Paraphrase of Shem

Introduction

In December of 1945, a young Egyptian farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for fertilizer near the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif, not far from the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. His mattock struck something hard beneath the soil — a sealed red earthenware jar, roughly a meter tall, buried at the base of a boulder. According to his own account, he hesitated before breaking it open, half-fearing that a djinn might be imprisoned inside. But greed and curiosity won out. He smashed the jar, and what spilled out was not a spirit but something far more extraordinary: a collection of ancient leather-bound codices, their pages made of papyrus, their texts written in Coptic, the late form of the ancient Egyptian language. He gathered them up, carried them home, and his mother reportedly used some of the pages as kindling for the household fire. The world would never be the same.

What Muhammad Ali had stumbled upon was one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the history of religion and philosophy — a library of early Christian and Gnostic texts that had been sealed and buried, most likely by monks from a nearby monastery, sometime around the late fourth century CE. Scholars believe the texts were hidden in response to a decree by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 CE, which ordered the destruction of all non-canonical writings. Someone, or a small group of someones, decided that these books were too precious to burn. They wrapped them carefully in leather, sealed them in a jar, and entrusted them to the earth. There they waited, in silence and darkness, for sixteen hundred years.

The collection that emerged from that jar — now known as the Nag Hammadi Library — contains fifty-two separate texts spanning thirteen codices. Among them are gospels, apocalypses, hymns, philosophical dialogues, and mythological narratives that present a vision of Christianity, of creation, and of the human soul radically different from anything found in the canonical New Testament. Some of these texts were known by name from the writings of early Church Fathers, who condemned them as heresy. Others were entirely unknown to the modern world. Together, they opened a window into a rich, complex, and deeply fascinating world of early religious thought that had been systematically suppressed, marginalized, and nearly destroyed.

Among the most enigmatic and philosophically dense of all these recovered texts is the one you are about to read: the document known to scholars as the Paraphrase of Shem. Found in Codex VII of the Nag Hammadi collection, it is one of the longest texts in the entire library, and also one of the most challenging. It is not a gospel in the conventional sense. It does not tell the story of Jesus in any recognizable way. It does not offer moral instruction or practical guidance for daily life. Instead, it plunges the reader immediately into a vast, swirling cosmological vision — a creation myth of extraordinary complexity and ambition, a narrative of cosmic conflict between primordial forces of Light, Darkness, and Spirit, and a revelation about the true nature of the human soul and its ultimate destiny.

The text is presented as a first-person account by a figure named Shem, who describes an experience of mystical ascent — his mind being lifted out of his body and carried upward through the layers of the cosmos by a divine revealer named Derdekeas. What follows is a revelation of staggering scope: the origins of the universe, the nature of evil, the mechanics of salvation, the hidden history of the world from its creation to its ultimate dissolution. It is a text that rewards patience and careful reading, but it also demands a kind of imaginative openness — a willingness to encounter a worldview that is genuinely alien to most modern assumptions about religion, science, and the nature of reality.

This introduction is designed to give you the context, the conceptual tools, and the orientation you need to approach this remarkable text with confidence and curiosity. We will explore the world from which it emerged, the tradition of thought it belongs to, and the key ideas and images that will guide your reading. But we will not rob you of the experience of discovery. The text itself is the destination, and everything here is meant to prepare you for that journey, not to substitute for it.

The World of the Gnostics

To understand this text, you first need to understand something about the people who wrote it and the tradition they belonged to. The word 'Gnostic' comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge — but not knowledge in the ordinary sense of accumulated facts or learned skills. Gnosis refers to a direct, experiential, transformative knowledge of divine reality. It is the knowledge of who you truly are, where you came from, and how to return. It is less like knowing a mathematical formula and more like recognizing your own face in a mirror after years of amnesia. For the Gnostics, this kind of knowledge was the only thing that truly mattered, and its attainment was the entire purpose of human existence.

