Overview of Exegesis on the Soul and Nag Hammadi Codex II

Exegesis on the Soul is often considered an oddity among the texts found at Nag Hammadi. Hugo Lundhaug describes it as “an allegorical exposition presented in the form of a mythical narrative interspersed with commentary, quotations, and more or less oblique allusions.”Footnote ⁵ Over eleven manuscript pages, Exeg. Soul offers a narrative of the soul’s descent into the material world, its eventual re-ascent to God, and exhortations for readers that emerge from the narrative. Central to the text’s narrative is that the soul was androgynous ( ; 127.24) while existing alongside the Father, but is defined primarily by her feminine qualities: she has a “feminine name” ( ; 127.20), is “female in her nature” ( ; 127.21), “has her own womb” ( ; 127.22) and was a “virgin” ( ; 127.24).Footnote ⁶ As soon as the soul falls into a body and no longer exists alongside the Father, she is sexually violated by various figures who are described by terms like “robber” ( ), “violent person” ( ), and “adulterer” ( ). After giving birth to children from these sexual encounters, the soul repents and calls upon the Father to restore her alongside him. Much of the tractate, as Madeleine Scopello has examined in depth, focuses on the binary of illicit sexual acts (πορνεία) and repentance (μετάνοια).Footnote ⁷ At this point, the narrator of Exeg. Soul turns to various biblical prooftexts (Jer 3:1–4; Hos 2:4–9; LXX Ezek 16:23–26; 1 Cor 5:9–10; Eph 6:12) to demonstrate that the soul’s sexual exploitation was already prophesied. The narrator then turns back to the narrative of the soul to describe the soul’s baptism and purification by the Father as well as her marriage to the bridegroom awaiting her, through which she leaves behind her experiences in the material body. In doing so, the soul is reborn and ascends to the Father. The rest of Exeg. Soul relays various biblical prooftexts—as well as a Homeric quotation (Od. 4.260–64)—to urge the reader to repent and seek restoration in a manner similar to the soul.

We do not know who wrote Exeg. Soul, and even its date is difficult to pin down. Various scholars have placed the text in Alexandria because of its possible affiliation with Valentinian versions of the Sophia myth or with Alexandrian theologians like Clement and Origen.Footnote ⁸ However, as Lundhaug demonstrates, the text of Exeg. Soul can be effectively compared to Egyptian writers from the second to fifth centuries CE, making it difficult to prove an early date for Exeg. Soul without providing evidence for dismissing a later date.Footnote ⁹ For my own analysis, the exact date of Exeg. Soul is not necessarily important, but rather the fact that this text was read and used by late ancient Egyptian ascetics is significant. As both Lundhaug and Kimberley Fowler have explored,Footnote ¹⁰ the Egyptian monastic usage and literary context of Exeg. Soul helps us better understand how a text allegorically portraying the soul’s descent, sexual violence, and ascent—as well as urging readers to repent—might have been understood alongside other scenes of sexual violence in Codex II.

Victim Blaming and Coerced Sex

Exegesis on the Soul’s portrayal of the soul’s descent into a body and experiences of sexual violence, I will argue below, can be characterized in part as victim blaming. The term was first coined in 1971 by psychologist William Ryan to describe how Black people were blamed for their own oppression in the United States.Footnote ¹¹ While at first it may seem out of place to use such a modern term, the concept of “victim blaming” been deployed to more accurately describe contemporary treatments of sexual violence and has been used to better understand ancient Mediterranean literature. For example, Melissa Kathleen Marturano’s examination of Ovid’s corpus has characterized depictions of sexual violence both in terms of victim blaming and sororophobia (i.e., women behaving in misogynist ways). She defines victim blaming as “attribution of responsibility for sexualized violence to the victim of the attack and the subsequent partial—or even full—exoneration of the sexual abuser,” often portrayed in ancient literature through how (usually male) writers suggest “explicitly or implicitly, that a female figure and her appearance, clothing, character, and social status caused sexualized violence.”Footnote ¹² In other words, victim blaming in terms of sexual violence involves not only claiming that a woman was “asking for it” because of her appearance, but also that the abuser was less responsible for their actions than the abused. Marturano’s scholarship demonstrates that ancient literature like Ovid’s Metamorphoses often follows suit, such that the narrator and their characters blame women for their appearance or actions that lead to sexual violence rather than highlight causal relationships between “male figures and sexualized violence.”Footnote ¹³

