The Crucified Book: Sacred Writing in the Age of Valentinus by Anne Starr Kreps (review)

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• The Crucified Book: Sacred Writing in the Age of Valentinus by Anne Starr Kreps
• Pamela Reaves

Anne Starr Kreps
The Crucified Book: Sacred Writing in the Age of Valentinus
Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022
Pp. 186. $65.00.

In The Crucified Book, Anne Starr Kreps explores this distinctive image from the Gospel of Truth as part of the broader textual scene of the second century c.e. Depicting a dying Jesus cloaked in a book and the crucifixion as an act of publication, the Gospel of Truth expands our understanding of early Christian "scriptural practices" (6). Attentive to the bodily and oral dimensions of this gospel, Kreps asserts that "the Gospel of Truth promoted the conception of books as living documents, permitting the generation of religious books by multiple authors as new sources of revelatory authority" (2). She grounds her argument through a series of chapters that productively contextualize and complicate notions of sacred writing. A brief introductory chapter reminds readers of fluidity in early Christian conceptions of gospel and positions Valentinus, whom she identifies as the author of the Gospel of Truth, as a central, rather than peripheral, figure in this "landscape of shifting textualities" (12).

In Chapter One, "The Joyful Gospel," Kreps aligns the Gospel of Truth's interest in continual revelation with contemporary Jewish, Christian, and Roman currents. The Gospel of John and Justin Martyr similarly envision ongoing expressions of the gospel. And Ben Sira, Genesis Rabbah, and Philo provide parallels for the Gospel of Truth's "book encompassed in the flesh" (24). In its expression of a "shape-shifting mode of revelation" (26), the Gospel of Truth is thus not an "outlier" (18). As she considers comparable contemporary views, Kreps effectively unpacks the scriptural dimensions of the text's unusual crucifixion scenes. Jesus, she describes, is "transformed into a scroll of knowledge of the Father, which he published through an oration of its contents" (34); scripture thus operates visually, aurally, and authoritatively, she asserts. The publication of the book involves its ongoing reception as well as risk of corruption. Kreps explains, "The book was 'published' as it was received on the hearts of the truly wise, who could then distribute their own versions" (35). Corruption, a concern apparent in Roman literary culture, is mitigated, Kreps highlights, through the gospel's divine inscription on the hearts of learned followers.

This scriptural community of followers is the focus of Chapter Two, "The Valentinian Gospel as a Scriptural Practice." Here, Kreps casts books of the heart as "interior sacred textuality" (43), exhibited in other Jewish (4 Ezra and Philo) and Christian (Irenaeus) writings and developed in Valentinian traditions (Valentinus, Heracleon, and Ptolemy). This bodily expression of scripture has the potential both to supersede imperfect written forms and to facilitate further production of Valentinian texts. This multiplicity of revelation, Kreps notes, is precisely what irked the opponents of Valentinus and his followers. In Chapter Three, "The Gospel of Truth According to the Christian Heresiologists," she examines how heresiological discourse sets a closed canon against a fluid one. The latter, she highlights, is neither deviant (as demonstrated in the previous chapter) nor theoretical. Rather, it reflects Valentinian practice. Irenaeus and Tertullian, Kreps highlights, "displayed remarkable awareness of their Valentinian opponent's [End Page 135] revelatory epistemology," disputing "the notion that humans could function as eminent texts" (59). Kreps's discussion of Irenaeus's apparent "inversion" (73) of Valentinian modes of reading is a particularly illuminating contribution. She tracks such discourse into the fourth century, when Epiphanius critiques the proliferation of books and their erroneous visionary claims as counter to uniform scripture. Kreps treats the fourth-century Jung Codex (NHC I) as representative of the kind of "living canon" critiqued by the heresiologists. She suggests that the Gospel of Truth, as "a book about books, endorsing a theory of open revelation," encouraged the inclusion of other texts that exhibit varied modes of revelatory authority (87). For Kreps, the organization of the codex, which permits continual revelation, illustrates "that the Valentinian counter-canon was not an invention of the heresiologists, but rather a viable scriptural practice that faded away as orthodoxy crystallized" (64).

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