Gnosticism is not a single, unified religion with a fixed creed and institutional structure. It is better understood as a family of related religious and philosophical movements that flourished in the Mediterranean world during the first several centuries of the Common Era, roughly from the first century CE through the fourth and beyond. These movements drew on an extraordinarily diverse range of sources: Jewish scripture and mysticism, Platonic philosophy, Zoroastrian dualism, Egyptian religious thought, early Christianity, and a host of other traditions. What united them was not a shared set of doctrines but a shared set of questions and a shared sensibility — a deep conviction that the visible world is not what it appears to be, that human beings are not what they appear to be, and that the path to liberation runs through knowledge rather than faith, ritual, or moral conformity.

The Gnostic movements produced an enormous body of literature, much of which was destroyed or lost in the centuries following the consolidation of orthodox Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Church Fathers — writers like Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian, Hippolytus of Rome, and Epiphanius of Salamis — wrote extensive refutations of Gnostic teaching, and these refutations are, paradoxically, one of our main sources of information about what the Gnostics actually believed. The Church Fathers quoted Gnostic texts at length, usually in order to ridicule or condemn them, but in doing so they preserved fragments and summaries that would otherwise have been entirely lost. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts gave scholars, for the first time, direct access to Gnostic writings in something approaching their original form — not filtered through the hostile lens of their opponents.

What emerges from a careful reading of these texts is a picture very different from the caricature that the Church Fathers presented. The Gnostics were not simply confused or deluded heretics. They were serious, sophisticated thinkers grappling with some of the most profound questions that human beings have ever asked: Why does evil exist in a universe created by a good God? Why do human beings feel alienated from the world and from themselves? What is the relationship between the material and the spiritual, between the body and the soul? What does it mean to be saved, and saved from what? Their answers were often startling, sometimes bizarre by conventional standards, but always intellectually serious and spiritually sincere.

Central to most Gnostic systems is a radical critique of the material world. Unlike mainstream Christianity, which affirms the essential goodness of creation ('And God saw that it was good,' as Genesis repeatedly declares), the Gnostics tended to view the material world as a prison, a mistake, or even the product of an evil or ignorant creator. This creator — often called the Demiurge, from the Greek word for craftsman — is typically identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible, or at least with a distorted, inferior version of that God. Above and beyond the Demiurge, in most Gnostic systems, there exists a higher, transcendent divine reality — the true God, the ultimate source of Light and Goodness — who is entirely different from and superior to the creator of the material world.

Human beings, in this view, are sparks of divine light that have become trapped in material bodies. The soul carries within it a fragment of the higher divine reality, but it has forgotten its true nature and origin. It is asleep, dreaming that the material world is all there is. The purpose of Gnostic teaching and practice is to awaken the soul to its true nature, to give it the knowledge it needs to navigate its way back through the layers of the cosmos to its divine source. This is gnosis: not merely intellectual understanding but a transformative awakening that changes everything.

The text you are about to encounter belongs to a particular strand of Gnostic thought that scholars sometimes call 'Sethian' Gnosticism, named after Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis. The Sethians regarded Seth as a special figure — a divine emissary, the ancestor of a chosen spiritual lineage, the one through whom true knowledge had been transmitted across the generations. Many of the most important Nag Hammadi texts belong to this tradition, including the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of the Egyptians, Zostrianos, and Allogenes. The Paraphrase of Shem is closely related to these texts, though it also has distinctive features that set it apart and make it particularly fascinating.

One of those distinctive features is its cosmological framework, which is unusually elaborate even by Gnostic standards. The text posits three primordial principles at the origin of everything: Light, Darkness, and Spirit. This triadic structure has led some scholars to see connections not only with other Gnostic texts but also with ancient Iranian religious thought, particularly Zoroastrianism, which also posits a fundamental cosmic dualism between light and darkness, good and evil. The precise nature of these connections is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate, but what is clear is that the text draws on a remarkably wide range of ancient religious and philosophical traditions, synthesizing them into a vision that is genuinely unique.

The revealer figure in the text, Derdekeas, is described as the son of the infinite Light — a divine being who descends into the cosmos repeatedly in order to rescue the light that has become trapped in matter and to reveal the knowledge that will enable souls to ascend. This pattern of divine descent and ascent, of revelation and salvation through knowledge, is one of the defining features of Gnostic religious thought, and it is expressed here with unusual vividness and imaginative power. Derdekeas is not quite like any other figure in ancient religious literature — he is both cosmic hero and intimate teacher, both transcendent divine being and present companion to the soul on its journey.