Building upon Marturano’s scholarship, I want to demonstrate that early Christian literature like Exeg. Soul follows similar patterns of victim blaming in its narrative portrayal of the soul and her sexual encounters. As noted above, the narrator of Exeg. Soul oscillates between naming the male figures as sexually violating and exploiting the soul and, conversely, claiming that the soul herself consents to her sexual encounters. I will first show this oscillation, particularly in the first half of the text, before analyzing victim blaming in Exeg. Soul in more depth.

The narrator of Exeg. Soul, at times, depicts the soul as being forced into non-consensual sex. The soul’s “fall” ( ; 127.25) into a body is paralleled in the same sentence by her “falling into the hands of many robbers” ( ; 127.26–27). These figures, described as violent people, end up “throwing her around among each other” ( ; 127.28–29), highlighting that they themselves are initiating this violent action through the use of the third-person plural verbal marker -.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, some of these male figures “use her forcefully” ( ; 127.29–30) and are described as actively exploiting the soul in a summary at the end of Exeg. Soul’s narrative opening: “overall, they defiled her, and she […] her virginity” ( ; 127.31–128.1). Given the occasional lacunae in our sole manuscript of the text, some editors and commentators have tried to emend this line in which something happens to the soul’s virginity—suggesting either that “she lost her virginity” ( ) or that “she destroyed her virginity” ( ).Footnote ¹⁵ In both cases but to different degrees, the soul herself is treated as the cause of the loss of her virginal status. When the soul tries to escape some of those who sexually abuse her, others “compel her to live with them and be enslaved to them, like masters, upon the bed” ( ; 128.9–11). Right before the Father discovers the soul’s current state, the narrator notes that these figures “deceive her for a long time” ( ; 128.13–14) as falsely-faithful husbands and “after all this they abandon her and go” ( ; 128.16–17).

As these various examples from the first narrative portion of Exeg. Soul make clear, the soul’s sexual encounters are teeming with language that suggests that other figures coerced and exploited the soul. Many of these sentences start with third-person verbal markers (e.g., -) and often treat the soul as an object, both grammatically and sexually. In Coptic, third-person conjugations can be used either to express an active voice or a “dynamic passive,” a form of passive voice that represents “an entity undergoing some action.”Footnote ¹⁶ While this ambiguity of voice can be clarified with agential prepositions (e.g., “by”) to clarify when a dynamic passive expression is intended, Exeg. Soul does not take this approach but rather leaves open two interpretive possibilities. The soul can be read passively as “being used forcefully,” “being defiled,” “being thrown around,” or actively in which “they used her forcefully,” “they defiled her,” “they threw her around.” In both cases, the soul is the recipient of violent actions initiated by her assailants.

These male figures are never named or identified beyond being called “robbers,” “violent people,” “adulterers,” or simply “they,” leaving ambiguous the perpetrators of sexual violence and partially absolving them from responsibility or recognition for their actions. Maddalena Scopello suggests that these figures are “the seductive archons of the soul” by comparison to other Nag Hammadi texts that present sexual abusers of biblical figures as archons.Footnote ¹⁷ While scholars offer suggestions as to who these figures are based on the narrative’s allegory of the soul and related narratives of archons sexually violating Eve in texts like Hypostasis of the Archons, Exeg. Soul does not identify them, but rather leaves the soul’s rapists and abusers faceless and anonymous. Additionally, both the narrator’s and the Father’s attention fall upon the soul rather than the abusers; the focus of the narrative turns to the soul’s redemption and ascent, and pays little attention to the abusers beyond their role in sexually violating and misleading the soul. In doing so, Exeg. Soul may implicitly exonerate the soul’s abusers by not narrating the Father’s anger at their exploitation of the soul or any form of punishment directed at them. Instead, the abusers are used as a foil for the soul’s bridegroom with whom she unites after her re-ascent.Footnote ¹⁸

