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  While thinking about the conference, I suddenly realized that although the sources in the New Testament often marginalize women and minimize their roles, the secret gospels and other texts found in Egypt—some, especially—abound in feminine images, even for God. None of my male colleagues had noticed this, and I hadn’t either, until I had been asked to confront the question. The Secret Revelation of John, for example, opens as the disciple John, devastated by Jesus’s death, goes out into the desert alone to grieve, when suddenly “the whole creation shone with light, and the world was shaken.” Terrified, John says he heard Jesus’s voice speaking from that light, saying, “John, John, why do you weep? Don’t you know that I am with you always? I am the Father; I am the Mother, and I am the Son!” Suddenly, I thought, “Of course—who else would you expect to find with the father and son but the mother?” Anyone reading the Bible in Hebrew would see that the words “spirit” (Ruah) and “wisdom” (Hokmah) are feminine, and might easily envision the spirit, or wisdom, as feminine aspects of God—divine mother. Furthermore, nearly two thousand years ago, Bishop Irenaeus denounced “heretics” who, he complained, were teaching people in his congregation to pray “in the name of the unknown Father, and in the name of Truth, the Mother of all being.” As I began to piece together the evidence, the hidden contours of censored forms of Christianity were taking shape.

  So when asking, “What difference does it make how we imagine God?” I realized that Israel’s god was an anomaly—a single male god, who, unlike other male gods among his contemporaries, had no feminine partner, as in Egypt, where Isis and Hathor were worshipped along with Ra and Horus, or in Greece or Rome, where Zeus and Jupiter were paired with divine wives, sisters, and lovers, like Hera and Juno. And while many Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians say they don’t think of God in sexual terms at all, the language in which they pray and worship every day sends the opposite message. Who, raised as a Jew, Christian, or Muslim, escapes the impression that God is masculine? Even when Jesus’s followers broke with Jewish tradition to speak of one God in “three persons,” they pictured two of those divine “persons”—Father and Son—as masculine, and the third, the Spirit, as sexless, since in their language, Greek, the word “spirit,” feminine in Hebrew, is gendered neuter (pneuma), and later was translated into Latin as the masculine word spiritus.

  Fascinated with what now was becoming obvious, I agreed to speak at the Women’s Conference at Barnard. To my delight, on the day it began, Heinz showed up, one of a handful of men amid thousands of women, wearing a huge WONDER WOMAN button that someone at the meeting had given him. I told stories from the secret texts—for example, telling how startled God was when his mother, the Spirit, divine Wisdom, scolded him for showing off:

  Becoming arrogant in spirit, [he] boasted over everything below him, saying, “I am father, and God, and there is no one above me!” But when he said this, he sinned against the whole of being. And a voice came forth from above—the voice of his mother, divine Wisdom!—saying, “You are mistaken, Samael,” [that is, “blind god”]. “Do not tell lies!”

  Two thousand women roared with laughter, then listened intently as the Secret Book of John went on to tell how “the Blessed One, the Mother-Father, the blessed and merciful one . . . sent . . . a helper to Adam, the luminous Epinoia [‘creative intelligence’] who comes forth from him, who is called Life [Eve]—the one who is to awaken his thinking.”

  Texts like the Secret Book sometimes turn traditional readings of the biblical story upside down. Certain rabbis, playing on a pun in Hebrew between “Eve” and the word “teacher,” blamed Eve for teaching Adam to sin, and pictured the Lord scolding her, saying, “The serpent was your serpent, and you were Adam’s serpent”; but some of the Nag Hammadi texts see her instead as Adam’s spiritual teacher. The Testimony of Truth tells how “divine intelligence” first spoke to Adam through Eve, and then through the serpent, encouraging the first man and woman to eat from the tree of knowledge, so that they could break free from the tyranny of the Lord, the garden’s master, who’d threatened them with death, and threw them out of Eden. So, this author concludes, “What kind of God is this? Surely he has shown himself to be a malicious envier!” Some versions of this story insist that it was not the Lord God, as the Genesis story suggests, but his evil underlings who punished Eve by establishing male domination, telling her that “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

