In my Sunday School class we are studying a book called The Other Gospels, which is a collection of Gnostic texts, discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. This week our text was The Dialogue of the Savior, and it was quite interesting. One thing that was really interesting is that there are some pages where there are more ellipses [...] than there are words, due to the state of the manuscripts when they were found. What’s also interesting, is that sometimes there are very obvious passages in the text that lead one to understand why these books were excluded from the canon, and were marked from destruction by the early orthodox church.
So what does this have to do with being prepared? Well, as I was reading the text last night, I was frustrated by the amount of text that was not there, again, caused by the state of the document when found. I ended up finding another English translation of the text, which had lacunas in different places from the other translation; in other words, in some places it was more “complete” than the one I had, and in others, it was less complete…. I ended up reading them in parallel; I would read a few sentences from the translation in the book, then read the same bits from the other translation, and then compare and contrast. It ended up taking me about two hours to get through the 8 pages, but I think reading it in this way was a better experience.
So what does that have to do with being prepared? Well, I’ll tell you. As we began our class this morning, our leader said that while he had read the text, he had not had time to do any preparation for class, because he had been at a conference all week. So I said “Well, not to usurp anything… but I brought in a whole bunch of research that I could share.” The class was happy with that, and I ended up leading for the whole hour. We didn’t finish, so we will be picking up where we left off next week.
These texts are really fascinating as they give a different view of the early church. Sometimes it’s easy to see why the orthodox church shunned these texts, but other times it’s not so easy. Regardless, it’s an interesting study.
