Journal of Early Christian Studies

INTRODUCTION

Recent studies have analyzed the Nag Hammadi codices within their fourth and fifth century Egyptian context: the scribal practices evident in colophons and cartonnage, the assembly of texts within each codex, the circulation of codices among potential communities of readers, and the [End Page 463] historical, ecclesiastical, ritual, theological, and literary context in which the texts within the codices would have been read and understood anew.¹ Lance Jenott and Hugo Lundhaug’s The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices meticulously and compellingly (in my opinion) solidifies the case that the codices could have been produced, owned, or read by those in Egyptian monasteries in the Thebaid.² To quote James Goehring, “This [End Page 464] is not to suggest that all Pachomian monks read such texts, or that those who did believed all they read. It is only to argue that a community that did not yet define itself in terms of doctrine did not yet banish books from its library over issues of doctrine.”³ Along these lines, Elaine Pagels and Jenott read Codex I in tandem with Antony’s letters to highlight themes that would have resonated with those whose library contained both Antony’s collection of letters and the Nag Hammadi texts; in another article, Jenott highlights the correspondence between monastic goals of returning to the state of a primordial Adam and ascetic ideals promoted in Nag Hammadi Codex II; Lundhaug reads Exegesis of the Soul alongside monastic ideals of union with Christ and metaphors of rebirth through baptism; Ulla Tervahauta places Authoritative Teaching within a late antique Egyptian Christian intellectual milieu, analyzing the text alongside contemporaneous religious and philosophical sources.⁴

Shifting the focus of analysis from the composition of individual treatises in the preceding centuries to their Sitz im Leben as Coptic texts bound into codices allows us to understand how these texts were incorporated into late ancient society, and the ways Christians and others might have engaged with them. That is, from a methodological perspective, we are able to interpret these texts and text collections differently when we place them into this new linguistic, temporal, and geographical context of the Egyptian desert, not where they were, most likely, first composed, but where they were most certainly read. One important reevaluation that such analysis has facilitated is a rethinking of the texts as inherently “heterodox,” “gnostic,” or “heretical,” and appreciating, instead, their continuities and points of contact with a diverse range of contemporaneous Christian ideas and writings.

In this article, I pose a question that builds on this previous work: if shifting our focus to the codices’ fourth- and fifth-century monastic [End Page 465] milieu allows us to interpret them in new ways, might rethinking other aspects of their reception—in this case, considering gender and the possibility that women were among the codices’ readers—make a difference for our interpretation of the textual collections and our understanding of their reception and transmission? In other words, (how) do our readings of these texts differ when we imagine women as part of the intended or actual audiences of the texts in their ancient contexts? This is as much a historical question as a methodological one, and I navigate between these two aspects in my analysis below.

First, I argue, based on our evidence for women’s literacy and reading practices in late antique Egypt and the greater Mediterranean as well as women’s participation in the vibrant monastic communities of the region, that women would have been among the likely readers of the Nag Hammadi codices (henceforth NHC). This is the historical argument. Then, I contend that we read Athanasius’s warnings about reading, for men and women, alongside one another, to determine what was at stake for Athanasius not only when he banned certain books and excluded them from his canon, but also when he insisted that women devote their time to reading books of scripture. Next, I offer a series of methodological reflections on how our readings might be enriched, revised, or complicated when we account for the potential diversity of the codices’ ancient readers, while acknowledging the inevitable difficulties of trying to read ancient texts from gendered perspectives. With these caveats in mind, I suggest a number of new avenues for analysis of the NHC in light of these historical and methodological interventions. I conclude by reflecting on what it means— for our study of late antique women, of the NHC, and of Christianity in Egypt—to put these codices back on women’s bookshelves, desert caves, and monastic cells.

For the most part, previous scholars have focused on desert “monks” as possible readers, rarely mentioning explicitly or in a sustained fashion the possibility of women readers.⁵ One exception is Alastair Logan, who argued that the NHC would have appealed to women and therefore fit better into a so-called “gnostic” cultic context rather than a monastic setting.⁶ Lundhaug and Jenott responded to Logan by contending that Logan need not locate the texts among such a sect, given that there were plenty of women in the [End Page 466] various monasteries of Upper Egypt who could have likewise encountered them.⁷ Logan, Lundhaug, and Jenott therefore acknowledge the possibility of women readers, though they do not explore the implications of such gendered readings. Even if we assume that yet other scholars have taken for granted the existence of women readers—such that they never reference women explicitly, using the terms “monks”/“brothers” as genderinclusive terms—the resulting scholarship about the codices’ reception has, thus far, primarily examined how the texts would have aligned with the ideas and ideals of monks and other men, constructing a “universal male monk,” as it were, to build on the work of Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart regarding the default “male reader” presumed by most reader-response theory.⁸ To be clear, I am not criticizing this previous scholarship, which contributed much to our understanding of the NHC, but rather highlighting how turning our focus to the gender of the codices’ readers, and to the oft-overlooked women readers in particular, can illuminate new and important aspects of the codices worthy of our sustained consideration.