Along with language that suggests the unnamed abusers sexually exploit the soul, we also briefly encounter language of enslavement: the soul is coerced into living with some abusers and being enslaved to them upon the bed as though they were her enslavers. Within the allegory of the soul’s descent, Exeg. Soul uses the metaphor of slavery to depict the soul as rendering enslaved sexual services to enslavers. As scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have demonstrated especially over the last few decades, “slaveowners in the ancient world exercised complete domination over their legal possessions, even when they were humans, including the capacity to do what they wished to and with these persons’ bodies.”Footnote ¹⁹ Enslaved women were often sexually abused and exploited by their enslavers, such that enslaved persons were made victims of sexual violence. In this case, the soul is compelled both to live with some of these abusers and compelled to function as if she were enslaved, offering sexual services to them without concern for her own desires or bodily autonomy.

As just noted, some portions of Exeg. Soul portray the soul as being coerced and sexually victimized while absolving the abusers of much responsibility. The text, however, also participates in another prominent trope of victim blaming: claiming that the woman “asked for it” or had some choice in the matter. While the soul is often characterized as consenting to sexual encounters based on appearance, clothing, or behavior, Exeg. Soul narratively and grammatically claims at times that the soul participates in her own victimization. Although some abusers forcefully use the soul in her new body, others “persuade her with a deceitful gift” ( ; 127.30–31), blurring the line between consent and coercion. The narrator describes the soul, right after losing her virginity, as “fornicating with her body and giving herself to each of them” ( ; 128.1–2), with the soul actively handing over herself to those whom she considers as though they were husbands. Eventually, the soul is depicted as “repenting from the fornication which she did” ( ; 128.30–31) and calling upon the Father. Even then, the narrator notes that the Father plans to restore the soul to her previous heavenly state when “he sees her in such a state; then he will consider her worthy of his mercy upon her, since the griefs that came upon her are numerous because she abandoned her house” 129.2–5). The Father in Exeg. Soul acts to save the soul not from sexual violence, but from the emotional distress and grief that she experiences afterwards—and even then, only after she sighs and repents of her purported complicity in the abuse, according to the narrator. At various points in the text’s narration of the soul’s earthly experience, the soul herself is portrayed as placing herself in such a vulnerable position because of her decision to leave the safety of existing alone alongside the Father, such that the Father does not intervene until the soul begins to understand how she “asked for it” by abandoning her post.

Not only does the narrator present the soul, at times, as to blame for her own victimization, but the soul herself is depicted as recognizing her own role in presenting herself as a vulnerable body when she says to the Father: “save me, my Father! Look, I will give an account to you, since I abandoned my house and ran from my virginal room” ; 128.34–129.1). Additionally, Exeg. Soul’s citations of biblical passages expressly present the fornication of the soul as prophesied and as the soul’s own fault. For example, the citation from Jeremiah claims that “she herself fornicated” ( ; 129.12–13), with an emphatic pronoun highlighting the soul’s decision. Exeg. Soul’s citation of Hosea labels the actions as “her fornication” ( ; 129.26) and “her adultery” ( ; 129.28), and the Ezekiel citation is presented as claiming that “you built brothels” ( ; 130.15–16). Much like how a contemporaneous monastic Coptic writer, Shenoute, deployed the prophetic books’ use of sexual language and πορνεία to describe the “the sins of Israel, Jerusalem, or the nations” as commensurate to “the sins of the monastery,” Exegesis on the Soul argues that even the prophets predicted the soul’s πορνεία.Footnote ²⁰ Exegesis on the Soul summarizes its long list of biblical citations by claiming that “as long as the soul keeps running here and there, having sex with whomever she might meet and defiling herself, she exists suffering what she deserves” . While Exeg. Soul does, at some points, present the abusers as instigators of violence, the narrator, biblical citations, and speech placed in the mouth of the corporeal soul shift blame onto the soul herself for the sexual violence she experienced.