  Conference participants clapped and shouted, all of us surprised that the anonymous authors of these previously unknown texts had challenged traditional gender roles thousands of years before we’d begun to do so ourselves. Yet even then, some “orthodox” Christians pushed back hard. The second-century African convert Tertullian, echoing Bishop Irenaeus, warned that women are especially attracted to heresy—dangerously so, he said, because it encourages them to defy male authority. In his Prescription Against Heretics, he writes:

  These heretical women—how audacious they are! They have no modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to practice exorcism, to enact healing, and, it may be, even to baptize!

  Enthusiasm and laughter showed that we’d hit a raw nerve. Probably every woman participating had experienced men’s efforts to suppress her and impose the male domination that biblical stories often endorse. Unexpectedly, then, this dive into the sources had plunged us into social history, showing that precisely because the creation stories are old folktales, they effectively communicate cultural values that taught us to “act like women.” Besides revealing how such traditions pressure us to act, these stories also taught us to accept the role of women as “the second sex,” a phrase that Tertullian coined in the second century. The same Christian leaders whose scriptures censor feminine images of God campaigned to exclude women from positions of leadership, often hammering on the Bible’s divine sanction of men’s right to rule—views that most Christians have endorsed for thousands of years, and many still do.

  My experience at the conference changed my perspective. At Harvard, we’d been told that controversies over heresy were arguments over conflicting ideas. But now that I’d seen how issues of sexuality and gender—or of any ideas that matter—are inextricably interwoven with how we live, what we choose, and how we set up a society, the history of ideas opened up, so to speak, into three dimensions. Those who struggled to shape the early Christian movement were contending with urgent and practical questions: Who’s in charge? Whose authority do we accept? Can women lead, or only men? If arrested for being a Christian, should you admit it and accept a sentence of death, or dodge the question and survive? To what group, if any, do you belong? With which group do you identify? Who chose the gospels now included in the New Testament, and why? Who’s in, who’s out—and who has the right to say?

  Now that the people whom traditionally minded scholars dismissed as “the crazies” could speak for themselves, we could include their voices in the conversation. From now on, instead of writing primarily about ideas, I’d have to show how ideas are inseparably woven into actual social codes, and so into behavior. Although no one, so far as I knew, had ever read these sources that way, now I had to, and so began the research that eventually would lead to the book I wanted to write.

  To my delight, Heinz shared my enthusiasm. While writing his own book, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature, he joked that we should write a book together, scrambling our titles—either “The Cosmic Gospels” or “The Gnostic Code.” I realized then, even more now, how much I owe to this loving, openhearted man. I started by doing what I learned in graduate school: writing a set of scholarly articles for academic journals. But because our friends would never read those, Heinz encouraged me to do more. Why not rewrite those scholarly articles—translate them, so to speak—into accessible language, so that people who aren’t scholars could see how these secret gospels are changing everything we used to think or thought we knew?

  When I did, I was a
mazed that Jason Epstein, a brilliant editor but no fan of religion, found the story intriguing and decided to take a chance on it. He arranged to publish it at Random House, after excerpts first appeared in The New York Review of Books. Having already published two scholarly books in the formal academic style I’d learned at Harvard, I now began to consider the questions raised at the Barnard conference and say what I actually thought in the book that became The Gnostic Gospels.