While this article hypothesizes specifically about monastic women because I am persuaded by studies that argue that monastic settings are the most likely context for the codices as well as for their women readers, we might similarly suggest that women would have read the texts in other urban or rural settings, in so-called “gnostic” cults, or in individual libraries of living or deceased elites, and that our interpretations of the texts and their possible meanings might differ as a result of taking into account women readers in these other contexts as well.⁹ Our conclusions about whether the codices were discarded or stored for safekeeping in the caves in which they were ultimately discovered similarly impacts our scholarly interpretations of their content and cultural significance, and in this case, too, the question of women readers must be addressed. [End Page 467]

READING WOMEN IN THE LATE ANTIQUE MEDITERRANEAN: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

A variety of sources—historical, literary, papyrological, and artistic—attest to women’s literacy in the late antique Mediterranean, especially within monastic settings. Among the documents used in the cartonnage of the NHC’s covers is a letter written by a woman inquiring about the price of chaff by the wagonload, attesting to women’s literacy in the codices’ immediate context.¹⁰ That is, though we do not have evidence that women were involved in the compilation and scribal activities that resulted in the construction of these particular codices, a woman’s writing was recycled in the books’ covers. This is only one of dozens of extant letters and documents from Egypt in both Greek and Coptic that were authored by or addressed to women in the first five centuries c.e.¹¹

Christian women participated in all aspects of textual transmission— commissioning texts, copying them, and reading—though at rates lower than their male counterparts.¹² Eusebius describes Origen and his writing [End Page 468] staff, including “young women skilled in fine writing” who produced elegant editions of texts in a good book hand, and evidence from Egypt and elsewhere in the Roman Empire confirms that other women, both enslaved and freed women, worked as copyists and scribes or taught writing as didaskalos and grammatikē.¹³

Women also read.¹⁴ In a note from Oxyrhynchus, north of the Thebaid, a Christian woman asks her friend to send her the “Little Genesis” in exchange for Esdras, presumably because she had finished Esdras and was eager to read the book of Jubilees, and a Coptic letter from Kellis’s Manichaean community requests that the recipient’s mother send her copy of the Book of Epistles to the letter’s author.¹⁵ Aurelia Ptolemais, also from Oxyrhynchus, owned Homer’s Iliad, Iulius Africanus’s Kestoi, and the Sikyonika.¹⁶ Eusebius and Palladius both mention a learned woman, Juliana, who inherited a book from a certain Symmachus; elsewhere Palladius [End Page 469] mentions a neighbor who left Clement’s commentary on Amos for him after her death.¹⁷ Emperor Julian, in two letters, thanks the priestess Theodora for sending her books to him.¹⁸ Jerome recounts that Pamphilus would lend books to men and women alike.¹⁹ Some sources describe women not only as readers but also among those responsible for the publication and circulation of texts.²⁰ The wealthiest women commissioned texts and founded libraries.²¹

Among several artistic renderings of women reading and writing, the paintings most proximate to Nag Hammadi are found in the Monastery of Apa Apollo in Bawit. One chapel depicts superior women, “mothers of the monastery,” holding a book-roll, and paintings in other rooms, too, show women holding books or book-rolls, sometimes alongside men.²² These paintings most likely depicted realistic scenes of monastic life and its rituals, suggesting that at least some women handled and read books in monastic contexts. (I do not believe that these images were fantastical, featuring women holding books in settings where they had no access to books or could not read.)

Several sources portray ascetic women, both in domestic and monastic settings, as voracious readers, and women received encouragement to read often, along with precise instructions for how and what to read. Melania the Elder, for example, is described as reading, in Peter Brown’s words, [End Page 470] “three million lines of Origen and two and a half million lines of more recent authors,” and Melania the Younger supposedly read the Old and New Testaments many times a year.²³ In addition to reading scripture, especially Psalms, and texts about the ascetic lifestyle, sources mention that women read texts by Origen, Gregory, Stephen, Pierius, and Basil, and saints’ lives.²⁴ Warnings to steer clear of certain writings suggest that women might have been drawn to read those—perhaps heretical or apocryphal texts—as well.²⁵

In Upper Egypt, reading was a prerequisite for entry into a Pachomian monastic community.²⁶ The Rule of Pachomius explicitly states this requirement: “There shall be no one whatever in the monastery who does not learn to read.”²⁷ Rule 139 includes further instructions: “And if he is illiterate, he shall go at the first, third, and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously with all gratitude. Then the fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs, and nouns shall be written for him, and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read.”²⁸ After Pachomius’s sister establishes her own monastery for women, “in the village, a short distance from the brothers,” the Greek Life of Pachomius explains that “Pachomius wrote down for them the rules of the brothers and sent them by the old man Peter, that they might govern themselves by keeping them,” highlighting [End Page 471] the centrality of these written rules for the women’s institution.²⁹ The Life assumes that these women were capable of reading these rules, and that the rules—including rules 139 and 140 about acquiring literacy skills— applied equally to women as they did to the Pachomian men. Palladius mentions such equal expectations explicitly: “They also have a monastery of about four hundred women, with the same constitution and the same way of life, except for the goat skin.”³⁰ That the rule was sent, through Peter, to the women might also suggest that other books passed between the two communities, as we also read that Peter regularly visited the women to preach.³¹

Finally, religious authorities accused women of reading and owning forbidden texts. John Chrysostom speaks disparagingly of women who “suspend Gospels from their necks” and “carry them about in all places wherever they go.”³² Though these books served as amulets, it is striking [End Page 472] that the bishop identifies women as those with little texts around their necks. In the Martyrdom of Saints Agape, Irene, and Chione, “cabinets and chests” full of Christian documents are discovered and the women are charged with “deliberately [keeping] …so many parchments, books, tablets, small codices and pages.”³³ In a papyrus from fourth-century Hermoupolis, Thaesis, an ascetic woman, is accused by rival heirs of stealing “Christian books”; she ends up winning the case and receiving half the estate.³⁴ Further east, women were accused of, or commemorated for (depending on the context), engaging in magical or divinatory practices, including the creation of incantation bowls and sortes, which involved reading and writing.³⁵ That is, women engaged with texts and in reading practices even when such activities were not condoned by religious authorities.

