified book tell us about ancient theories of sacred books?
The Crucified Book addresses these questions. It places the Gospel of Truth in
the context of discourse about sacred books from the second through the fourth
centuries. By documenting the text’s unusual representations of sacred writing, it
argues that the Gospel of Truth promoted the conception of books as living doc-
uments, permitting the generation of religious books by multiple authors as new
sources of revelatory authority. The Gospel of Truth, and Valentinian Christian
texts more broadly, offered a definition of sacred book that competed with the
fourfold Gospel of nascent orthodoxy. Valentinian Christians endorsed a mode
of open authority, recognizing ongoing oral and written revelation, instead of a
closed canon of sacred books.
The Material Gospel
In the late nineteenth century, the German philologist Friedrich Max Müller
attempted to classify world religions by drawing on the evolutionary model of