Our translations and commentaries on Exeg. Soul complicate the matter further by how they translate Greek loanwords like and . Those without Coptic or Greek in their linguistic repertoire are left dependent on whether translators read πορνεία as “prostitution,” “fornication,” or other forms of illicit sexual activities.Footnote ²¹ For example, Robinson’s translation reads this term as “prostitution” without much explanation for how this term might be read as a professionalized act of sex workers in the Roman Mediterranean, whereas Gillian Beattie notes that prostitution is treated in Exeg. Soul as the “synecdoche for all inappropriate involvement in the world.”Footnote ²² Scopello oscillates between calling the sexual actions that the soul participates in “prostitution,” “fornication,” and “adultery,” splitting πορνεία into two different French terms.Footnote ²³ Additionally, she notes that the unnamed abusers “treat her as a πόρνη, a whore,” adding another translational option.Footnote ²⁴ Given that prostitution was a profession occupied in large part by enslaved persons in the Roman Mediterranean, its use to translate porneia and describe the soul’s sexual activity may condition how readers see descriptions of her acting as though enslaved to her abusers.Footnote ²⁵ For example, it could leave the reader of Exeg. Soul in interpretative ambiguity: should “prostitution” be understood in this context as the soul being coerced and forced into sex work? Is this “fornication” or acting as a “whore” something that the soul has some level of autonomy in regarding her participation?

We might frame the narrative of sexual violence and victim blaming experienced by the soul through Rhiannon Graybill’s critique of applying liberal notions of consent to ancient narratives of rape. As Graybill argues, the idea of consent as the dividing line between sex and rape emerges from the Enlightenment subject, and consequently often fails to account for intersectional identities or other forms of psychological, emotional, or bodily discomfort or subjection.Footnote ²⁶ She points in particular to moments in which scenes of sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible that have been described by scholars as rape (e.g., Dinah in Gen 34) can be “fuzzy” and ambiguous, and ought to lead to further analysis of what can and cannot be said about the desires or interests of characters within such biblical narratives.Footnote ²⁷ In the case of Exeg. Soul, the narrator wants the reader to approach the abusers as untrustworthy, bad characters by calling them “robbers” and “violent people”; meanwhile, the soul is depicted by the narrator as seeking out a suitable husband and frustratingly failing to find anyone beyond the abusive and deceptive adulterers. This oscillation between presenting the soul as the object of sexual violence and the subject who fornicates and repents with multiple sexual partners offers readers of Exeg. Soul with, at the very least, a messy narrative of sex that does not provide an instantly clear picture of the soul’s experiences and treatment when it becomes embodied.

Slut Shaming the Promiscuous Soul

Along with arguing that the soul is blamed in Exeg. Soul for the sexual violence it experiences, I want to suggest that the soul is also slut shamed at certain moments in the narrative. Like “victim blaming,” “slut shaming” is a modern phrase that requires some definition and justification before applying it to ancient Mediterranean literature. In her examination of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4, Meredith J. C. Warren argues that commentators who characterize Jesus’s treatment of the Samaritan woman as “radical inclusivity” overlook how Jesus participates in a culture of slut shaming by degrading the woman for having multiple husbands over her lifetime. Warren defines slut shaming as “a means of restricting women’s sexual activity by using a woman’s sexual history, reputation, or activity to discredit her,” which “connects the perceived promiscuity or sexual deviance with shame.”Footnote ²⁸ Slut shaming thus involves turning a woman’s sexual activity or sexual reputation into something that ought to make a woman experience shame and discomfort, as well as treating such sexual activity as a reason to not believe women or treat women with respect. Warren argues that both the writer of John and modern scholars have often participated, knowingly or not, in slut shaming the Samaritan woman through treating women as less-than-fully-human and as needing men to evaluate and determine women’s sexual activity and bodily autonomy.