Epiphanius’s Panarion presents us with an intriguing instance of women possessing books that were considered heretical by fourth century Christian bishops. Epiphanius encounters “gnostic women” who teach him about their beliefs and attempt to seduce him.³⁶ Epiphanius reveals that he read their books in order better to understand their ideas, but that, with God’s help, he was not persuaded by their thoughts and was able to escape without being enticed by the women.³⁷ He lists a number of texts associated with these “gnostics,” among them “Noria,” a “Gospel of Perfection,” [End Page 473] a “Gospel of Eve,” “Questions of Mary,” “Greater Questions of Mary,” “Lesser Questions of Mary,” “Apocalypses of Adam,” “Birth of Mary,” and a “Gospel of Philip.”³⁸ Though none of these texts were likely the same as those found in the NHC, Epiphanius might be our most direct source that women owned and read books that were regarded as heretical by church authorities, as those bound between the covers of the NHC were likewise considered by the end of the fourth century.³⁹

Given this wide-ranging evidence, we have every reason to suspect that women—in addition to men—read a diverse set of texts, especially in monastic settings, and that some of their books might have been considered problematic or heretical by contemporaneous or later bishops. Numerous groups of ascetic women lived reasonably close to the location of the NHC’s discovery, within the Pachomian monastic federation as well as in Shenoute’s White Monastery, in Tabennesi, Tsmine, Panopolis, Pbow, Latopolis, Hermopolis Magna, Antinoë, Atripe, and beyond.⁴⁰ If we conclude that monks or other elite (rural or urban) intellectual men in the region read the NHC, their female counterparts likely did as well.

REREADING ATHANASIUS’S INSTRUCTIONS FOR READING

We do not know whether Athanasius’s festal letter of 367 c.e. contributed to the burial of the NHC. The date of the codices’ production is uncertain (scholars have posited as early as the mid- or late fourth century and as late as the fifth), and they might have been buried decades later.⁴¹ As late as the mid-fifth century, Dioscorus of Alexandria sent a letter to monks urging them to stop circulating heretical books, which suggests that such books still circulated.⁴² Such explicit and official demands made by Athanasius [End Page 474] and Dioscorus ordering monastics and others in Egypt to stop reading books considered to contain heresies, however, could not easily be ignored. Perhaps such letters led to the eventual burial of the codices in the nearby caves. Athanasius’s letter details what should be read and what avoided: “ …let us now keep the feast [Easter] according to the tradition of our ancestors, since we have the Holy Scriptures, which are sufficient to instruct us perfectly.”⁴³ Athanasius lists texts included within the category of “scripture”; extra-scriptural texts “useful for instruction”; and texts that must altogether be avoided. Concerned that people thought it legitimate to read a wide range of texts beyond scripture, Athanasius wished to curb instruction from texts with unorthodox ideas.⁴⁴ Thus, motivated by fear of Christians reading apocryphal texts promoted by “heretics,” the bishop urged his audience to read only scriptures. Athanasius addresses his letter to other bishops—that is, other men—and asks that they enforce these reading policies among their congregants.

In other treatises, written directly to and about women, however, Athanasius returns to the question of reading. For example, Athanasius dictates what ascetic women should be reading in On Virginity: “Neither during the night, nor during the day, should the Word of God be absent from your mouth. Your occupation will be studying constantly the Sacred Scriptures. You must have a Psalter and you must learn the Psalms. When the sun appears above the horizon, it should be the book in your hands.”⁴⁵ While Athanasius’s festal letter is interpreted as an attempt to control permissible and prohibited reading practices, this passage is usually understood differently, as positive encouragement to women always to be studying scripture—that is, to read constantly.⁴⁶ It serves as proof for women’s literacy, so much so that they were encouraged to read the [End Page 475] Bible at all times. But might we read this passage, addressed to women, as a polemic similar to that found in the festal letter? Perhaps Athanasius encourages these women to read a specific set of texts—scripture in general, Psalms in particular—because he suspects that they might be reading other (heretical) texts as well, and he wants to ensure that they only read within the canon rather than beyond it? Interpreted so, Athanasius does not provide reading instructions in an expansive sense; rather he promotes a specific reading list that represents approved texts as he defined and delimited the category.⁴⁷

This reading builds upon David Brakke’s expansive analysis of Athanasius’s first letter to the virgins, in which he identifies Athanasius’s concern about the Arian “heresy” as a central motivation for the epistle:

Although Athanasius seemed never to tire of refuting the Arian “heresy,” such a long foray into the fine points of Christology might seem out of place in an epistle to virgins devoted primarily to the relative merits of virginity and marriage and to the exemplary lifestyle of the Mother of God. But more was at stake for Athanasius than the proper theological ideas of these virgins. The bishop wanted to detach the virgins from a social form of Christianity in which free academic discussion of doctrine thrived and hence “heresy” might be enunciated: the study circle of men and women gathered around a brilliant teacher. In this effort, the title “bride of Christ” proved a convenient image: according to Athanasius, the virgins’ fidelity to their husband the Word required a private life devoted to the cultivation of true thought, not a public life involving conversation with men.⁴⁸

According to Brakke, Athanasius’s concern about the Arian heresy and some women’s potential participation in and defense of this movement motivated his “programme of secluding virgins in private lives of prayer” and “regulat[ing] and seclud[ing] active and independent women.”⁴⁹ These women could be subdued, the logic goes, with instructions for how to behave, with whom to interact—and, I would argue, what to read. They were urged to follow the one true pedagogue, Christ; to unite with Christ as his bride; and to read only texts that contained true teachings while avoiding texts with potentially heretical elaborations.

