The Thunder: Perfect Mind

by Hal Taussig

What do Toni Morrison, Umberto Eco and Ridley Scott have in common? All of them have been fascinated by an ancient poem from the Nag Hammadi codices, The Perfect Mind, and have evoked its words in their work. This poem of provocative self-declarations by a mostly female, sometimes divine figure has already had a full life in the contemporary public imagination. Yet scholarship on Thunder has been limited, and has paid too little attention to the powerful and puzzling I at its center. What might this poem have meant to its ancient audience? How does it complicate and change contemporary images of early Christianity? What are the poem's possibilities for meaning now? In this fresh, post-gnostic translation, and the first book-length treatment in English devoted to Thunder, the history, social world and literary composition of the poem gain new attention and significance, as do the compelling twists and turns of gender and status that the voice of Thunder takes.

168 pages, Paperback

Published November 24, 2009

About the author

A founding member of the Jesus Seminar, HAL TAUSSIG is a pastor, professor of Biblical literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and professor of early Christianity at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He is the author of In the Beginning Was the Meal; The Thunder: Perfect Mind; A New Spiritual Home; Reimagining Life Together in America (with Catherine Nerney); Jesus Before God; Reimagining Christian Origins (with Elizabeth Castelli), and others.