The point here is not to contrast victim blaming with slut shaming, but rather to explore how these rhetorical strategies can work in tandem. While Exeg. Soul argues that the soul’s sexual promiscuity (and intricate intermingling with the non-ascetic experiences of the material world) leads to her downfall, my aim is to point out how representations of sexual violence and gendered stereotypes function to convince the reader that the soul’s downfall is its own fault. Ambiguity and complexity abound in the gendered representations present in Exeg. Soul. As Kimberly Fowler has noted, “both females and males are represented variously at certain points in the text. For instance, while the male adulterers are responsible for drawing Soul into sinful acts and defiling her, she (at this point specifically identified as female) is a willing accomplice, and not a helpless victim.”Footnote ²⁹ The fact that there is ambiguity around whether she or her abusers are primarily to blame for the soul’s condition is exactly the point: victimization works to obscure responsibility, disperse agency without consideration for unequal power dynamics, and maintain gendered hierarchies.

Within the narrative of Exeg. Soul, there is only one instance where the soul’s shame regarding her sexual activity is explicitly named. Near the opening of the text, after she has turned from abuser to abuser in search of one who will not be an adulterer, the soul is coerced into acting like an enslaved woman rendering sexual services to an enslaver. Immediately after, the narrator states that “out of shame she no longer dares to leave them, but they continue to deceive her for a long time, [acting] like faithful, true husbands, as if they really valued her. And after all these things, they abandon her and go” ; 128.12–18). Although the various abusers leave the soul without any recourse or chastisement, the soul is depicted as internalizing the shame of being sexually violated and of continually failing to find a faithful husband.

Exegesis on the Soul’s prophetic citation of Jeremiah, additionally, alludes to the soul’s shame or lack thereof. The quote (LXX Jer 3:1–4) is positioned so as to accuse the soul of acting in adulterous ways if she pursues multiple men in succession, thus committing and two other notable vices: “becoming shameless with everyone” ( ; 129.19–20) and “not calling on me as kinsman or as father or originator of your virginity” ( ; 129.20–22). The citation from Jeremiah is used to accuse the soul of not experiencing shame immediately for her sexual activity, since the soul only expressly exhibits shame after having had multiple sexual partners. The soul’s shame only emerges when she begins to question whether it is worthwhile to turn from one sexual partner to another in search of a faithful husband, and only sets in after “she sighed and repented” ( ; 128.6–7). Additionally, the Jeremiah citation emphasizes how the woman being discussed fails to turn to a male family member before committing these sexual acts. The assumption underlying the prophet’s statement is that the family member, as “originator of your virginity” ( ; 129.22), ought to have some say in the decisions that the woman has over her own body so as to make sure she avoids πορνεία.

Within the context of Exeg. Soul, the writer offers this citation to suggest that the soul spatially separated from her father and thus committed shameful sexual acts because of not being under a man’s sexual supervision. The Father seemingly evaluates her sexual acts and only has mercy upon her after shame has set in and she actively seeks repentance and restoration. Once the soul weeps and repents in front of the Father, he not only has mercy upon her but also “will make her womb turn from the outside again and will turn it inward” ( 131.20–21) so as to restore her body to its original state. The soul’s body is manipulated by the Father in order to cleanse her both from the fornication she experienced and shame of her sexual activity, making her dependent upon the Father’s evaluation and treatment of her body. The soul in Exeg. Soul experiences some characteristics of slut shaming through how she is portrayed as experiencing grief and shame at the fact that she cannot maintain a single faithful sexual partner as well as that the Father only intervenes once that shame has been experienced, such that he determines when and how to alter the sexual activities of the soul.