The implication of this interpretation is the possibility that, in addition to women studying with teachers such as Arius, these (or similar) women [End Page 476] were reading texts such as those discovered at Nag Hammadi that Athanasius found inappropriate or threatening, and that he attempted subtly to limit such practice through his treatises and epistles. If we read Athanasius’s various texts together, we might understand that he dictated to everyone—men and women—what they should (not) read, and in both cases he strongly encourages the study of scripture, to the exclusion of other works, many of which he fears might lead readers astray. Athanasius, that is, might have imagined women as potential readers of the NHC or similar collections of texts; as scholars of late antique Christianity, with an abundance of evidence for women’s literacy during this period, we too should assume women among the codices’ possible audiences.

READING GENDER: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Before turning to new insights we might glean by considering women among the NHC’s readers, there are important methodological caveats that must accompany the ensuing discussion: 1) treating critically the category of “woman/women”; 2) sensitively analyzing gendered tropes employed within heresiological literature; 3) refraining from essentializing “women’s experiences” or “women’s readings”; 4) recognizing the diverse possibilities for women’s varied engagement with texts; and 5) making sure not to view the NHC as a coherent philosophical or theological system but rather approaching the corpus as an anthological collection of disparate writings containing many texts, each with different—and sometimes competing— suppositions, perspectives, and values.

(1) Though this article argues for considering the NHC’s women readers, it must be acknowledged that the category “woman” itself is fraught, unstable, and continually constructed. Sex, gender, and sexual difference are more complicated and variegated than the categories of “men” and “women” allow, and such a gendered dichotomy does not easily account for those with gendered identities that do not fit into either of these groups. These categories also often conflate sex and gender, usually referring to those born biologically female as women (and biologically male as men) while excluding other types of women and effacing altogether those born biologically between or beyond male and female.⁵⁰ Here, in contrast, I [End Page 477] use the category “woman” as expansively as possible, denoting all those who considered themselves women in antiquity, or who might have been considered women by others; as a category with fluid boundaries and intermediary possibilities; and with awareness that these categories are continually constructed through language rather than articulations or reflections of an underlying and unchanging “reality.”⁵¹ To be clear, the expansiveness, fluidity, and tentativeness with which I treat these categories are not anachronistic; the opposite, in fact, is the case when studying late antique Egyptian monasticism. The ancient sources at the center of analysis themselves thematize the idea of gender transcendence, transformation, and transgression, even as they work within the categories of “man”/“woman.” Moreover, asceticism was often viewed as a set of practices that facilitated the elimination or minimizing of gendered difference. To quote Rebecca Krawiec: “The desert mothers argued that they had female bodies but male natures; that is, that their sex was female but their gender male.”⁵² In short, I employ the category of “woman” to destabilize the implied scholarly default that ancient readers of the NHC were men, and to consider that others, with different gendered identities, including women (however defined), also read these texts, and that our scholarly interpretations of these texts are enhanced when we imagine more diverse ancient readers engaging with them and bringing their own (gendered) identities to bear on the texts.

(2) The trope of gender pervades ancient heresiological accounts, as has been well-documented by scholars.⁵³ Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement all refer to named women and women followers in their heresiological texts, giving the impression that these movements were overrun by women.⁵⁴ In [End Page 478] fifth-century Egypt, too, Shenoute emphasizes that women were especially susceptible to the allure of (what he considered to be) unorthodox ideas. Shenoute worried about the bad influence that the Melitians might exert over other Christians, including those in his monastery: “they have corrupted the minds of many brothers and especially many sisters and many ignorant wretches.”⁵⁵ Shenoute points out that both men and women— especially women—are drawn to the Melitians’ ideas. I cite these examples not to argue that they refer specifically to the readers of the NHC, but rather because they suggest that some Christian authorities were particularly bothered by—what they perceived to be—women’s leadership and women’s participation in such heretical movements, and they mention women’s practices, including their reading practices, within these groups. Eventually, the Nag Hammadi texts were, it seems, similarly regarded as heretical and forbidden by Christian authorities. Associating heretical sects with women and presenting such sects as feminized communities were often essential aspects of polemics against them, and we might thus be inclined to disregard these sources as historical evidence for women reading esoteric literature.

I am weary, however, about discounting altogether heresiological sources, polemical as they are, as historical resources about ancient women’s literacy, agency, and communal engagement.⁵⁶ On the one hand, such sources must be read critically. On the other hand, if we are too cautious and disregard all aspects of such accounts as literary representations, with no connection to real events and people, we risk effacing groups or individuals. For example, if we disregard the passage by Epiphanius about the [End Page 479] “gnostic” women’s heretical books as merely rhetorical and thus untrustworthy, we potentially erase the memory of actual women who owned books and read them, and who might have played important intellectual or ritual roles within their communities. By being methodologically sensitive to the constructed dimensions of heresiological discourse, we might simultaneously be creating new, unintended, methodological problems. I therefore think we must recognize the potential pitfalls of these competing reading practices—regarding heresiological sources as historical accounts, or disregarding them as untrustworthy rhetorical attacks—and navigate carefully between critically analyzing ancient discourses and considering the texts beyond their rhetorical function.

