Table of Contents
This page is about one tractate in the Nag Hammadi books. The tractate is in Codex II. Its usual title is On the Origin of the World. The title of this page stays The third Adam is earthly. The tagline on the page still says Codex I. That tagline is the old label. The tractate I am summarizing is Codex II.
I used to paste a modern English of the tractate. That English is Willis Barnstone, The Gnostic Bible (2003), from the copy that had been posted at gnosis.org. It is in copyright, and it was not credited as his. There is no public-domain English of this tractate that I can put here. I have taken that modern English off the page. What follows is my own summary. I do not quote the tractate. I do not have a printed page number I can check, so I do not borrow his sentences.
The story sets out three Adams. The first is a being of light. The second is a person with a soul. The third is the earthly one, a human under a law, and the page title names him. The rulers see the Adam of light. They decide to make an earthly human after that pattern.
Sophia Zoe is wisdom and life in this story. She is with Sabaoth. When the rulers plan a human of their own, she moves first. She lets a drop of light fall. An instructor comes from that drop. The story calls the instructor androgynous. It says the Greeks would say Hermaphroditus, and that the instructor’s mother is Eve of life. The rulers later call this figure the beast, so that the humans will not trust it. In the story the beast is the instructor, and it is wiser than the other creatures.
The rulers are told that their fashioned body is alive. They send seven archangels to look. I keep a separate note on the angelic hierarchy. They find Eve talking with Adam. They want to seize her and to use her so that her children will serve them. They mean to put the man into a sleep and to tell him the woman was taken from his side, so that she will serve him. Eve leaves only a likeness with him and goes into the tree of knowledge.
The trees of paradise and the beast
The rulers tell the man and the woman that they may eat from the trees, and that the tree of knowledge would kill them. The instructor, in the form of the beast, tells the woman that this threat is false and that eating will wake her mind. She eats, and she gives the fruit to the man. Their minds open. They see that they were naked of knowledge, and they see that their makers have the shapes of beasts. They turn from the rulers.
Have you eaten from the tree?
The rulers come back in fear. They ask whether the man has eaten. He blames the woman. She blames the instructor. The rulers curse the instructor, the woman, the man and the earth. They drive Adam and his wife out of the garden, down to the earth they were taken from.
They set living beings of fire, the cherubim, around the tree of life, and a flaming sword that turns, so that no earthly being can go in.
They want human life to be shorter. The story says a life had been fixed at a thousand years, and that the rulers take years away, so that what remains is nine hundred and thirty years, lived in grief.
Sophia Zoe then sees the rulers curse her companions. She comes out of the first heaven and throws the rulers down into the world, where they stay as evil demons. The tractate gives signs that last until the end of the age. One is the phoenix, a bird that dies and lives again. I keep the link to the phoenix because the tractate uses that bird as a witness. Another sign is the water serpents in Egypt. The two bulls in Egypt stand for the sun and the moon. They witness that Sophia has been set above the sun and the moon, from the day she made them and sealed her heaven, until the end of the age.
Credits and public domain
Work: Nag Hammadi Codex II, tractate On the Origin of the World (often numbered II,5). No public-domain English translation is used here, because I do not have one. The Barnstone 2003 English has been removed. This page is my summary, in my own words.
