The Gospel of Truth

In 1945 a whole library of Gnostic books was discovered at Nag-Hammadi in Upper Egypt, thirteen volumes, forty-eight treatises, more than seven hundred pages. Unfortunately, economic and political vicissitudes have kept most of these from publication. So far only the Gnostic books which are contained also in the Akhmin Codex of Berlin, the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Thomas, have appeared. --Kenneth Rexroth, Gnosticism, introduction to a new edition of Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Gnostics (1960), by G.R.S. Mead, reprinted in Assays (1961) and World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (1987)

But those who are from Valentinus, being, on the other hand, altogether reckless, while they put forth their own compositions, boast that they possess more Gospels than there really are. Indeed, they have arrived at such a pitch of audacity, as to entitle their comparatively recent writing the Gospel of Truth, though it agrees in nothing with the Gospels of the Apostles, so that they have really no Gospel which is not full of blasphemy. For if what they have published is the Gospel of truth, and yet is totally unlike those which have been handed down to us from the apostles, any who please may learn, as is shown from the Scriptures themselves, that that which has been handed down from the apostles can no longer be reckoned the Gospel of truth. --Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses, (On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis, c. 180) Book III, Chapter 11, 9.