(3) Even once we make a persuasive case for women reading the NHC in the fourth or fifth centuries, determining how women might have engaged with their stories and themes is likewise complicated. Caroline Walker Bynum argued that in medieval Christian sources, men and women authors associated the same gendered images and symbols with distinct ideas.⁵⁷ The precise difference between men and women in Bynum’s study, however, is surprising and complicates assumptions about what a “woman’s reading” might be: men evoked feminine images and emphasized gender reversal, writing at length about the motherhood of Christ, envisioning their roles as abbots or preachers in nourishing maternal terms (sustaining their followers with milk and imagining them torn from their breasts and cut from their wombs), and regarding Mary as a model, while women tended to assert gender neutral conceptions of humanity and described their imitation [End Page 480] of Christ instead. Likewise, scholars of late antiquity have argued that the feminine imagery in the NHC might have been more derogatory than empowering for ancient women, and that it is unlikely that women composed them or that they were written deliberately for female audiences.⁵⁸ Bynum’s comparative conclusions highlight that one cannot assume that women would have necessarily introduced certain types of readings, and that it is possible that men in particular would have engaged in, and most appreciated, such interpretations. Fourth- or fifth-century monks could have paid attention to feminine imagery in the NHC while their female counterparts could have found masculine or non-gendered aspects more meaningful, and we need to leave this possibility—as well as its opposite, that women would have been drawn to such feminine images—open, aware that there is nothing self-evident about gendered readings. In either case, however, we must acknowledge that just because texts contain ideas regarding gender that have potentially detrimental effects on women (or that would have appealed more readily to men) does not mean that women did not read them and need to reckon with them.⁵⁹

Bynum proposes an explanation for variations in approaches by men and women to gender in medieval literature: “It may be that, in any patriarchal society, men will stress gender differences because such an emphasis consolidates their advantage. Women, on the other hand, unable to propose their experience as dominant and unwilling to accept it as exceptional, will quite naturally couch their perceptions in terms of an androgynous humanity.”⁶⁰ [End Page 481] Relatedly, Krawiec explores the ways in which Shenoute’s engagement with ideas of gender transformation and elision often worked to reinforce the existing gender hierarches within his monastic communities rather than to overturn them.⁶¹ Instead of using the language of “brides of Christ,” a term promoted by Athanasius, Shenoute calls the women in his monastery “brethren.” By including the women fully into the monastic community, he asserted his own control over them.⁶² In contrast, a narrative within the Apophthegmata Patrum quotes desert mothers who rebuke their male counterparts for treating them as women, rather than overlooking their gendered identities, as they sought to do for themselves. A female desert hermit wittily responds to a monk who avoids her and her companions on the road: “If you were a perfect monk, you would not have seen us as women!”⁶³ As with Bynum’s medieval sources, in this vignette (regardless of its historicity) we see differences in men’s and women’s engagement with gendered theological ideas, even if the ways in which these responses are gendered is complicated and counterintuitive.⁶⁴ Shenoute and the desert mother portrayed in the Apophthegmata Patrum relate to and express similar theological ideas about gender and the transcendence or irrelevance of gender through ascetic practice in varying ways because of their divergent social and hierarchical locations with relation to gender. Trying to ascertain, therefore, how ancient women readers might have understood the narratives and theologies in the NHC is a complicated endeavor; using comparative studies such as those written by Bynum and Krawiec helps us situate the NHC more accurately within a gendered landscape.

(4) We must also note that, even when men’s and women’s readings differ, there is also, as always, no single “woman’s reading” of a text (and, likewise, no single “man’s reading”)—there are many. The categories of “women”/“men” however defined, include a diverse group of individuals [End Page 482] with varied experiences and opinions. There would therefore necessarily have been differentiated readings among women and men, too. Moreover, different social and economic status, conditions, and motivations drove women and men to pursue ascetic lifestyles, transcend the limitations of their gender, and seek unity in Christ in late antique Egypt.⁶⁵ Freedwomen and men, those who escaped enslavement, former sex workers, elite women and men, and others with divergent backgrounds and circumstances found inspiration, empowerment, fulfillment or escape in a monastic life, and might have related differently to the same ideas and metaphors contained in shared texts and codices. Women and men in monastic communities were a diverse group and we must take this diversity seriously in our analyses of the sources. Even so, I will show that focusing on women in particular allows us to ask—and eventually begin answering—an exciting range of questions about the diversity of women’s experiences and reading practices in antiquity that focusing only on men’s readings (or overlooking gender altogether) do not. Here, I highlight women readers in particular, for reasons outlined above, but the same range of diversity ought to be assumed when studying the NHC’s male readers and readings, too.

(5) Finally, it is worth reiterating Michael Williams’s caution not to conflate all of the NH texts into a single generalized “gnostic attitude” towards gender, because each text engages with gender and sexuality in distinct ways.⁶⁶ Still, as Williams has argued elsewhere, when the individual texts were collated into codices, readers of the codices might have harmonized the texts, reading them as a set regardless of the context of their initial composition or contradictory ideas between them (much as the texts within the New Testament are read as a unified set in devotional contexts despite their contradictions).⁶⁷ Thus, following Williams, we might ask about how the ideas conveyed in (a) individual treatises, (b) single codices that compiled a number of texts, or (c) the entire book collection hidden as a set communicated ideas about gender as a starting point for investigating women’s readings of these texts, codices, and book collection. The codices were also read alongside, and in conjunction with, other [End Page 483] texts, rather than as an isolated “library,” and thus analyzing the codices as part of larger monastic book collections—interacting, supporting, and challenging ideas in other texts—is also important.

With these methodological reflections in mind, we can tentatively speculate on the intellectual, theological, and sociological implications that a constellation of ideas—within a single treatise, codex, or book collection— might have had for different kinds of readers. How might a diverse group of monastic women have related to texts or codices that thematize the merging of masculine and feminine and the transcendence of gender as a theological goal, or that tell a sexualized story of the origins of the cosmos and of humanity? Even if women did not author the texts or produce these codices, as readers they would have confronted and contended with them in unique, and varying, ways.

