The Treatise on Resurrection: Thoughts
This treatise is in the Nag Hammadi. It's a mish-mash but worth reading to affirm thoughts and spark pondering on the Resurrection.
The Treatise on Resurrection: an interesting take on what the Resurrection is. In a way, this letter might have been the progenitor of the idea of resurrecting one’s life on Earth before death — although it also refers to the Resurrection in the traditional sense. What a mish-mash!
The author takes a bit from Paul, a bit from Jesus, and goes wildly off the rails.
I first read this treatise letter when I wrote my Resurrection play in 2019. I remembered zip when I flipped to it early this month. I’d read it originally only a year after I’d completed the Lindamood-Bell course to restore my reading comprehension after brain injury and I’d received a couple of vaccines that did quite a nice number on my cognitions for awhile.
Three weeks ago, I opened the Nag Hammadi. My brain said nuh-uh. Crashing concentration headache.
I tried again to read the treatise as part of last week’s November 7-day writing sprint shake-it-up Saturday.
Sun streamed in through the window. I slouched in a comfy chair. I parked the Nag Hammadi tome on a cushion at eye level. I wrote my thoughts on Post-its and stuck them on the pages.
These Post-it thoughts follow. Some sparked new ideas. Some will go into my novel: the second book in The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy, The Soul’s Reckoning. I already like the idea of using the moniker “the Kind One” for Jesus. According to the editors’ note in the Nag Hammadi, the word “pekhrēstos” may be understood as “the kind one.”
The Treatise on Resurrection is divided into sections with titles.
The Letter to Rheginus (43,25—44,3)
“Many do not believe in [resurrection] and few find it, so let us discuss it in our treatise.”
Right away, the Treatise’s author is off on a tangent.
Since we cannot know what people find out during death and the afterlife—even with the glimpses that near-death experiences give us or what the terminally ill close to death see and say—this statement implies the author believes that it’s the living who find resurrection.
Jesus and church history make it clear the Resurrection happens after life after death. Yet the Gospel of Matthew records an intriguing event:
“Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.” Matt 27:52
Asleep was a metaphor for death. These raised people had been long dead, probably longer than Lazarus had been. Matthew didn’t record any other Resurrections while Jesus walked the earth in his Resurrected form. We can only speculate how and why these particular people were. In any case, during ordinary life, us ordinary mortal humans are not raised.
Christ as Son of God and Son of Humanity (44,3—39)
“While he was in flesh and after he revealed himself as Son of God, he went about in this world where you live and spoke about the law of nature, which I call death.”
I thought about the “law of nature” as the author defined it. I pondered our assumption that death is part of that law. Before Adam and Eve ate of the fruit and received knowledge of good and evil, death was not part of their creation. They lived, were alive, and would have kept living if they had not eaten from that tree. So is death a law of nature?
Or was death introduced, a kind of if/then code in God’s creation program? And death is, in fact, an abomination to the law of nature?
Alternatively, God knew that Adam and Eve would eat that fruit and had prepared this code—the code of death—to become part of God’s creation program. Resurrection will close death’s if/then code. Death entered the program after it had begun; Resurrection will end that code while the main program carries on.
I know, I know, I’m using computer language instead of novelling language. Mixing my metaphors, like Paul did. And the Treatise’s author does.
For me, this line of thinking opens up ideas for my resurrection trilogy. Would the idea that death is not a law of nature work better in novels two and three of The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy? Does church doctrine or the Bible or Gathas support that idea? Something to mull over.
“[Jesus] embraced both aspects, humanity and divinity, so that by being a son of God he might conquer death, and by being a son of humanity fullness might be restored.”
I’m not sure what the author meant by fullness, but the rest of this accords with the New Testament. Because it does, the reader may find themself seduced by the rest of the Treatise and veering wildly off course like the author did.
The Resurrection of Christ (44,39—45,23); The Resurrection of the Believer (45,23—46,2); Thought and Mind Will Not Perish (46,19—47,1)
“The Savior swallowed death. You must know this. When he laid aside the perishable world, he exchanged it for an incorruptible eternal realm. He arose and swallowed the visible through the invisible, and thus he granted us the way to our immortality.
“As the aspostle [Paul] said of him, we suffered with him, we arose with him, we ascended with him.
“From the Savior we radiate like beams of light, and we are sustained by him until our sunset, our death in this life. We are drawn upward by him, like rays by the sun, and nothing holds us down. This is the resurrection of the spirit, which swallows the resurrection of the soul and the resurrection of the flesh.
“The thought of believers will not perish and the mind of those who know will not perish.”
Wow. How does one image the swallowing? And talk about swinging between well-established doctrine and fanciful takes on Paul’s metaphors.
“When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’” Paul in 1 Cor 15:54-55
You can see where the author got the idea of swallowing.
