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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Crucified Book: Sacred Writing in the Age of Valentinus by Anne Starr Kreps David Brakke The Crucified Book: Sacred Writing in the Age of Valentinus. By Anne Starr Kreps. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2022. Pp. 186. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-5387-0.) According to the Gospel of Truth, preserved in Nag Hammadi Codex I (“Jung Codex”), “Jesus appeared. He rolled himself in that book and was nailed to a tree and published the edict of the Father on the cross” (1). This striking image of the crucified Jesus as a crucified book inspires Anne Starr Kreps’s innovative study of scriptural practices among Valentinians and other Christians and Jews of the second and third centuries. Kreps contributes significantly to recent scholarship that revises the standard narrative of the emergence of Christian scriptures and the development of the canon. Valentinian Christians, Kreps argues, effaced the distinctions between human being and text and among Christian, Jewish, and other revelatory books: “The body-as-book, then, signaled a mode of holy book that resisted Irenaeus’s call for a fixed collection of written texts” (p. 117). The Crucified Book consists of four chapters divided into two parts and framed by an introduction and conclusion. The two chapters of part 1 focus on Valentinus and the Valentinians. Chapter 1 studies closely two passages that present Jesus’s death as the publication of a book; Kreps contextualizes this image within Jewish and Christian interpretations of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 and within Roman book culture. Although she admits that it cannot be proved that Valentinus wrote this work, she accepts his authorship and says that attribution to another Valentinian would not affect her reading (p. 19). Chapter 2 examines the implications of understanding the book as at once divine, human, and textual for how Valentinian Christians wrote, read, and transmitted sacred texts (their scriptural practices). The fragments of Valentinus, Heracleon, and Ptolemy evince an openness to the continued dissemination of revelation in multiple books. Part 2 considers early Christians who opposed the Valentinian scriptural program and Jews whose practices resembled those of the Valentinians. Chapter 3 shows that the heresiologists Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius recognized the Valentinians’ fluid approach to scripture, claimed that it led to contradiction and [End Page 789] error, and opposed it with the notion of a limited canon. Kreps suggests that the Jung Codex provides evidence for the persistence of the Valentinian “theory of open revelation” in fourth-century Egypt (p. 87). Working from two rabbinic stories of “Jewish sages mutating into scrolls upon their timely deaths” (p. 92), Chapter 4 argues that the rabbis also developed a “corpora of living books” with illuminating similarities with and differences from Valentinian practice (p. 114). A summary cannot capture this book’s many stimulating ideas, nor can it replicate its lucid, often eloquent prose. Kreps works easily with sources in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Hebrew, and she adduces revealing comparative materials from across the Mediterranean; the book fulfills the Divinations series’ goal of “rereading late ancient religion.” I might complicate Kreps’s account by placing the Valentinians Ptolemy and Heracleon closer to Irenaeus and farther from Valentinus (Gospel of Truth and fragments) than she does; for example, I think that when Ptolemy invested authority in “the words of our Savior,” he had in mind written gospels, not oral traditions (p. 57). Nonetheless, as Kreps notes, I coined the term “scriptural practices” a decade ago as an invitation to scholars to write less teleological histories of the New Testament and early Christian literature. The Crucified Book represents precisely the kind of work that I hoped to see. I enthusiastically recommend it to historians of Christianity interested in textuality, canon formation, and what we used to call “Gnosticism.” David Brakke The Ohio State University Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press