REREADING THE NAG HAMMADI CODICES: AVENUES FOR TEXTUAL AND CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Below, I outline some trajectories of analysis for considering the diversity of the NHC’s readers in our interpretations of the sources, without essentializing the gendered or other differences of these readers, and investigating how these readers could have understood and integrated the texts into their theologies, ritual practices, and daily rhythms. Lundhaug has explored the cognitive effects of reading practices on individual and collective memories and, in turn, on constructions of the self, arguing that monastics used repetitive reading, memorization, and recitation to internalize theological ideas and dispositions.⁶⁸ Because of the heightened importance of these practices, monastic authorities attempted meticulously to control the types of reading materials available to their communities.⁶⁹ Lundhaug’s analysis highlights the profound impact that the content of one’s books [End Page 484] had on both individual and communal identities and subjectivities. Here, I integrate notions of gendered reading practices—considering women’s social and cultural statuses, women’s unique experiences, women’s access to books—into this broader conversation about the impact of reading on monastic life and the formation of monastic subjectivities.

In “Recovering Adam’s Lost Glory,” Jenott argues that NHC II “could have appealed to monastic readers …interested in recovering the lost glory of Adam, and who sought to do so by eradicating passions from their bodies through sexual continence and combat with demons.”⁷⁰ The codex, Jenott demonstrates, revolves around reinterpretations of the creation of Adam and Eve as narrated in Genesis. “Its stories about the primordial man and woman, and the sexual continence it teaches to recover humanity’s original glory,” Jenott explains, “fit nicely with what we know about monastic ideals of Adam in Christian Egypt.”⁷¹ Jenott’s argument for the coherence of the various treatises in the codex and of their relevance for Egyptian monastic readers is nuanced and sophisticated. He argues that, for monks who read the Life of Antony and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and who thus focused on eradicating bodily demons and recovering “the original spiritual condition in which humanity was first created in Adam,” the codex, and especially the codex’s fifth treatise, On the Origin of the World, provided practical and theological guidance.⁷² Jenott focuses almost exclusively on the perspective of those for whom attempting to return to a luminous Adam was a daily practice and an ultimate goal, even as he discusses the text’s incorporation of Eve as “true Life” as well. For such monastic men, the codex offers many points of intersection with other texts in their libraries and practices in their daily lives. Is it possible, we might ask, to read the codex from the perspectives of monastic women as well, for whom return to the stage of a luminous Eve might have been a more immediately tangible—or simply a more relatable and appealing—goal (even if they ultimately sought gender transcendence)?⁷³ What happens when we shift the reader’s attention from Adam as subject to Eve as subject?

In Specters of Paul, Benjamin H. Dunning analyzes the figures of Pistis/Sophia, Eve, and her female human creations in this same text.⁷⁴ Dunning argues that the treatise contains a well-developed theology of sexual difference that stands out from other treatments of creation in antiquity [End Page 485] because of its focus on a primordial Eve (a Second Adam) derived independently of a primordial First Adam (not in the likeness of this Adam of Light but of Pistis Sophia). The text, a subversion of Genesis 1–3 and dominant biblical interpretations of the time, offers a counter-narrative in which “Sophia creates her female human being according to a body or image derived from her own luminosity—and according to the likeness of her mother Pistis in the waters.”⁷⁵ “Sophia’s human being,” Dunning elaborates, “appears first as an androgyne born from her drop of light. Second, she molds that drop into a female body (which I correlate with creation in her own image). Third, she forms the body in the likeness of the mother Pistis.”⁷⁶ When the Third Adam is created, this Eve of Life enlivens him with her words, and he credits her with giving him life. Even though the archons assume that Eve has been derived from the First Adam and proceed to deceive the Third Adam into believing that Eve has been formed from his rib, the reader knows the truth. Throughout the text, the figure of Eve is thus never presented as derivative of Adam, but rather as a powerful life-giving figure originated from Pistis Sophia who, the logic goes, is worth emulating. Reading Dunning’s analysis in conjunction with the work of Jenott allows us to imagine that On the Origin of the World might not only have served as inspiration for monastic men to imitate a luminous Adam, but also as a uniquely compelling resource for monastic women, who could have been drawn to imitate or channel a luminous Eve.

The narrative continues with an unexpected twist. The archons, stunned by Eve’s luminosity, decide to rape her. Eve avoids their violence by transforming into a tree and creating a copy of herself, which the archons defile instead. Later, when this version of Eve finds herself in the Garden of Eden with Adam, she is guided by the snake to eat from the tree (who is actually the luminous Eve) and free herself from the grip of the archons. Eve emerges as a powerful figure who overcomes harm and remains in control of her own destiny.

Celene Lillie’s recent study, The Rape of Eve, explores this motif of Eve’s rape and how she overcomes trauma, found in no fewer than three treatises in the NHC (including Secret Revelation of John and Reality of the Rulers).⁷⁷ Lillie’s focus on rape as a simultaneously human and political [End Page 486] experience allows her to place this story of Eve within a Roman imperial context, which conceived of its conquered territories as sexually subdued feminine victims. What emerges from Lillie’s reading is a new appreciation for these texts as literature of an oppressed and subjugated minority within a violent empire, and also for their deeply human emotions and “psychological savvy” regarding rape and trauma. Lillie writes, “The three stories of the rulers’ rape of Eve not only give a description of sexual violence but also articulate a condemnation of this sexual violence, moving the locus of defilement from the victim to the perpetrator.”⁷⁸

