Are there any parallels to the Gnostic Gospels or the New Testament Apocrypha in other Abrahamic religions?

by HunterSThompson_72
nottheprinceofwales

Someone is baiting me here, I just know it.

For brevity’s sake, we’ll call Abrahamic religions (a) Christianity, (b) Judaism, and (c) Islam, although there are offshoots of each that can still fall under that umbrella. As far as parallelism goes, the first thing you have to understand about the Gnostic gospels are that they’re not all specifically “Christian," for the most part, unless you’re looking at the Valentinian school (or the school of D. Judas Thomas). Valentinianism, as the name implies, was the school founded by Valentinus, who was in the running to be bishop of Rome at one point, and it was definitely Christian; of the four-ish broad schools of gnostic thought, his was definitely the closest to what you’d call orthodox Pauline Christianity. Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures and Petrement’s A Separate God have a lot of useful information on this school. The main Valentinian myths, the "Gospel of Truth” for the Western branch and the "Tripartite Tractate” for the Eastern, are what I’ll assume you mean by Christian apocrypha, along with the Gnostic Gospel of Didymus Judas Thomas (henceforth just “Gospel of Thomas").

Thomas is another school of Gnostic thought entirely; it centers around a list of stuff Jesus supposedly said—the aforementioned “Gospel of Thomas." It’s definitely apocryphal and in some places downright inscrutable; Meyer’s section in his anthology of Gnostic scriptures covers this nicely. I’m quoting here from page 780:

Central to the scriptures of Thomas Christianity is the role of Judas Thomas as twin [to Jesus Christ], and in the literature the concept of the twin not only is descriptive of the family connections between Jesus and Judas, but also functions as a metaphor for the relationship between a person and the spiritual counterpart of the person—Jesus or one’s heavenly alter ego. Such an emphasis upon the twin is prominent in Gnostic literature, especially among Valentinians, and also in Manichaean texts, but Judas as Twin is already present in the earliest of the documents of Thomas Christianity, the Gospel of Thomas, the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II.

Preliminaries out of the way, that leaves two schools to deal with, and two Abrahamic religions to cover. Broadly speaking, I’m talking about Sethians/Barbelognostics and Hermetic Gnostics.

For both of those, there’s not a whole lot to single them out as “Christian” apocrypha; if anything, I’d say that the Sethians (shortened to save time and carpal tunnels) work harder to subvert the Old Testament (which is Judaic) than anything else; they’re the stereotypical “kooky Gnostics” your mommy warned you about. By “mommy,” I mean Epiphanius, who’d have you believe they eat babies. (Sources available.)

The focus for the Sethians is on the “holy seed of Seth,” and “those who are worthy,” and on Seth’s status (Seth being the sperma heteron born to Adam and Eve in Gen. 4:25) as the transmitter of the original, authentic image of Adam—who, in turn, was the bearer of the most authentic image of the true divine. Here’s Turner in the same anthology I quoted above on Sethians/Barbelos:

…a number of recurrent mythological features that Schenke considers to form a core doctrine or myth on the basis of which one may characterize a document as “Sethian:” the self-understanding of their readers as the spiritual “seed” (descendants) of Seth, who is also their heavenly-earthly savior, and a supreme trinity consisting of the Father (Invisible Spirit), the Mother (Barbelo), and the Child (Autogenes), who in turn establish four luminaries…often conceived as the dwelling places of the heavenly Adam, Seth, and the seed of Seth, the last of whom is responsible for the appearance of Sophia [Wisdom] and, through her, for the material world and its evil fashioner and ruler Yaldabaoth/Sakla/Samael and his demonic powers, who try to destroy the seed of Seth by flood and fire but are thwarted by the Mother’s saving interventions…

Tl;dr of that: There’s nothing super Christian about it, and I’d argue that it’s more a subversion of Judaic scripture than of Christianity; the main Sethian myth, the “Secret Book (or Apocryphon) of John,” is a gorgeous symphony of not making sense which contains a maximum of two references to “Jesus:” the character of the “Savior,” who could be pretty much anyone, but “swter [savior]” was one of the epithets applied to Jesus historically; and the colophon at the end, which says only, “Jesus Christ, Amen.” The shorter versions than the one I’m looking at (in Meyer’s anthology; the shorter ones are in Berlin Gnostic 8502 and NHC III) don’t have that colophon at all.

Hermetics I’m just skipping to save time. No one needs to willingly venture into that labyrinth. Mahé has a good paper on them.

Moving on, I suppose I’ve covered approximately two Abrahamic religions. The third, Islam, starts up much later (the 600s CE), coming into its own as an empire about a hundred years after the death of the Prophet (pbuh).

As far as Islamic apocrypha and mystical sects go, I’d point first to the Sufis because those are the coolest. My sample text here is going to be Attar’s Conference of the Birds, which is a lengthy and very entertaining poem on achieving enlightenment, which uses as a poetic device the presentation of various types of humans as birds.

Some preliminaries to Islamic mysticism:

There are three aspects to Islam as a religion: islam, which concerns worship; iman, which concerns faith; and ihsan, which deals with the inner dimension of the individual’s relationship to God. The third, ihsan, is explained by the Prophet as “worshipping Allah as if you see him; for even if you cannot manage this, be sure that he sees you.” Tasawwuf is the Islamic science of ihsan; it is the science, as fiqh is to law, of the inner dimension of religion. The standard English translation of tasawwuf is Sufism.

Sufism, Islamic mysticism, bases itself around the belief that an intense love of God (Allah) is the heart of religion, and that the absolute peak experience of a human life, the goal which should be striven for, is some kind of direct contact with the divine. Sound familiar? The methods of achieving said acquaintance are recorded and transmitted by spiritual teachers (sheikhs). Methods vary in the gritty details, but the idea is to reduce one’s attachment to one’s material self through (a) purification, (b) remembrance of God (dhikr), and (c) asceticism. (More on this in the intro to the Penguin Classics ed. of COTB.)

The birds in Attar’s mystical poem journey to the Simorgh with the guidance of the wisest among them, a bird called the Hoopoe (who has the bism-Allah written on his beak); this is an analog of the journey of the soul of the Sufi to Allah, and all the problems and trials faced by each bird relate to the difficulties of the Sufi’s path. Attar conveys through metaphor the approach of the ecstatic school of Islamic mystics; he praises it and advocates it, exhorting readers to seek direct acquaintance with Allah.

All of the apocrypha I’ve mentioned share a standard moth-to-flame trope; in the broadest sense, any text with a reference to the Abrahamic God and some sense of yearning for a personal, specialized acquaintance with the divine can be seen as “gnostic” or “apocryphal.” Whether that connection is facilitated by lineage, some innate quality (as the gnostikoi), or asceticism and devout prayer, it’s all the same desire.

Edit: Formatting, clarity.