The Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth (NHC VI,6), the Prayer of Thanksgiving (NHC VI,7), and the Asclepius (NHC VI,8): Hermetic Texts in Nag Hammadi and Their Bipartite View of Man

Abstract

In an article from 2017, I introduced the study of the anthropological framework of Nag Hammadi texts and established the existence in this corpus of two anthropological patterns, the bipartite and tripartite. The present study continues the analysis by means of an exhaustive investigation of the evidence provided by the three Hermetic treatises included in Nag Hammadi Codex VI, namely, the Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth, the Prayer of Thanksgiving, and the fragment of Asclepius. It concludes that, far from presenting a tripartite anthropological framework, “die für die Gnosis typische trichotomische Anthropologie,” in the words of Karl-Wolfgang Tröger, these three Hermetic treatises only include a bipartite of view of the human being.