THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP

The Gospel According to Philip is a Gnostic gospel, probably of the Valentinian school, written in Coptic in the second half of the 2nd century, probably from a lost Greek original. The pseudepigraphic attribution is to Philip the Apostle. It contains some sayings of Jesus, and pays particular attention to the teachings on the sacraments, to which it adds that of the "bridal chamber". Lost with the extinction of Gnosticism, unmentioned by the Church Fathers, a thirty-five-page manuscript dating from the 4th century was rediscovered in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi codices (codice II, tractate 3). Its importance is linked to the fact that it sheds light on the sacraments of a Christian Gnostic current, in particular on the peculiar sacrament of the bridal chamber. The Gospel According to Philip is particularly well-known to the public because it was cited by the novelist Dan Brown in his popular work The Da Vinci Code (2003).