The Gospel of Truth interprets the death of Jesus as the supreme act of revelation. Jesus reveals the truth to humanity, the truth not only of its own origin and divine destiny but also of the very essence of the Father. Those who remain trapped in ignorance or deficiency, the gospel warns, are doomed to perish. Through narrative exposition the gospel advocates and extols the benefits of knowing the truth. For example, Christians experience joy, a personal discovery of the Pleroma, and unity with the Father. The process of returning to the Father is described as a sweet and joyful process that leads to ultimate repose within the primordial source of all things. The Father is perfection itself and when individuals ascend to the Father, they then can claim their divine birthright and the things that are theirs. The text says that blessings belong to those who share the knowledge of the truth, who do the work of the Father, and who do work among others.

Meanings Hidden and Revealed

The writer of the Gospel of Truth made frequent use of analogies. For example, those who return to sobriety from drunkness is a reference to returning to knowledge from a state of ignorance. Likewise, the gospel states that the person who has awakened is happy, meaning that the individual who is cognizant of the Father or who has a clear vision of the Divine is happy, as opposed to the one who is asleep in ignorance. For the one in ignorance, like one asleep, is susceptible to troubled dreams. The gospel goes on to describe various types of nightmares that disappear upon awakening.

Envy and strife sprout in an environment of incompleteness, the text states, but where there is no strife, unity prevails, completeness is restored. Completeness means “no lack” or “no deficiency,” terms often used in Valentinian Gnostic rhetoric. Those who believe that they are not separate from the Father are incorruptible. All that exists does so within the Father, hence all physical space and things are emanations of Him. There is nothing that is not the Father. Those people who know they are of the Father will have eternal life. Such individuals are not “lacking” nor are they in any way “deficient.” They are complete. But those who do not know the Father and think that they exist apart from him will perish. This particular section of the Valentinian homily seems to be saying that just as the dream world is not real, neither is the material world once you awaken. Separation from God is not possible once you know the truth — that you and God are one and that the separation exists only in the mind.

A Parable Used to Reveal Truth

The Gnostics were adepts at syncretizing existing sacred stories of other traditions and putting them upon a Christian framework. They also could reinterpret those stories spoken by Jesus to fit their own meanings. The Parable of the Good Shepherd, from the canonical Gospel of John, also appears in the Gospel of Truth. In the Gospel of John, the parable reveals how the good shepherd guards the sheep with his life, lest they fall prey to wolves.

Jesus articulates the parable in John. He explains that he is the good shepherd. He knows his sheep and will lay down his life for them. He knows the Father and the Father knows him. He reiterates that he will lay down his life that he might take it again and that no man takes his life from him but that he lays it down of his own accord.

In the Gospel of Truth, the Son is the shepherd who left behind ninety-nine sheep to seek out the lost one. The text details how ninety-nine could be expressed on the left hand but add one more number and the counting shifts to the right hand. The ancients had a way of counting up to ninety-nine on one hand before shifting to the other hand, so this was simply a real-world connection that the author of the Gospel of Truth used to express his meaning. Basically he was trying to convey the idea that the incompleteness represented by the lost sheep was restored to completion once the lost sheep was found. The Gnostic Bible states that the Valentinians believed that the right represented people who were psychical (or with free will, so could choose to know the Father) while the left represented the hylics (or people of the physical/material world).