(Colloque international, Québec, Université Laval, 13 avril 2018)
It is in the 18th century, when the Gnostics were still known only by what their opponents had said of them, that the first direct sources on “Gnosticism” came to light in Egypt and began to make their way to Europe. Among these Coptic sources are the voluminous Askew Codex, which contains a text known today as the Pistis Sophia , and the Bruce Codex, which has preserved at least two important Gnostic treatises: the so-called “Two Books of Ieou ”, as well as an acephalous and incomplete text, which would come to be referred to as the Untitled Text of the Bruce Codex. Unfortunately, these three texts were soon overshadowed by the discovery, in 1945 near the modern town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, of forty or so distinct, and mostly Gnostic, texts. It is in this context, following the volume editor’s work on the Untitled Treatise of the Bruce Codex in preparation for the publication of a new critical edition, French translation, and a study of the text, that a workshop entirely devoted to this still largely ignored and underused Gnostic treatise was organized on April 13th, 2018, at Université Laval, Québec, Canada. This one-day conference gathered seven scholars, both early in their career and established, whose contributions shed new light on this difficult but rich and fruitful text, offering new perspectives and new avenues for research.