But there’s a broken bridge between the image of victory swallowing death and the confusing image of swallowing matter through energy. And the even stranger idea of one resurrection swallowing other resurrections. I mean, where did the author get the idea there’s more than one type of resurrection??!
The Study Bible Notes say that Jesus’s resurrection reversed Satan’s apparent victories in the Garden of Eden and Jesus’s crucifixion. Satan introduced death, and Jesus ended it. Of course, we know from the Book of Job that Satan cannot do anything without God allowing it (and no, we’re not going into that can of worms here — read my ebook on the Book of Job instead!).
Imperishable Mind
Thoughts and minds won’t perish. They will persist beyond our mortal deaths. The Treatise author accords with the New Testament in that, even if they restrict it to believers and knowers of Christ. In my trilogy, God wants to save all their children, every last human being. I think more and more people are coming to see that was Christ’s intent. Perhaps the change in thinking is a reaction to the hateful speechifying blowing around.
The author correctly refers to Paul’s assertions about dying, rising, and ascending with Jesus Christ. Maybe this is why some swallow the confusing fantastical elements in between. I mean, when you can’t image the metaphors of resurrection swallowing resurrections and of swallowing the visible through invisible, then you might be inclined to think this is so brilliant, maybe that’s why I can’t understand it.
It’s confusing because it makes no sense.
Soul, Spirit, Mind
I once asked a man with a Ph.D. in divinity what the difference was between spirit, soul, and mind. He had no ready answer. I left our conversation as confused as ever. I feel like the author here is interchanging soul with mind and then changes his mind. The editors explained the author’s thrust this way:
“When the Savior later rose from the dead, he also freed himself from the body he had put on when he descended into the world and became once more a purely spiritual being. During this process, he ‘swallowed’ the entire visible world: it was revealed as nothing.
“Because the Savior assumed the physical existence of humans, they on their part acquired access to his spiritual form of being. This is their spiritual resurrection.”
Say what now?
The author wrote in What Is the Resurrection? (47,30—48,19):
“…do not think that the resurrection is an illusion. It is no illusion. It is truth. It is more appropriate to say that the world is illusion rather than the resurrection.”
Off the rails and hurtling into Plato’s philosophy. Plato held we live in an illusion and reality exists elsewhere. The chair I’m sitting on, the keyboard I’m typing on, are only copies of reality. I’ll never forget my Grade 9 Classical Civilizations teacher shaking my classmate’s desk to make this point. He was wild! The 40-ouncer in his desk drawer helped, I’m sure. But I digress…
Jesus didn’t “put on” flesh and blood. He was conceived and born that way. Flesh and Love met and conceived him. The metaphor of Jesus putting on flesh like one dons clothing can deceive a literal minded person. Paul’s metaphor of the imperishable clothing the perishable works better as an image of the Resurrection.
Jesus didn’t return as a spirit. He returned in a form that Mary could see and grab onto, that Thomas could touch. Yet his form comprised a different kind of matter, a kind that turns to energy and vanishes only to change back to matter somewhere else. When others scoff, I ask, How?
That’s a question I’m trying to answer in The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy, starting with The Soul’s Awakening.
I’ve been thinking about the physics of it for years, ever since my brain injury had me experience the separation of my mind from my brain, my consciousness from my identity. The research and case reports of terminal lucidity also cause me to ask, HOW?!
How does a mind express itself through a severely damaged brain for minutes or hours or days just before death?
Autopsies show no reversal in the damage. How do those near end of life, without neurological impairment, see dead people? How do babies born without a cortex show personality and conscious thought? (This last I learned about during my Philosophy of Mind course at Oxford University over a decade ago.)
Flesh and Spirit
The author says under Flesh and Spirit (47,1-30), “What is better than flesh is what animates the flesh.”
On the one hand, the author is advocating we are essentially spirit beings. On the other hand, near-death experiences, brain injury, terminal lucidity put credence to the idea that there is something else going on that animates the flesh and that, although the flesh usually contains it and limits it, it can sometimes punch through.
For me, that’s mind. There may be a revealing seed within the author’s nonsense.
That’s why it’s important to think critically about passages like these instead of dismissing them immediately. Don’t be seduced but neither ignore. Instead, ask.
Is mind a particle or wave like photons are?
Somehow, neither seems to fit for me. I’ve recently conceptualized something else. I’ll put it in my novels.
I’ve mined The Treatise on Resurrection as much as I want to. I can ignore most of it. I like the idea of referring to Christ as “the Kind One.” The law of nature regarding death leads me to think more on God’s Creation and plan. And then there’s mind. I refuse to cogitate further on the difference between spirit, soul, and mind. There’s no answer because I think most of us don’t have a clue. Some try to make it sound like they have when they use these terms as if they’re separate entities. What do you think?