Lillie concentrates on how these narratives of rape might be understood— by ancient and contemporary readers alike—within a Roman imperial context (in which the empire’s founding myths and iconography of conquest depicted multiple rapes), during the centuries when those who followed Christ found themselves terrorized by the empire. We might also, however, reread these treatises through the eyes of later Christians, living by then in a Christian Roman Empire. While such readers would no longer have approached the texts as persecuted minorities, they were still individuals with their own experiences of rape, sexual enslavement, and trauma, and they might have found the rejection of masculine violence and the transformation of disenfranchisement into subversive feminine power comforting, empowering, or re-traumatizing on a personal level.⁷⁹ Some ascetic women—whether they hailed from wealthy elite families, poor rural villages, or lives of enslavement or prostitution—no doubt suffered from rape and other forms of violence before, and perhaps also during, their time in monastic communities, as some men, especially boys and enslaved men, did as well. The Apophthegmata Patrum mentions former courtesans and prostitutes who repented and joined monasteries as virgins,⁸⁰ and anti-heretical texts identify leaders of so-called “heretical” movements [End Page 487] as former prostitutes, e.g. Helena, Simon Magus’s partner.⁸¹ We need not rely, however, on such literary texts to imagine the range of backgrounds from which members of monastic communities might have come, and the difficult experiences they might have endured. Such traumas might even have motivated such women and men to join monastic communities and commit themselves to celibacy.⁸²

Additional texts from the NHC address related themes and social contexts. In both Authoritative Teaching and Exegesis of the Soul, for example, the soul is put into a brothel and forced into sexual enslavement. From the outset, Authoritative Teaching identifies the soul as female; in the brothel, she drinks too much wine and falls into bestiality and debauchery.⁸³ She contaminates lustful virgin men as they bring her into the depth of desires and fleshly pleasures.⁸⁴ At the end, however, the soul prevails and changes her conduct. The text describes the soul’s journey from the brothel to a bridal chamber, where she transforms into a virginal bride; the “invisible soul of righteousness” recognizes the power of her light and emerges from the invisible, ineffable world.⁸⁵ While the soul’s body is treated as a female body exploited by men, her own personal journey is configured as a transformation from a lower, earthly masculinity to a heavenly femininity. Exegesis of the Soul focuses more centrally on the soul’s defilement by lustful men, though the text occasionally portrays her in masculine ways too.⁸⁶ In both texts, the violated and defiled soul ends up a virginal bride.⁸⁷

Such narratives of the soul, along with those of Eve’s rape, would have resonated for women with similar experiences of sexual violence and/or sexual renunciation.⁸⁸ A newly ascetic woman, for example, might have [End Page 488] found the description of the soul shedding her material clothes in Authoritative Teaching an apt metaphor for the abandonment of material interests:

She [the soul] had learned about evil; she went away from them and she entered into a new conduct. Afterwards she despises this life, because it is transitory …. And she learns about her light, as she goes about stripping off this world, while her true garment clothes her within, (and) her bridal clothing is placed upon her in beauty of mind, not in pride of flesh. And she learns about her depth and she runs into her fold, while her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn, then, that she received in this world, she receives ten thousand times the grace and glory. She gave the body to those who had given it to her, and they were ashamed, while the dealers in bodies sat down and wept ….⁸⁹

Reading these narratives not only as theological metaphors but also as stories related to the deeply personal—physical, psychological, and spiritual—circumstances of their readers is important for assessing the fullness of their reception.⁹⁰

A final text, Thunder, Perfect Mind, is worth considering as well. In the opening lines, the narrator identifies herself as one sent by God to those who seek:

I was sent forth from [the] power,    and I have come to those who reflect upon me,    and I have been found among those who seek after me.Look upon me, you (pl.) who reflect upon me,    and you hearers, hear me.    you who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.And do not banish me from your sight.And do not make your voice hate me, nor our hearing.    Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!⁹¹ [End Page 489]

After this bold introduction, the voice of a woman or female divinity narrates an aretology largely consisting of female images and associations, such as whore, wife, mother, daughter, barren one, and so on. By the end of the text, however, the voice has transformed into a gender neutral character, identified with the contrasting ideas of judgment, acquittal, lust, interior self-control, hearing, and speech.⁹² Many explanations have been suggested to decipher the mysterious narrating voice of Thunder.⁹³ Whether the text originated as an Isis hymn or presents personified Wisdom or the luminous Eve, and regardless of the identity of the author, a woman reader (or women listeners, if the text was read aloud or used ritually or liturgically) might well have found the narrator’s feminine voice and the mainly female “I am” sayings along with its eventual transformation into gender neutrality intriguing.⁹⁴ Contemporary research in social psychology demonstrates that women’s overall confidence and job performance increased when they encountered photos of powerful women leaders. That is, visual reminders of women’s success bolstered women’s self-perception and translated into scientifically calculable differences in women’s behavior. ⁹⁵ Building on this work, Mika Ahuvia has analyzed incantation bowls in which some Jewish women sought the assistance of local goddesses, just as Jewish men evoked the authority and efficacy of named masculine [End Page 490] angels.⁹⁶ Ahuvia posits that, given the lack of specifically Jewish angels or divinities upon whom such women could call, they turned to other deities, even as they maintained their Jewish identities and appealed, as well, to a singular God. Monastic readers of the NHC in Egypt likewise might have gained confidence when encountering the powerful narrator’s voice and persona in Thunder.

