Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund Read Free Book Online Page B

of Jesus. These religious texts took their name from the place on the Upper Nile—Nag Hammadi—where they had been found in 1945.
    Considering myself to be fairly well informed as a teen—at least I
wanted
to be well informed, to know, to study, to see with my own eyes—I wondered why so few people seemed to have even heard anything about books excluded from the biblical canon, let alone considered their content. Since the revelation by neighbor Sylvia, I was amazed at how few religious people wanted to know how the canon had been formed. Held sacred by my evangelical parents and most of the people I knew, the Bible was inviolate, as though it had no history. But mere men had struggled for intellectual ascendancy in establishing what was sacred, and they had eliminated those books with alternative views. An array of gospels had been boiled down to the standard four included in the New Testament.
    “Skepticism is a path,” my retired neighbor the dear old professor had cautioned, “not a destination.”
    Of Tennyson’s poem
In Memoriam,
written against the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam, Sylvia told me T. S. Eliot had said it was a great poem not for the quality of its faith but for the quality of its doubt.
    Before I entered the information center at Nag Hammadi, I noticed an alabaster many-mouthed fountain, a large, bubbling jar positioned at the center of the entrance plaza. The fountain referenced the actual man-size jar containing the suppressed gospels that had been buried in the sand near Nag Hammadi, hidden for fifteen centuries. The bubbling fountain jar, fashioned from mottled alabaster, seemed both stately and droll. In response to its figure, I had a dizzy impulse to say, “How do you do?” Perhaps I did speak. I noticed a brown man wearing a loosely wrapped turban gazing curiously at me. His eyes were dark as dates, but menacing. Because of the heat, I hurried toward the information center.
    The ferociously air-conditioned, beautifully modern structure provided a great relief from the Egyptian oven. From the bottom of a framed picture of the current president-dictator cascaded a ladder of translations of the word
Welcome.
    “Thank you,” I said out loud to the dictator and wondered if I were losing my mind.
    From the place where I stood, thirteen spokes projected outward in a semicircle, one for each of the Nag Hammadi gospels, like rays from a half-risen sun. Each ray displayed along its walls a series of the individual pages with translations from that gospel. Even before I began to read, my feet protested the hard granite floors. No one likes to read standing up; even at the Louvre the short placards beside famous paintings are always read with impatience.
    Dutifully, I explored the extensive display, starting with the Gospel of Philip, Nag Hammadi Codex II. I read, “God is a dyer,” that “good dyes, true dyes” dissolved into the fabrics dipped into them. So it is with heat, I thought: when I am plunged into heat, it becomes part of me and I of it.
    The Gospel of Philip suggested that Adam and Eve were originally one androgynous figure. I wanted to drink to the idea.
Let Adam and Eve absorb oneanother,
I amended. But most of the Gospel of Philip was about the Christian era, not Genesis. I studied the Willis Barnstone English versification of Philip’s meditation on names:
    Father, son, holy spirit, life, light, resurrection, church.
These words are not real. They are unreal
but refer to the real, and are heard in the world.
They fool us. If those names were in the eternal realm,
they would never be heard on earth.
They were not assigned to us here.
Their end dwells in the eternal realm.
    I, too, believed in the ineffable. As an art therapist, I believed that the hand that draws inner realities is the friend of the anguished soul. A picture can evoke what cannot be said. But what would I myself do without language? Without Freud, without neighbor Sylvia? Without explanation? Philip in early