The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit

which also bears the name "The Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians" but is a completely different work from "The Greek Gospel of the Egyptians", was thought lost for many centuries, until two versions were discovered among the codices in the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945.

The book explains the form of Gnosticism practiced by a sect called the Sethians (followers of the Egyptian god Set); their understanding of how the Earth came into being; especially the incarnation (reincarnation?) of Set as Jesus in order to release people's souls from the evil prison that is creation (an inversion of Tammuz worship, which is very much in evidence in the Canonical Gospels).

The work also includes a rather strange hymn, which may be a glossolali - the act of speaking in tongues - or may simply be the absence of vowels imposed on the Greek text by people who were accustomed to the Yehudit (Hebrew) and so didn't need vowels to read the Greek either. The hymn reads "u aei eis aei ei o ei ei os ei" which is perfectly understandable as meaning "who exists as Son for ever and ever. You are what you are, you are who you are" and is obviously a variation on the Yehudit "Eheyeh asher eheyeh - I am that I am" of Exodus 3:14 (compare my comment on this in "The Gospel According to Thomas".

The Sethians began their life long before Christianity, following not Egyptian Set, the uncle and slayer of Osher (Osiris), but the Yisra-Eli version in which Set becomes Shet, or Seth in the English, the redemptive third child of Adam and Chavah. Two oddities in this; first that they should be called Sethians, and not Settians or even Shettians. Second, that they must have known the Egyptian version, and been able to make the logical equation of Osher with Jesus as versions of the Risen Lord, which makes it very peculiar that they worship the killer of the one in the form of the reincarnation of the other.

Such text as there is has been translated faithfully (if somewhat incomprehensibly - but that is the fault of the original, not the translators), and can be found here.

The entire Nag Hammadi library, including its catalogue, can be accessed here.

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