It is worth pausing here to say something about the title of this text and what it tells us about its nature. The word 'paraphrase' in the title is a translation of the Greek word paraphrasis, which in ancient usage could mean a restatement, a commentary, or an expansion of an existing text or tradition. The 'Shem' of the title is almost certainly the biblical Shem, the son of Noah, who in Jewish tradition was associated with wisdom, priesthood, and the transmission of sacred knowledge. By attributing the text to Shem, the author is placing it within a tradition of antediluvian — pre-Flood — revelation, suggesting that the knowledge contained in it is of primordial antiquity, older than the corruptions and distortions of later religious history. This was a common strategy in ancient Jewish and Gnostic literature: by attributing texts to ancient patriarchal figures, authors gave them an aura of authority and antiquity that placed them beyond ordinary criticism.

The framing of the text as a revelation received by Shem during a mystical ascent also connects it to a rich tradition of Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic literature — texts like the Book of Enoch, the Apocalypse of Abraham, and numerous others in which a human figure is taken up into the heavens and shown the secrets of the cosmos. This genre of literature was enormously popular in the ancient world, and it provided a powerful framework for communicating cosmological and theological ideas in a vivid, dramatic, and personally engaging way. The reader is not simply told about the structure of the universe in abstract terms; they are invited to experience it alongside the visionary narrator, to see what he sees and feel what he feels as the layers of reality are unveiled before him.

Reading the Light Within the Darkness

Having established something of the historical and intellectual context from which this text emerged, it is worth saying something about how to read it — not in a prescriptive sense, as if there were a single correct approach, but in a practical sense, as a guide to getting the most out of what can be a genuinely challenging reading experience. The Paraphrase of Shem is not an easy text. It is dense, repetitive, sometimes obscure, and written in a style that can feel alien to readers accustomed to modern narrative conventions. But it is also, in its own way, deeply beautiful — and the difficulty is part of the beauty. Working through its complexities is itself a kind of initiation.

The first thing to understand is that this is not a text designed primarily to convey information. It is designed to produce an experience. The repetition that can feel tedious on first encounter is often deliberate — a kind of incantatory rhythm intended to shift the reader's consciousness, to draw them into a different mode of perception. Many ancient religious texts work this way, and the Gnostic texts are particularly rich in this quality. When you find yourself reading the same image or phrase for the third or fourth time, try not to skim past it. Instead, sit with it. Let it resonate. Ask yourself what it is doing to you, not just what it is telling you.

The cosmological framework of the text, while initially bewildering, becomes more navigable once you grasp a few key principles. The universe described here is not the universe of modern science, nor is it the universe of conventional religious imagination. It is a layered, dynamic, living cosmos in which spiritual forces are constantly in motion — ascending and descending, mixing and separating, struggling and reconciling. The three primordial principles of Light, Darkness, and Spirit are not static categories but active powers, each with its own nature, its own desires, and its own role in the great drama of cosmic history. Understanding their relationships — how they interact, how they conflict, how they are ultimately resolved — is the key to understanding the text as a whole.

Light, in this system, represents the divine, the transcendent, the source of all true being and goodness. It is not simply the absence of darkness but a positive, creative, overflowing power that yearns to express and extend itself. Darkness, by contrast, is not simply evil in a moral sense — it is more like a principle of opacity, density, and self-enclosure, a force that absorbs and traps rather than radiates and liberates. Spirit occupies a middle position, a kind of mediating principle that participates in both Light and Darkness and whose ultimate fate — whether it will be drawn upward toward the Light or downward into the Darkness — is one of the central questions that the entire narrative seeks to address.

What makes this cosmological vision so compelling is the way it maps onto the inner life of the human being. The struggle between Light and Darkness is not only a cosmic drama happening out there in the universe — it is also happening within every human soul. The spark of divine Light that each person carries within them is surrounded and threatened by the forces of Darkness and materiality. The Spirit within us is constantly being pulled in two directions. The knowledge that Derdekeas brings is not merely theoretical information about the structure of the cosmos; it is a practical tool for navigating this inner struggle, for recognizing the Light within ourselves and finding the path back to its source.

