Gospel of Philip · 4 of 13 · tr. Thomas O. Lambdin
Section 1d
When the child is grown, however, then the father turns over all he possesses.
THE LOST Those who have gone astray are those born of the spirit.
And they are usually lost because of the spirit.
So from one single breath of spirit the fire blazes and is blackened.
WISDOM AND THE WISDOM OF DEATH Echamoth is one thing and Echmoth another.
Echamoth is simply wisdom, but Echmoth is the wisdom of death, who is the one who knows death, who is called little wisdom.
DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND BEASTS Domestic animals may be the bull and the donkey and other species.
Others are wild and live in the deserts.
A man plows the field with a domestic animal, and from the fruit of his labor he feeds himself and the animals, tame or wild.
Compare the perfect human.
Through submissive powers he plows and prepares for everything to come into being.
So his world holds together, good or evil, the right and the left.
The holy spirit shepherds everyone and rules all the powers, those tame and wild and running loose.
He gathers them and shuts them in so, like it or not, they cannot escape.
CAIN The one who has been created is beautiful, and you would expect his sons to be noble creations.
If one was not created but engendered, you would find his seed was noble, but now he was created and he engendered.
Is this nobility?
Adultery came into being, then murder.
One was engendered in adultery, since he was the child of the serpent.
So like his father he too became a murderer and killed his brother.
Every sexual act between unlike persons is adultery.
GOD IS A DYER God is a dyer.
The good dyes, true dyes, dissolve into things dyed in them.
So too for things god has dyed.
His dyes are imperishable because of their colors.
What god dips he dips in water.
SEEING It is impossible to see anything in the real realm unless you become it.
Not so in the world.
You see the sun without being the sun, see sky and earth but are not them.
This is the truth of the world.
In the other truth you are what you see.
If you see spirit, you are spirit.
If you look at the anointed, you are the anointed.
If you see the father, you will be father.
In this world you see everything but yourself, but there, you look at yourself and are what you see.
FAITH AND LOVE Faith receives, love gives.
No one receives without faith.
No one gives without love.
To receive, believe; to love, give.
If you give without love, no one derives a thing from what is given.
Whoever has not accepted the lord is still a Jew.
NAMES OF JESUS The messengers who were before us had these names for him: Jesus, the Nazorean, messiah, that is, Jesus, the Nazorean, the Christ.
The last name is Christ, the first is Jesus, the middle name is the Nazarene.
Messiah has two meanings, both “Christ” and “measured.” Jesus in Hebrew is “redemption.” Nazara is “truth.” Christ has been measured.
The Nazarene and Jesus are they who have been measured.
PEARL IN THE MUD If a pearl is thrown into mud, it loses no value, and if rubbed with balsam oil, it gains no value.
It always is precious in its owner’s eyes.
Wherever they are, the children of god are precious in the eyes of the father.
JEW, ROMAN, GREEK, CHRISTIAN If you say, “I am a Jew,” no one will be moved.
The transformation of base substance — outer matter or the inner soul — into a purified, perfected, or 'gold' state; the magnum opus as both laboratory practice and spiritual allegory.
God is described as a dyer whose imperishable dyes dissolve into things, mirroring alchemical transformation.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
The holy spirit is said to shepherd everyone and rule all powers, gathering them so they cannot escape.
The Gnostic myth of Wisdom's prolapse from the Pleroma — her unilateral desire or error producing the Demiurge and the entrapment of divine sparks in matter.
The distinction between Echamoth (Wisdom) and Echmoth (Wisdom of Death) reflects the Gnostic myth of Wisdom's error or fall.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
The perfect human is said to plow and prepare for everything to come into being so his world holds together.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
The Lost are described as those born of the spirit who are usually lost because of the spirit.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
The text asserts that seeing the anointed makes one the anointed and seeing the father makes one the father, describing a process of becoming divine.
The 1 Enoch narrative in which a class of originally-good angelic beings (the Watchers) descends, mates with women, and teaches forbidden arts — the substrate that Gnostic archons inherits and inverts: archons are born malevolent, the Watchers fall through transgression.
The narrative of Cain being engendered in adultery as the child of the serpent mirrors the mythos of fallen beings introducing corruption.