The Gospel of Truth

A homily, possibly by Valentinus himself, and by a distance the most tender text in the Gnostic corpus. Its subject is forgetting: error is not sin but a fog, a nightmare of running with no ground, and salvation is what happens when the sleeper is called by name and wakes — "as one who wakes from a drunken sleep and returns to himself." No condemnation of anyone anywhere in it. The famous image: the Father holds the perfections of everything within himself, and the one who has knowledge "is like a person who, having been drunk, has become sober and, having come to himself, has restored what is his own."