Краткое содержание: The Thunder, Perfect Mind

The 7 key ideas

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   A sealed jar carried the poem through centuries

   The poem comes to us from one of the great finds of religious history. In December 1945, Egyptian farmers digging near the cliffs of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt broke open a sealed clay jar. Inside were fifty-two ancient texts, written in Coptic on papyrus and bound into leather-covered books called codices. The dry desert air had kept them in remarkable shape after roughly sixteen hundred years underground.

   The manuscripts passed through the hands of antiquities dealers and became tangled in the politics of postwar Egypt. Only in the 1970s were they available to researchers in full. Among them were gospels that never appeared in the Bible, and this poem stood among them.

   The Coptic text is thought to rest on a lost Greek original. Nobody knows the author. Nobody knows for sure which community first copied it, though the other books in the jar point toward groups that valued gnosis, a Greek word for direct knowing.

   Why is the poem outside most Bibles? The churches that shaped the canon gathered the books they used and trusted, and this one was not among them. It teaches no clear doctrine, and its speaker is a female divine figure who stands apart from the male language of mainstream worship.

   The jar shows how varied early religious life was. People did not all read the same books or picture the divine in the same way.

   The poem is a rare survivor from a varied religious world, found by chance in a jar.

2. 2

   She begins by asking to be received

   The poem opens with a sending and an arrival.

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3. 3

   She is every family role at once

   After the call, the speaker names herself, and the names come in pairs.

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4. 4

   Silence, voice and word are hers together

   The poem turns from family to language.

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5. 5

   The despised and the honored are the same woman

   At the center of the poem stands a run of direct appeals to the people who hate her.

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6. 6

   She speaks to every nation and every name

   The speaker then widens her address to whole peoples.

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7. 7

   Near and far, hidden and seen: how to read her

   Near the end, the poem plays with distance.

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