This psychological dimension of the text is one of the things that makes it feel surprisingly modern, despite its ancient origins. Contemporary readers who are familiar with depth psychology, with the work of Carl Jung for example, will find many resonances here. Jung himself was deeply interested in Gnostic thought and drew on it extensively in developing his own psychological theories. The Gnostic vision of the soul as a divine spark trapped in the darkness of matter and the unconscious, struggling toward the light of self-knowledge and integration, is remarkably consonant with Jungian ideas about individuation, the shadow, and the self. Reading this text through a psychological lens can be enormously illuminating — though it is important not to reduce the text entirely to psychology and lose sight of its properly religious and metaphysical dimensions.

Another productive lens through which to read this text is that of comparative mysticism. The experience that Shem describes — being lifted out of ordinary consciousness, ascending through the layers of the cosmos, receiving revelatory knowledge from a divine guide — is structurally similar to mystical experiences reported across many different cultures and traditions. Whether we understand such experiences as literally true, as symbolic representations of inner states, or as something in between, they point to a dimension of human experience that is real and significant, and that has been a central concern of religious life in every culture and every era. Reading this text alongside accounts of mystical experience from other traditions — Sufi poetry, Jewish Kabbalah, Hindu Vedanta, Buddhist meditation literature — can enrich your understanding of what the text is trying to communicate and why it matters.

It is also worth approaching the text with a degree of historical empathy — an effort to understand it on its own terms, within its own world, before translating it into our own categories. The people who wrote and read this text lived in a world very different from ours: a world of Roman imperial power, of social upheaval and religious ferment, of widespread anxiety about the nature of the cosmos and the fate of the soul. They were not naive or primitive thinkers. They were sophisticated, educated people who had read widely and thought deeply, and who were using the tools available to them — mythology, philosophy, visionary experience — to grapple with questions that remain as urgent today as they were in the second century CE. Treating them with the respect due to serious thinkers, rather than as curious historical curiosities, will make your reading of this text far richer.

One of the most striking aspects of the text, and one that deserves special mention, is its treatment of the body and of sexuality. Gnostic texts are often characterized as simply anti-body, as straightforwardly dualistic in a way that denigrates the physical and celebrates the purely spiritual. The reality is considerably more complex. This text, like many Gnostic writings, has a deeply ambivalent relationship with the body — it is simultaneously a prison and a vehicle, a source of entrapment and a potential instrument of liberation. The text's treatment of reproduction, of birth and death, of the physical processes of the natural world, is dense and sometimes shocking to modern sensibilities. But underlying the apparent negativity is a profound concern with the question of what it means to be an embodied spiritual being — a question that is no less urgent for us than it was for the ancient Gnostics.

The figure of Derdekeas himself deserves particular attention as you read. He is one of the most remarkable characters in all of ancient religious literature — a divine being who is willing to descend into the depths of darkness and matter in order to rescue what is trapped there, who takes on the limitations of embodied existence in order to reveal the path beyond those limitations. There is something deeply moving about this figure, something that resonates with the deepest human experiences of compassion, sacrifice, and the desire to help those who are lost find their way home. Whatever one makes of the metaphysical claims of the text, the figure of Derdekeas embodies a vision of divine love that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely challenging.

As you prepare to enter the world of this text, it may help to adopt a particular kind of reading posture — one that combines intellectual rigor with imaginative openness, critical distance with personal engagement. This is not a text to be consumed passively, like a novel read for entertainment. It demands something of you. It asks you to think, to feel, to question your assumptions about the nature of reality and the nature of yourself. It asks you to take seriously the possibility that the visible world is not all there is, that you carry within you something of infinite value and infinite antiquity, and that the journey toward self-knowledge is the most important journey you can undertake.

The scholars who have worked to recover, translate, and interpret this text have done an extraordinary service to human culture. The decades of painstaking work that went into cleaning, photographing, transcribing, and translating the fragile papyrus pages of the Nag Hammadi codices represent one of the great collaborative achievements of twentieth-century scholarship. The result is that we now have access to a body of thought that was nearly lost forever — a window into a world of religious imagination that enriches our understanding of human history, of the origins of Christianity, and of the perennial questions that have driven religious and philosophical inquiry in every culture and every age.

