A prince is sent down into Egypt to bring back a pearl guarded by a serpent. He forgets who he is, until a letter from home wakes him.
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A short poem that reads like a fairy tale and is usually read as a parable of the soul. The prince leaves his father's kingdom and his robe of glory, goes down to Egypt, eats their food and falls asleep. A letter flies to him in the shape of an eagle; he wakes, charms the serpent with his father's name, takes the pearl and goes home, where the robe turns out to be his own image. It is in the press now and not yet readable. Your support would open it.
In the Acts of Thomas, written in Syriac in the early third century AD, probably around Edessa, the apostle sings the hymn in an Indian prison. The hymn may be older than the book that holds it, since its world of Parthian kings fits a time before the Parthian empire fell in 224. It survives in one Syriac manuscript and in a Greek version, and the Greek is what we will press.
The prince's robe is his double. When it comes out to meet him he sees himself in it as in a mirror, two of him and one. Gnostic readers took the story as the soul's descent into matter and its awakening; others read it as a plain tale about a king's son. Word by word, you can watch what the Greek translator did with the Syriac images, and where the Greek grows fuller or thinner.
Making an interlinear The Hymn of the Pearl is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, The whole hymn gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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