Ascetic Sexual Harmony and Dissonance

Reading instances of victim blaming and slut shaming the soul in Exeg. Soul does not occur in an interpretative bubble for either ancient or modern readers. Rather, our only extant copy of Exeg. Soul survives in Codex II of the Nag Hammadi Codices. In recent years, scholars have been interested in how to read the Nag Hammadi Codices in their late ancient Egyptian context in ways that account for the audience that most likely compiled and read them (i.e., Pachomian monks) and for the ways that readers would encounter texts within a single codex.Footnote ³⁰ Scholarship by Lance Jenott, Kimberley Fowler, and Hugo Lundhaug, for example, have analyzed specific texts within Codex II (including Exeg. Soul) in order to imagine how monastic readers might approach and be edified by such literature.Footnote ³¹ Additionally, Codex II itself has garnered particular attention as a set of texts that can be examined together to better understand what a late ancient Egyptian reader might gain from the literature compiled within it. Some studies, like those of Celene Lillie, Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Eduard Iricinschi, and Alexander Potts, explore Codex II more holistically through lenses of historiography, narratology, book production, and Roman mythmaking.Footnote ³²

All of these aforementioned studies will help contribute to my analysis in this section of Exeg. Soul as a text read by Egyptian ascetic practitioners who also encountered various scenes of sexual violence throughout Codex II. My goal here is to ask how the victim blaming and slut shaming of the soul relates to or differs from sexual violence enacted against figures in earlier texts of Codex II, like Eve. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how sexual violence is treated somewhat differently in the case of Exeg. Soul. While retellings of Genesis contained in Codex II (e.g., Ap. John, Nat. Rulers, Orig. World) treat sexual violence against Eve and Norea as a violent act that stands at the origin of human sexual desire and is more explicitly a condemnable action of the archons, Exeg. Soul fails to condemn the soul’s abusers while nonetheless using her abuse as a discursive tool to think with. Sexual ethics in Codex II are developed throughout and meant to be inculcated in the ascetic reader, but present the reader with various levels of narratival proximity to the experiences of the characters.

Codex II was undoubtedly compiled to encourage ascetic practices among a group of late ancient Egyptian Christians. Eduard Iricinschi argues that the scribes who produced the codex were part of a literary network that had shared reading interests and texts that supported monastic social structures and ascetic ethics. Iricinschi sees Codex II as a mixture of a few different texts with an ascetically-minded metanarrative: retellings of Genesis 1–3, reflections on Jesus’s and Paul’s teachings about the body and sex (Gos. Thom.; Gos. Phil.), and exhortations to repent and avoid sexual contact (Exeg. Soul; Bk. Thom.).Footnote ³³ He argues that a literate worker chose to compile these seven texts specifically “in order to create a meta-narrative that reconciles Genesis 1–3 with monastic ascetic practice,” thus arranging the material to explore the danger of the archons in the creation of the world, how Paul and Jesus’s teachings challenge the ethical and sexual norms of this world, and how to escape the world’s ethical and sexual norms through repentance and avoidance.Footnote ³⁴ While only a small portion of his overall project is dedicated to Exeg. Soul, Iricinschi suggests that it functions as a bridge between the three cosmological retellings of Genesis (Ap. John, Nat. Rulers, Orig. World) and the exploration of “the role of sexuality in creation,” as if providing a bottom-line for how Christian sexual ethics ought to be performed in light of the fallen state of creation.Footnote ³⁵ Additionally, as Gilhus argues, Codex II is overwhelmingly invested in narrating creation and exhorting readers to return to an exemplary mode of life (particularly in terms of gender and sexuality) that existed at creation.Footnote ³⁶ Codex II, and Exeg. Soul in particular, supports the ascetic aims of Pachomian cenobitic monasticism through exhorting a life in which worldly pleasures and sexual activity are avoided.Footnote ³⁷