But scholarship, however valuable, can only take us so far. At a certain point, the text must speak for itself, and the reader must bring their own intelligence, their own experience, their own spiritual hunger to the encounter. The ancient teachers who produced this literature believed that the capacity for gnosis — for direct, transformative knowledge of divine reality — was not the exclusive property of any elite or any tradition. It was, they insisted, the birthright of every human being. The spark of Light was present in everyone, waiting to be recognized and kindled. Whether or not you share that belief, the invitation it represents is one worth taking seriously: the invitation to read not merely with your eyes and your intellect but with your whole self, open to the possibility that an ancient text, sealed in a jar and buried in the Egyptian desert for sixteen centuries, might have something to say to you — something urgent, something true, something that you have, in some sense, always known but needed to be reminded of.

What lies ahead in these pages is a journey unlike any other in ancient literature. It is strange, demanding, sometimes bewildering, and ultimately unforgettable. The cosmos you are about to enter is vast and dark and full of light. The guide who will accompany you is wise and ancient and strangely familiar. And the knowledge waiting at the end of the journey — if you are willing to make it — is nothing less than the knowledge of who you truly are. Turn the page, and begin.

The Paraphrase of Shem

Chapter 1

The paraphrase concerns the unbegotten Spirit.

This is what Derdekeas revealed to me, Shem, according to the will of the Majesty. My thought, which was in my body, snatched me away from my race. It carried me up to the top of the world, which is close to the light that shone upon the whole region there. I saw no earthly form, but there was light. And my thought separated from the body of darkness as though in sleep.

I heard a voice saying to me: Shem, since you are from an unmixed power and you are the first being upon the earth, hear and understand what I shall say to you first concerning the great powers that were in existence in the beginning, before I appeared. There was Light and Darkness, and there was Spirit between them. Since your root fell into forgetfulness — he who was the unbegotten Spirit — I reveal to you the truth about the powers. The Light was thought full of hearing and word. They were united into one form. The Darkness was wind in waters. He possessed a mind wrapped in a chaotic fire. And the Spirit between them was a gentle, humble light. These are the three roots. They reigned, each in themselves, alone. And they covered one another, each with its own power.

But the Light, since he possessed a great power, knew the abasement of the Darkness and his disorder — namely that the root was not straight. The crookedness of the Darkness was a lack of perception: he did not know that anyone was above him. And as long as he was able to bear up under his evil, he was covered by the water. And he stirred. And the Spirit was frightened by the sound. He lifted himself up to his station. And he saw a great, dark water. And he was nauseated. And the thought of the Spirit stared downward and saw the infinite Light. But he was overlooked by the putrid root. And by the will of the great Light the dark water separated. And the Darkness came up wrapped in vile ignorance, so that the mind might separate from him, because he took pride in it.

And when he stirred, the light of the Spirit appeared to him. When he saw it he was astonished. He did not know that another Power was above him. And when he saw that his own likeness was dark compared with the Spirit, he felt hurt. And in his pain he raised up toward the height of the members of Darkness his mind, which was the eye of the bitterness of evil. He caused his mind to take shape in a member of the regions of the Spirit, thinking that by staring at his evil he would be able to equal the Spirit. But he was not able. For he wanted to do an impossible thing, and it did not come to pass. But so that the mind of Darkness — which is the eye of the bitterness of evil — might not be destroyed, since he had been made partially similar, he arose and shone with a fiery light upon all of Hades, so that an equality with the faultless Light might appear to exist. For the Spirit made use of every form of Darkness because he appeared in his majesty. And the exalted, infinite Light appeared, for he was very joyful.

He wished to reveal himself to the Spirit. And the likeness of the exalted Light appeared to the unbegotten Spirit. It appeared, and a voice declared: I am the son of the incorruptible, infinite Light. I appeared in the likeness of the Spirit, for I am the ray of the universal Light. And his appearance came to me so that the mind of Darkness might not remain in Hades. For the Darkness had made himself like his mind in a part of the members. When I, Shem, appeared in that likeness, so that the Darkness might become dark to himself — according to the will of the Majesty, and so that the Darkness might be freed from every aspect of the power he possessed — the mind drew the chaotic fire, with which it was covered, out from the midst of the Darkness and the water. And from the Darkness the water became a cloud, and from the cloud the womb took shape. The chaotic fire, which was a deviation, went there.