Thunder also anchors itself around a series of contradictions, the narrator simultaneously honored and scorned, a whore and a holy one, a wife and a virgin, and mother and daughter, barren and the bearer of many children, powerful and weak, silent and loud, loved and hated, disgraced and great, impoverished and wealthy, compassionate and cruel, senseless and wise.⁹⁷ Ascetic women might have felt similarly torn, being at once empowered and free from the control of fathers, husbands, and children, and yet under the authority of their monastic institutions, their rules, and lifestyle.⁹⁸ In this vein, Hal Taussig et al. write, “In ways both large and small, Thunder shows profound sensitivity to the powers, pains, and constraints inherent to gender—particularly to being a woman. Amidst its carnivalesque shaping-shifting, the ‘I’ of Thunder continually takes account of the cruelties and contradictions of feminine identities: the unsparing swing between whore and holy woman, virgin and wife.”⁹⁹ By the end of the narrative, the authors argue, the text’s initial binaries unravel and “oppositions become ridiculous and fall apart.”¹⁰⁰

Codex VI, as a whole, thematizes the transcendence of gender, and other texts in the codex (as well as beyond the corpus, e.g. the Sayings of the Desert Mothers) might be read alongside Thunder as developing these ideas further.¹⁰¹ In addition to Authoritative Teaching, The Concept of Our Great Power also features a feminine soul.¹⁰² Discourse on the [End Page 491] Eighth and the Ninth and the Prayer of Thanksgiving employ metaphors of pregnancy and birth to describe male characters, while Asclepius begins with a scene of sexual intercourse between male and female as a metaphor for the mystery experience.¹⁰³ These final texts thus blur gendered difference by presenting male characters with metaphors associated with female bodies, and with the ultimate union of both bodies as one.

The stories within the NHC explore the creation of human bodies, procreation, motherhood, sexual violence, gendered transformations, and much else. They could have served as vibrant resources for men and women who chose—or were forced into—ascetic lifestyles devoted to celibacy, contemplation, and ritual and intellectual engagement with biblical and philosophical traditions. The texts often present narratives and interpretations that supplemented, and at times also challenged, competing notions of gender and sexuality as well as of cosmogony and cosmology, and which thus would have provided much food for thought for monastic women readers committed to a life of sexual renunciation and the transcendence of gender. It is possible, of course, that these varied feminine images in the texts spoke more directly to men’s concerns, as Bynum discovered in her medieval sources, and certainly that men found them meaningful in their own right as well (in any case, they are the most probable authors of these texts). Nonetheless, I would contend that even if men authored all these texts and later compiled them into codices, the men and women who read them would nonetheless have needed to contend with their gendered figures and theologies in ways that intersected with their embodied experiences and identities, even if they ultimately rejected them or found them less influential than other aspects of these sources. Women’s embodied experiences, however varied, shaped the meanings of these texts. Rather than providing alternative feminine readings of these texts, I hope that accounting for women among the audience has illuminated new themes in the manuscripts and contributed to our overall interpretation of the texts and their reception.

CONCLUSIONS

In her study of Christian women and their books, María Jesús Albarrán Martínez concludes, “female ascetics in Egypt read books in Greek or Coptic language in all monastic contexts …primarily from the Bible, and [End Page 492] secondarily, bishop’s precepts as a guide to their ascetic lives …theological treatises of ancient commentators …biographies of renowned monks and nuns and the writings of pilgrim journeys ….”¹⁰⁴ I have suggested that we might add an additional category of texts to this book list: texts such as those contained between the covers of the NHC. These texts are not mentioned in our sources because they would have been kept secret and because, in later periods, they were abandoned due to continued pressure from bishops and other church authorities who deemed them heretical. But if we can imagine that they were read and studied until then (and perhaps also thereafter) by men in Pachomian and other monasteries— and we should—then we ought also to imagine that they were read and studied by some of the women in those same monasteries. Through this study we have thus expanded ancient ascetic Christian women’s libraries so that they now include the NHC or other texts like them.

Thinking expansively about the readers of the NHC might afford us another way to approach the question of women in and behind the texts. Previous scholarship has focused on women’s authorship, or whether women were more likely to be drawn to the figures who authored or promoted the ideas within them and their movements. On both these questions, scholars have been divided, and ultimately, we simply lack evidence to draw solid conclusions: men are just as likely (or more?) to have written the texts, even those that employ feminine imagery, and evidence for women’s participation is found primarily in the writings of heresiologists, who drew on tropes of gender in their polemics against ideas and sects with which they vehemently disagreed. Shifting our focus to women as readers, then, might be another avenue through which to bring women back into our historiographical endeavors, and to take seriously women as recipients and transmitters of these texts and traditions, without compromising what we know about the production of these texts and the gendered rhetoric that circulated about them. It also encourages us more generally to think about ancient readership more expansively and inclusively. This study thus finds itself at the intersection of intellectual, social, and reception history.

In her study of the Thessalonian ekklēsiai, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre insists that “wo/men were there,” by which she means that women are always part of the histories we study even when our sources and scholarship do not acknowledge them. Women were “materially visible” even when they were—and remain—“discursively invisible,” and their presence [End Page 493] makes a difference for how we write and teach history.¹⁰⁵ Johnson-DeBaufre concludes her essay as follows:

Feminist New Testament scholars press interpreters to “read” the monuments of kyriarchal inscriptions, but also to imagine alternative readers and readings …. I do not claim to have found the elusive Thessalonian wo/men. Rather, I hope that the process of “gazing upon the invisible” will have brought into clearer view why it is worth trying. Simply agreeing—as most everyone does—that Phoebe was a deacon or that New Testament generic language should (usually) be translated inclusively in no way means that wo/men in early Christianity are now visible and we can all move on. The questions of how to characterize wo/men’s presence, what difference (if any) that presence makes, and how to interpret generic and androcentric discourses persists.¹⁰⁶

In this piece, I have tried not only to expand the libraries of Egyptian ascetic women, but also to imagine “alternative readers and readings,” those who might have handled the NHC, shared them with others, and discussed them late into the evening with other women, even as they did not inscribe their names into colophons or their labors into the bindings. I have done so by looking around at the spaces adjacent to the Pachomian monasteries, and populating the libraries not only with monks but also with ascetic women, who surely would have found their way to these books, or asked for them to be sent their way. As Athanasius himself instructed the women that read his letters, “when the sun appears above the horizon, it should be the book in your hands.”¹⁰⁷ [End Page 494]