The Hymn of the Pearl (also Hymn of the Soul, Hymn of the Robe of Glory or Hymn of Judas Thomas the Apostle) is a passage from the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. In this work, originally written in Syriac, the Apostle Thomas sings the anthem while praying for him and other prisoners. Some researchers think the national anthem before the laws, it appears only in a Syriac manuscript and a Greek manuscript of the Acts of Thomas. The author of the hymn is unknown, but it is believed that it was composed by the Syriac gnosticBardaisan because of some parallels between his life and the anthem.
The song tells the story of a boy, "the son of the king of kings", which was sent to Egypt to retrieve a pearl of a snake. During the quest, he is seduced by the Egyptians and forgets his origin and his family. However, a letter is sent from the king of kings to remind him of his past. When the boy receives the letter, he remembers his mission to retrieve the pearl and performance. That boy is implicit rather than Thomas Jesus is indicated by the assertion that it is possible in line next to his older brother, the brother anonymous not otherwise mentioned in the text.
The hymn is commonly interpreted as a Gnostic view of the human condition, that we are spirits lost in a world of matter and the memory of our true origin. This state of things May be mitigated by a revelation message issued by a messenger, a role is generally attributed to Jesus . The letter is a symbolic representation of gnosis.
The anthem has been preserved and retained particularly in Manicheism - a version of it appears in the context of a North African Manichaean Psalm book written in Coptic, called the Psalms of Thomas. The Hymn of the Pearl has been admired by orthodox Christian thinkers.
He who will know our great Power will become invisible, and fire will not be able to consume him. But it will purge and destroy all of your possessions. For everyone in whom my form will appear will be saved, from (the age of) seven days up to one hundred and twenty years. (Those) whom I constrained to gather all that is fallen - and the writings of our great Power, in order that he may inscribe your name in our great light - and their thoughts and their works may be ended, that they may be purged, and be scattered and be destroyed, and be gathered in the place which no one in it sees. But you will see me, and you will prepare your dwelling places in our great Power.
Know how what has departed came to be, in order that you may know how to discern what lives to become: of what appearance that aeon is, or what kind it is, or how it will come to be. Why do you not ask what kind you will become, (or) rather how you came to be?
Discern what size the water is, that it is immeasurable (and) incomprehensible, both its beginning and its end. It supports the earth; it blows in the air where the gods and the angels are. But in him who is exalted above all these there is the fear and the light, and in him are my writings revealed. I have given them as a service to the creation of the physical things, for it is not possible for anyone to stand without that One, nor is it possible for the aeon to live without him. It is he who possesses what is in him by discerning (it) in purity.