Not only are the themes of repentance, prayer, and self-control amidst sexual and other material desires and realities of the world manifested throughout Codex II, but also various scenes of sexual violence toward women. Figures like Sophia, Eve, Norea, and the soul in various texts contained in Codex II experience or are threatened by alienation, defilement, and sexual violence. The soul in Exeg. Soul is, as Alexander Potts explores, a character through whom a reader might be invited to share in the experience of falling and restoration—and to position male readers of the text “to view the focalized narrative space of pained, repentant, searching and salvific feminine characters.”Footnote ³⁸ He notes that male readers throughout Codex II are offered multiple opportunities to go through “experiential divergence” through empathizing with the plight of female characters like Sophia, Eve, Norea, and the soul. Potts argues that “scenes across Codex II stage grounds for enacting experientiality through empathetic and transparent immersion with specific characters,” allowing both male and female readers in late ancient Egyptian monastic contexts to have some level of perspective-sharing and emotional response to the experiences of characters.Footnote ³⁹ Overall, I find such analyses of the role of Exeg. Soul helpful for contextualizing it within Codex II: it offers readers another narrative avenue to explore the entangled nature of sexuality and the creation of the world, as well as provides an immersive narratological experience for readers to reconsider their own practices and ethics in light of the relationship between the material world and sexual violence.

Building upon such scholarship, I want to make two additional points about the role of Exeg. Soul in Codex II as a text that was compiled to produce particular sexual ethics in an ascetic context. The first is that the soul represents a different type of female character for readers to encounter compared to Sophia, Eve, or Norea in the earlier retellings of Genesis because it is an entity that is understood to not only exist in the heavenly sphere or antediluvian past, but also within ascetic practitioners themselves. Even though readers can experientially share and empathize with characters like Eve and Norea, as Potts rightly argues, sexual violence against the soul might be read as more personal or “hitting closer to home” in that the soul is considered part of the reader’s own self. The second is that sexual violence committed against the soul in Exeg. Soul might share similar persuasive goals with the rest of Codex II (i.e., to encourage ascetic values), but more directly puts the blame of initiating or acting upon sexual desire on the victim of abuse than do earlier texts in the codex. While Sophia, Eve, and Norea resist and avoid abuse, the soul is presented less clearly as a figure that avoids or resists her sexual abuse until the point of repentance.

The distinction between characters offered to readers of Codex II with which they might empathize can be seen through the proximity of the soul to the reader. The sexual abuse of characters like Eve and Norea or the fall of Sophia in earlier treatises in Codex II might, to borrow from David Frankfurter’s analysis of Christian martyr narratives, activate the “prurient gaze” through which “arousal itself it mixed—indeed, safely mixed—with horror, outrage, or disgust, and it derives as much from the fantasy of pain, passivity, self-obliteration, and punitive rage as it does from the representation of sexual fulfillment.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Gospel of Philip even states this erotic imagination outright in the middle of its argument that a woman should only be seen having sex by her husband or other family members in the bridal chamber, such that others must “yearn just to listen to her voice and to enjoy her ointment, and let them feed from the crumbs that fall from the table like dogs” (82.19–23). Codex II is teeming with scenes of sexual desire and sexual violence, as well as constructs the fall and restoration of humanity around sexual ethics and kinship relations. Exegesis on the Soul, then, might function as the prurient gaze turned inwards, such that the late ancient ascetic reader is confronted with a presentation of sexual violence that not only impacts antediluvian human ancestors but that directly impacts their own body and soul. As Exeg. Soul notes in the midst of its string of biblical citations, the πορνεία of the soul and its experience of sexual violence is the precursor for πορνεία of the body (130.34–131.2). Consequently, ascetic readers are called not only to gaze on the sexual violence that caused the creation of the material world and the fall of humanity, but to repent of their own soul’s participation in this cosmic πορνεία. While Exeg. Soul speaks of the soul in the singular and presents its backstory as an entity that existed alongside God until her fall into the body, her story is meant both to encourage ascetic practitioners not to succumb to desires made possible within the material world and to mimic the soul’s repentance.Footnote ⁴¹

