Dialogue of the Savior - Overview and Discussion

Somewhere in the second century, someone wrote down a conversation that reads like nothing else in the Nag Hammadi library. There is no narrative and there are no miracles, only the Savior and three disciples, Judas, Matthew, and Mary, asking the questions they could not leave alone. Where does the soul go when the body dissolves? What is the “place of life,” and how does anyone reach it? The answers are startling: the mind is the lamp of the body, the one who seeks is also the one who reveals, and no one can know the Father without first knowing themselves. Mary is no bystander here. She questions the Savior as an equal and is praised as the woman who understood completely. Midway through, the disciples are taken to the edge of heaven and earth and shown a vision of a single soul’s passage, one of the strangest scenes in early Christian literature. The text survives in one battered copy, with whole lines eaten away, so we will be reading around the holes and asking what the missing pieces might have said. Join us as we walk through it slide by slide. All are welcome; no prior reading required. For those interested, a link to the full text can be found here: http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/dialog.html