The Gospel of Truth depicts the crucified Jesus wrapped in a scroll, reading aloud the contents of his heart as he died. This is just one of many strange appearances by the physical book in the Gospel of Truth and the fragments of Valentinus. This dissertation argues that through its representations of the written word, the Gospel of Truth promoted a living document perspective on the holy book, encouraging the generation of religious books as new sources of revelatory authority. The text describes the existence of a divine spark (logos) within each member of humankind, endowing all with capacity to speak or write a version of the gospel. I place this Valentinian theory of open canon, and person-as-sacred-book within an empire-wide debate about books and their attendant authority. In Roman and Jewish texts we find similar efforts to equate holy person with holy text, while Christian heresiologists exhibit awareness of the living book through their fierce vituperations. Although the Gospel of Truth is often set apart from contemporary mainstream Christianity, its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and also cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity. In particular, Valentinian views about the relationship between the oral and the written dovetailed with thinking on the nature of the sacred book that gradually became the trademark of Rabbinic Judaism. Ultimately, because the Gospel of Truth reflects a mind that was at the center of the discursive debates that formed Judaism and Christianity, this project demonstrates the usefulness of so-called heretical texts for discussions on the parting of the ways between the two traditions.PHDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100046/1/akreps_1.pd
