So in Hebrew and Aramaic, words have only two genders: male or female. Unlike many other languages, there’s not a neutral gender.
So you have ‘mother’ or ‘father’ but not ‘parent’. Or ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ but not ‘child.’
One of the sayings (#22) in this text has the following line:
When you make the two into one, […] and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female
There’s a fragmented reference to what appears to be a “true mother” in saying 101 in contrast to a human mother, and then in saying 105 quoted above it refers to knowing a father and mother, much as it regularly refers to ‘knowing’ one is the child of a “living Father” elsewhere in the work.
One interpretation of the sayings about a mother or a father would be that it’s referring to two different entities. You see this crop up with later Gnostics (this text is pre-Gnostic).
But in light of saying 22 and knowing about the constraints of a possible Hebrew or Aramaic origin for sayings contained here, another interpretation (and the one I’m inclined to) was that these aren’t sayings about an exclusively masculine ‘Father’ or a feminine “true mother” but are still within the context of monotheism with the perspective of a dual natured single ‘Parent’ that has characteristics of both a father and mother.
This would be in keeping with the later followers of this text who saw the divine itself as broght forth by an original hermaphroditic (i.e. both male and female) primordial Adam, but here we’re veering off into the dualistic cosmology of this text and group which is much too complicated for this already lengthy comment.
So in Hebrew and Aramaic, words have only two genders: male or female. Unlike many other languages, there’s not a neutral gender.
So you have ‘mother’ or ‘father’ but not ‘parent’. Or ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ but not ‘child.’
One of the sayings (#22) in this text has the following line:
There’s a fragmented reference to what appears to be a “true mother” in saying 101 in contrast to a human mother, and then in saying 105 quoted above it refers to knowing a father and mother, much as it regularly refers to ‘knowing’ one is the child of a “living Father” elsewhere in the work.
One interpretation of the sayings about a mother or a father would be that it’s referring to two different entities. You see this crop up with later Gnostics (this text is pre-Gnostic).
But in light of saying 22 and knowing about the constraints of a possible Hebrew or Aramaic origin for sayings contained here, another interpretation (and the one I’m inclined to) was that these aren’t sayings about an exclusively masculine ‘Father’ or a feminine “true mother” but are still within the context of monotheism with the perspective of a dual natured single ‘Parent’ that has characteristics of both a father and mother.
This would be in keeping with the later followers of this text who saw the divine itself as broght forth by an original hermaphroditic (i.e. both male and female) primordial Adam, but here we’re veering off into the dualistic cosmology of this text and group which is much too complicated for this already lengthy comment.
Hopefully this helps clarify?