Along with presenting the soul’s need for restoration as a more proximate reality for the ascetic reader, Exeg. Soul’s presentation of the soul differs in part from earlier depictions of sexually violated women in Codex II through its treatment of their resistance to abusers. While Ap. John portrays the chief ruler as “defiling” (ϫⲱϩⲙ; 24.16–18) Eve and impregnating her with two sons, Elohim and Yahweh, Nat. Rulers and Orig. World more explicitly present Eve and Norea as resisting their would-be rapists. In Nat. Rulers, the archons lust after Eve, but she laughs and evades them by producing a materialized shadow that they defile (89.18–90.12), leading to the birth of Cain. Similarly, when the rulers attempt to rape Eve’s daughter Norea, she reminds them that they failed to defile her mother and calls upon divine support to save her from being sexually violated (92.20–93.2). In Orig. World, Eve likewise evades sexual violence by leaving behind a physical form that is raped by the rulers (116.8–117.5). As Celene Lillie explores in her analysis of Eve’s rape by the archons in Orig. World, Nat. Rulers, and Ap. John, such texts “show a savvy psychological understanding of the effects of sexual violence in the complicated dissociation of Eve and also the effects of some kind of movement or reintegration of Eve after her rape.”Footnote ⁴² Eve is characterized elsewhere in Codex II through a complex narrative of avoidance of assault, dissociation, and overcoming her divine predators. Exegesis on the Soul differs from these earlier scenes in Codex II of Eve and Norea’s outsmarting of the archons, instead portraying the soul as desperately seeking a faithful husband and being continually deceived by her abusers. Rather than allowing readers to experientially relate to or empathize with the bodily and cognitive dissociation of rape like in the scenes of Eve and the rulers, Exeg. Soul offers a different reading experience in which the soul fails multiple times to escape the deception of her abusers until she finally sighs, repents, and is restored by the Father.

Codex II presents the ascetic reader with multiple narratives of sexual violence that often comment on the relationship between embodiment, sex, procreation, desire, and alienation from God. For example, the Apoc. John notes immediately after the chief ruler’s rape of Eve and birth of Elohim and Yahweh that sexual desire exists in humans because the ruler planted it in Eve (24.27–29); divine sexual assault becomes the origin of humanity’s sexual desire, which the writers of our various treatises hoped could be undone through sexual asceticism, repentance, and prayer. Likewise, the Gos. of Phil. presents uncoupled men or women as dangerous and lustful, arguing that defilement occurs because of a “male sitting alone” or a “beautiful woman sitting alone” who are vulnerable to sexual violence. The solution offered is coupling (in the form of marriage and the mirrored bridal chamber) in order to stymie such sexual advances.Footnote ⁴³ Such concern for lust between uncoupled men and women also plays a significant role in Jesus’s dialogue with Thomas in the Bk. Thom., concluding Codex II, in which desire and lust are characterized as bestial, madness, and pollution that contaminates material bodies.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Ingvild Sælid Gilhus argues, the monastic literary consumers of Codex II made sense of the fallen world in which they lived and their aim to return to a prelapsarian state through living an ascetic life that gave “them strength to forsake what their ascetic training programmed them to forsake—not least sexual temptations.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Navigating the world as a proper (ascetic) Christian meant navigating desire, lust, sexual violence, and sexual vulnerability.

Exegesis on the Soul offers one angle by which those who read and treat Codex II as a purposeful compilation might understand both sexual violence and the failure to find one’s proper partner as two events that ought not exist in an idealized world. However, Exeg. Soul does not merely present the soul as passively captured in the sexual and ethical messiness of the material world, but as a potential participant in both her degradation and restoration. The reader—not to mention the reader’s own soul—becomes the battleground upon which Exeg. Soul works to suggest ascetic practice and prayer as an antidote to the promiscuity of the soul and the danger that it could bring upon the body. Differing in part from the rest of Codex II, Exeg. Soul applies the threat of sexual violence as well as the possibility of being victim blamed and slut shamed more directly to the reader, rather than treating sexual violence as a more abstract cosmic cause for the fallenness of creation that stemmed from the first humans. The characterization of the soul as feminized and sexually vulnerable in Exeg. Soul urges ascetic readers to protect their own gendered, vulnerable soul from sexualized spiritual violence they associated with desire and lust.