Foreword: The Pearlsong

Among the various collections of apocryphal acts of the early Christian apostles is one conventionally known as the Acts of Thomas, which narrates the apostle Judas Thomas “the Twin”’s evangelism in the East, especially in India. It is generally thought to have been composed in Syriac, and then translated into Greek, in the early third century CE. The Acts of Thomas is well attested, with something on the order of six Syriac and seventy-five Greek manuscripts. In only one of the Syriac manuscripts, and in only one of the Greek manuscripts, we find a text that has come to be called the “Hymn of the Pearl” or “of the Soul” – or, as Adam Bremer-McCollum has dubbed it, The Pearlsong. Whatever else The Pearlsong is, it is a poem, spoken in the first person by a young prince from the East who journeys westward to Egypt to recover a pearl from a slumbering serpent, is then called home to his royal family and accompanied by various guides, human and otherwise. The poem, like the Acts, survives in Syriac and in a Greek translation, although oddities in the Syriac suggest that it might too be a trans- lation from a lost original in a different dialect of Aramaic. In both manuscripts of the Acts that include The Pearlsong, the poem is recited in the first person by Thomas while he is imprisoned, so the prince’s voice, and arguably his quest, becomes the apostle’s own. 

The very fact that The Pearlsong appears in only two manuscripts suggests that it was not original to the Acts but inserted later: by whom, when, and exactly why remain matters of dispute. It was almost certainly an independent composition. Unlike the Acts, The Pearlsong contains no obviously Christian content. It might have originated in a different religious milieu and was then repurposed for Christian readers. But there is little or no agreement on what its religious milieu, if any, was; or where it was composed, or exactly when, between the first and fourth centuries.

I included my own interpretation of The Pearlsong in my 2016 book, Our Divine Double, which interpretation I will briefly rehearse here.¹ As I mentioned, the poem is spoken in the first person: a young prince tells of his royal family in the East – a father, mother, and brother – and how he is stripped of his royal garment and sent to Egypt to retrieve a pearl guarded by a slumbering serpent. On his journey westward, he is at first accompanied by guardians and then alone and finds in Egypt the serpent he is seeking. He meets a countryman from the East, but adopts the dress of the Egyptians to blend in. They see through his disguise, however, and make him eat of their food, and he forgets his parentage and his quest. His parents learn of his predicament and send a flying magical letter to awaken him: it reaches and awakens him, and he in turn enchants the serpent and recovers the pearl. He is led home by the magical letter, and then greeted along the way by his parents’ stewards bearing his royal garment. In the end, he returns to his father’s kingdom, with pearl in hand and clothed in his cloak, and is welcomed into the royal court.

In Our Divine Double, I confidently asserted that The Pearlsong, or “hymn” as I called it, is quite obviously an allegory. I was leaning on the good work of, among others, Bentley Layton.² If The Pearlsong is an allegory, then we must ask who or what this prince is supposed to signify. There are two common interpretations. The first interprets the prince as the savior or redeemer figure who is sent into the world to rescue the human soul (the pearl) but becomes ensnared in that world and so is himself in need of saving. This was often alleged to be a fundamental Gnostic myth of the “redeemed redeemer” or salvator salvandus. There is, in my view, very little to recommend this interpre- tation of The Pearlsong. Much more compelling, I argued, is a second interpretation, according to which the prince stands not for the savior but for the human soul itself that departs its heavenly origin (the East) and descends into embodiment (Egypt). The drama is therefore of the soul’s exile and return.

One problem with this second interpretation, however, is that it does not furnish an obvious meaning for the pearl. I argued that the pearl and the serpent serve principally to explain how the prince (soul) finds himself in Egypt (embodied exile). The real interest of the alle- gory, then, is how the embodied soul comes to realize its divine parent- age and to return home. This interpretation suggests that “the letter and the garment … are much more important to the development of the story” and that “the pearl plays only a supporting part in the story, just as the serpent does.”³ I argued that the scholarly convention of labeling this interpolated hymn the “Hymn of the Pearl,” therefore, is somewhat unfortunate insofar as it leads the reader to think that the drama centers on the prince’s recovery of the prized pearl from the serpent. Whereas the prince’s recovery of the pearl is narrated in a few short verses, The Pearlsong devotes almost twenty verses to his parents’ letter to him, and nearly thirty-five to his return home, including detailed descriptions of how the letter guides him and especially how his royal garment meets him on his way home. In short, I argued, this is a hymn, not of the pearl, but of the letter and the garment. I would revise that and say: if The Pearlsong is a song, it is a song of the soul, and of soul’s many divine doubles.

That should come as no surprise, since that was the topic of my book. Perhaps I was seeing doubles everywhere. The truth is, how- ever, that The Pearlsong furnishes plenty of them. There is the brother the prince leaves behind in the East, called his “second” or “double.” There is the countryman he meets in Egypt, whom he makes his “intimate friend” and “companion.” Or, as Bremer-McCollum translates this scene,

I saw someone there from my people, freeborn from the East:

A lovely, charming boy

My age had come and joined me.

I made him my expedition partner and brought him in as an associate.⁴

There is the letter his parents and brother send, which flies to him in the form of an eagle, which lands by him and “becomes speech.” Its voice and the sound of its flight awakens him from his slumber; the prince reads the letter, only to learn that its words were already written on his heart (lebbå). The letter is his textual double, as it were: it mirrors back to him his inner inscription, which had been obscured by exile. The prince is something of a palimpsest, and his textual double renders his inner inscription once again legible.

Having recovered the pearl, he turns east and begins the journey home, led by the letter, “my awakener, in front of me on the road … leading me with its light.”⁵ The letter had reminded him of his “shining clothes,” his “luxurious cloak,” and of his brother, with whom he expects to inherit his parents’ kingdom. On the journey home, his par- ents’ treasurers meet him along the way, bearing his “shining garment,” which likeness he had forgotten:

Suddenly, when I’d faced it, the garment seemed like my mirror:

I saw all of it in all of me, and in it likewise I faced all of me,

Because we’re distinctly two, but still one, with one form.⁶

Like the letter, the garment speaks to him, and he rushes to put it on. Now resplendent, the prince returns to the royal court, reunited with his brother in their parents’ court. 

It was, and remains still, hard for me not to interpret this litany of characters (human and otherwise) “allegorically,” namely that the brother, countryman, letter, and shining garment are the prince’s various alter-egos, other “I”s, divine counterparts calling him home to the light of the East, where he can be, as he always was, two and yet one. This allegory, I argued, was inserted into the Acts of Thomas precisely because it resonated with – or echoed – the Acts narrative of the apos- tle Judas Thomas as “the Twin” of Christ. While The Pearlsong didn’t originate in this apocryphal collection, I argued that as an allegory it harmonizes well with the theology of the Acts. Just as the letter serves as the textual double to the prince in The Pearlsong, so The Pearlsong serves as an interpolated textual double of the Acts – facilitated by the apostle Thomas speaking the part of the prince, reciting his verses as his own. Just as the shining garment appears as the mirror image of the prince, so the divine double is our mirror image, or rather we are its mirror image. I argued that The Pearlsong and the Acts mirror each other, and we, the readers poised between the two as if in a mise en abyme, begin to see, to know, our own divine double⒮.