  Excited and nervous, I knew that the book would be controversial—and it was. Immediately a review appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, written by Raymond Brown, a renowned senior colleague and biblical scholar. After opening with cautious praise for my reputation, since he knew me as a colleague and had invited me to participate in writing a book with him and others, he attacked the secret gospels, declaring that since they were only rubbish in the first century, and were still rubbish, what I’d written could only deceive the public! Next, my mentor at Oxford, Henry Chadwick, a prominent Anglican professor and clergyman, wrote a strongly worded attack in the London Review of Books, repeating what the church fathers had said thousands of years ago, that Gnostics were essentially not Christian at all. He finished with scolding words the Bible attributes to the apostle Paul—that women, weaker than men and less rational, are easily seduced by heresy. A third colleague, Joseph Fitzmyer, published “The Gospel According to Pagels” in the Jesuit journal America—an attack so mocking and vituperative that other colleagues urged me to sue him for libel.

  After those first attacks and several enthusiastic positive reviews, buckets of mail arrived, packed with letters of intense appreciation, and others seething with hate, threatening hell and damnation. I stuffed them together into a large cardboard box, which I later misplaced and never found. To my surprise, the sensation that the book caused helped release me from worrying about what others would say, since neither the praise nor blame mattered as much as I had imagined they would—and mattered far less than finding my own voice.

  During the Barnard conference, Sharon Olds, a close friend from Stanford, introduced me to Elizabeth Diggs, a playwright then completing her doctoral dissertation in Columbia’s English Department. Since we all loved to dance, the three of us met every week, first with a dance teacher, then by ourselves at Lizzie’s downtown studio, to explore improvisational dance, an ongoing, intricate conversation in movement. As our friendship grew, I became aware that I felt erotically attracted to Lizzie, who spoke openly about relationships with both men and women. Married and divorced twice in her twenties, she now declared herself bisexual, and was living with a woman she loved. While this attraction held no threat either to my marriage or to our friendship, even acknowledging it made me uncomfortable. Yet I knew—hadn’t we all read Freud?—that such feelings were virtually universal. Why had I, or any of us, unthinkingly accepted what didn’t make sense, and contradicted our own experience? How, I wondered, had sexual attitudes about marriage, divorce, homosexuality, and abortion that we’d grown up with—all of them now rapidly changing—been made to feel as natural as if they’d been built into the structure of the universe? How had we not been aware of how culturally conditioned those attitudes are? What happened at the Women’s Conference offered some clues; travel in Africa would soon suggest more.

  Shortly after The Gnostic Gospels was published, those of us working on the secret gospels eagerly accepted an invitation to participate in the first international conference on Coptic studies in Cairo. Despite the sagging metal mattress frames and the rats scampering through our rooms on cement floors at night at the Garden City House hotel, we got up early to go to the Coptic Museum. There, for the first time, we were excited to see what we’d known only from photos: the actual texts, startlingly beautiful, written in black ink on papyrus, golden brown as tobacco leaves, so fragile that they’d been pressed between sheets of plastic to keep them from shattering. The next day we drove to the village in Upper Egypt where a team of archaeologists, working with men from the village, were excavating a large monastic compound—the site of one of the earliest monasteries built in Egypt, around 315 CE. Monks from that monastery may have been the ones who hid the “secret books” denounced by the bishop, taking them out of their sacred library, carefully sealing them into a six-foot jar, and hiding the jar where Mohammed Ali, the villager who claimed to have discovered it, said he found it, buried under a nearby mountain honeycombed with caves. For millennia, Egyptians had buried the dead in those caves, where, centuries later, monks would retreat to pray and meditate. Even now, nearly two thousand years later, when entering a large cave, I could read the first line of a psalm (“I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, whence comes my help”), which someone, likely a monk, had written on the wall in large Coptic letters, to prompt those who retreated there to pray and recite the psalm they would have known by heart.

