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The Tripartite Tractate says the Father is unbegotten and that no one begot him. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus also points to the Father as the one not born of woman, an idea found often in the Nag Hammadi writings.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Gospel of Thomas 1:15
Nag Hammadi
14 Jesus said to them, “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves; if you pray, you will be condemned; if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits. When you go into any land and travel about in the countryside, if they receive you, eat what they set before you and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you; rather, what comes out of your mouth is what will defile you.” 15 Jesus said, “When you see one who was not born of woman, fall on your faces and worship him; that one is your Father.” 16 Jesus said, “People perhaps think I have come to cast peace upon the world, and they do not know that I have come to cast divisions upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house: three will be against two and two against three, the father against the son and the son against the father, and they will stand as solitary ones.”
Tripartite Tractate 1:10
Nag Hammadi
This is why, strictly speaking, he is single, and (why he) is a god, given that no one (stands in a relation to him) as a god, because no one is his father. For he is unbegotten, and no one else begot him, and no one else created him. Because anyone who is someone else’s father or creator, he also has a father and a creator.
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Notes and References
“... That one is your Father. On the Father in Thomas, see above on 3.4. The theme of the Father as one unborn is common in the Nag Hammadi literature. ‘The Father’ is also the object of vision in GTh 27.2 (‘Unless you observe the Sabbath, you will not see the Father’) and GTh 59 (looking at, [...], and seeing, ‘the living one’). There is variation, however: in GTh 37, the vision is of Jesus; GTh 84 talks of the elect seeing their pre-existent images. [...] See e.g. Tri. Trac. I 51,27–30, and further references in H.W. Attridge & E. Pagels, Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex): Notes (NHS 23; Leiden: Brill, 1985), 222. ...”
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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