Some say that Mariam was impregnated by the Holy Spirit *. They are confused, they know not what they say. Whenever has a female been impregnated by a female? .... And the Lord was not going to say ‘my Father [in] the heavens', unless indeed he had another father- but rather he said simply [‘my Father'] (The Gospel of Philips,18)

(* Considered feminine by the Gnostics).

Those who say that the Lord first died and then arose, are confused. For first he arose and (then) he died. If someone first acquires the resurrection, he will not die (The Gospel of Philips, 22).

Before we commence discussions of these gospels we should point out a serious weakness of Indian scholarship. Our scholars entirely rely on the English translations of the original works and have never read the Greek, Coptic, Hebrew or Arabic originals so as to get the nuances and meanings relevant to us. A simple example will suffice: the original Egyptian word for what is known as pyramids in English to us is MRU (the vowel ‘e' is not written in this language). A Hindu will immediately link it to Meru, a mountain sacred to all Indian faiths. This immediately changes our whole perspective of these structures. Hence when we attempt to fathom the significance of the Gnostic gospels to us, we really can not do full justice in linking them to Indian philosophical thought. What is done below is only a superficial survey of this literature. In a few places our analogous terminology and references are pointed out.

A list (partial) of the available Gnostic works is given at the end.  Surveying all of them is not possible here and we only give a broad picture of its contents by quoting a few passages from some of them. We should also remember that the literature unearthed in Nag Hammadi is a Coptic translation of the original Greek works and hence it is quite likely that some of the original flavour is lost in translation. Another important point to note is that all Christian literature including the New Testament is ‘pseudonymous', i.e. forged in the name of an apostle or group of apostles.