  When Arab workmen took time off from the dig to celebrate the holy days of Ramadan, we took a taxi down to the Valley of the Kings, descending from blazing sunlight into the cool of the tombs, marveling at a painting of the divine Isis spreading her protective wings across the ceiling, and another of the goddess Nut, her dark body spangled with stars, bending over the night sky. Toward evening, on the way back to the sugar factory where we were staying, military police blocked the road and ordered us to stop. That afternoon, a decades-long blood feud between families on opposite sides of the road had erupted into machine-gun firefights, which had already damaged several cars. We returned to Luxor, where our director negotiated with the police, offering several cartons of Marlboros and a bottle of Johnnie Walker, then contraband in Egypt. A few hours later, the mayor of Luxor provided us with a military escort, machine guns at the ready, pointing out the taxi windows. As we got closer to the crowds by the roadside, terrified by the shouting and gunshots, I dived to the floor of the car, greatly amusing my male colleagues, who insisted that they loved the adventure, and have joked about it ever since.

  As the conference concluded with a lavish dinner given by members of the Coptic community, and hosted by the stately, black-bearded Coptic pope, Shenouda III, Heinz arrived, and we flew together to Israel. In Jerusalem, after attending meetings of the Einstein Centennial in the Old City, and seeing colleagues at the Hebrew University, we drove to the Weitzmann Institute to drive with Heinz’s physicist friends into the Sinai desert. Traveling in army jeeps by day, and camping at night under brilliant stars, we reached Mount Sinai, where biblical legend says Moses saw the burning bush and received the Torah from the Lord himself. Near camps where Bedouins were cooking lentils and roasting lamb, monks from the ancient monastery of Saint Catherine still preside over what they say is the oldest Greek monastery in the world, built among the red rocks below the mountain.

  Since we were on our way to Africa, friends in Jerusalem asked us to bring gifts to children of a friend of theirs, a Sudanese woman whose husband had died in a car accident in Cambridge while she was completing her law degree. Now a distinguished professor of law at the University of Khartoum, she invited us to lunch at the faculty club, while her uncle and brother sat silently at our table. We were startled to hear her explain that although she was not a strict Muslim, Sharia law would not allow her to host a male visitor, even accompanied by his wife, without male relatives present. There, too, we met with Francis Deng, a tall, elegant man, then minister of state for foreign affairs of Sudan, who showed us a book he’d written as a student at King’s College London, a collection of stories traditional among his people, the Dinka. What impressed me most about Dinka creation stories was how practical they are: they show people how to live, what matters, what to do, and what to avoid.

  Weeks later, emerging from many days of camping near the Uganda border, dreaming of hot showers, we enjoyed the luxury of a night’s stay at the Khartoum Hilton, where, in the lobby, I found a worn copy of Time magazine, and read it from cover to cover. What fascinated me most were letters to the editor protesting a previous lead story on
bisexuality in America. To my surprise, four out of six of those letters invoked the Genesis creation story to prove that only heterosexuality is “natural” and “right.” Reading them right after the Dinka stories, I began to see that what my father had dismissed as foolish old folktales are not, as he assumed, simply “science for dummies”—stories that “primitives” tell to explain the creation of the natural world. Instead, creation stories help create the cultural world, by transmitting traditional values. And although I hadn’t been brought up to take the Genesis stories literally, the discomfort I’d felt acknowledging any attraction for a woman showed me that I’d absorbed, quite unconsciously, the cultural messages the Adam and Eve stories have conveyed for thousands of years. On the flight back to New York, I kept wondering, Why do people continue to tell such stories to this day? What do these stories mean to them?

  After we arrived back in New York, as our taxi passed activists picketing Saint Patrick’s Cathedral to protest Catholic opposition to homosexuality, the driver turned to us and said, “You know, as I see it, God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” Yes, we did know. Amazing, I thought—a bad joke, but one that shows how this story still works as a cultural Rorschach test, to which countless people, religious or not, reflexively turn when they encounter something that makes them uncomfortable. For creation stories claim to tell how the world was meant to be, or how it should be—how it was in the beginning. Now I was eager to explore how, for thousands of years, various people have read this story that explains so little and suggests so much: the Lord plants a special garden, where he places a naked man and woman, newly made; luscious fruit that can make you wise or kill you; then the garden’s master threatens them with death if they touch it, while a talking snake urges them on.