The Laughing Savior: The Discovery and Significance of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library

by John Dart

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006061692X
• ISBN13: 9780060616922
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 154 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Laughing Savior

The title of this book is taken from the story that Jesus Christ was not and could not be crucified, and laughed at the folly of those so deluded as to imagine that God could be taken prisoner and maltreated. This is the standard Muslim point of view, as stated in the Qur>an. In that system, Manda< d-H.ayya "Knowledge of Life" is the savior, Ys^u< Ms^ih.a is a fake; whereas in >islam islam is a continuation of Gnosticism, which had been praevalent in the Roman Empire before the emperor Constantine commanded that it be suppressed.

Dated yet still interesting look at the Nag Hammadi codices

John Dart's The Laughing Savior, published in 1976, offers a good summary of what was known about the codices discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt soon after World War II. These ancient documents consisted largely of Gnostic writings that had not seen the light of day in some 1600 years; the Christian church had declared the Gnostics heretics at the end of the second century after Christ, and the vast majority of scholarly knowledge on this important religious movement consisted primarily of written condemnations from the pens of early Church fathers. It took some thirty years for the contents of the Nag Hammadi library to make their way into the hands of most religious scholars and the public at large; this book describes the history of the codices and then offers a summation of important themes and ideas expressed in those documents.I was primarily interested in this book for its discussion of the mysterious discovery of the codices and the excessive delay involved in imparting the contents of these highly important writings to the world. More information has become available on these subjects in the years since Dart's book, but his discussion of historical archaeology at work and the vicissitudes of gaining access to invaluable artifacts in Egypt during an era of periodic warfare and frequent government turmoil prove very interesting. Dart spends some time discussing theories on the origins of Gnosticism, devoting a good deal of time to evidence of Judaism's influence on the movement. Interestingly, he never really describes the Gnostics as on offshoot of Christianity, but of course there was much research still to be done when he wrote this book. Dart then goes on to discuss a number of themes and issues addressed in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. These consist mainly of the more controversial ideas contained within the material - alternate takes on the creation story and the Great Flood, arguments that Israel's God was actually a false god and that the serpent in Eden was actually an agent of the supreme deity, references to statements of Jesus that are not recorded in the New Testament (much of which consisted of "secret" knowledge), and theological arguments that go to the heart of Gnosticism. Dart was not a theologian but a religion news reporter, so this is a book written primarily for laymen rather than scholars - it is in fact one of the first of its kind to address the subject of these ancient texts. Of further help for readers, especially at that particular time when the full texts had not yet been published in translation, was an appendix, written by James Brashler, consisting of a summary of each of the ancient codices discovered at Nag Hammadi. The title of this book, I might add, is taken from one of the more controversial aspects of these Gnostic texts. At least some Gnostics did not believe Jesus really died on the cross - instead, they believed Jesus separated his spiritual self from his physical body at that time, and a