ESSENTIAL GNOSTIC SCRIPTURES

The people weÆve come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the centuries with remarkable power and beautyùbeginning with texts from the earliest years of Christianityùincluding material from the Nag Hammadi libraryùand continuing all the way up to expressions of gnostic wisdom found within Islam and in the Cathar movement of the Middle Ages. The twenty-one texts included here serve as a compact introduction to Gnosticism and its principal ideasùand they also provide an entrTe to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.