The First Thought in Three Forms: a Sethian revelation monologue in which the divine First Thought speaks in the first person as Father, Mother, and Son, descending three times to rescue her own from the world below.
Documented
The triple descent
Documented: the tractate occupies most of Codex XIII, a Coptic Sethian text related to the Apocryphon of John, structured around three descents of Protennoia, first as voice, then as sound, then as word, corresponding to Father, Mother, Son, each descent establishing aeons and the final one initiating the baptismal rite of the five seals. It is the most elaborate first-person divine speech in the library.
Assessment: Documented: the codex, the threefold structure, the five seals. The text is a liturgy as much as a cosmology.
Stories
The mother who is God
The documented radicalism: Protennoia declares herself androgynous, Mother and Father in one, and names herself the androgynous womb. In a library full of fallen goddesses, this text gives the supreme principle a female face without fall, Sophia's tragedy corrected into Protennoia's triumph.
Assessment: Documented: the self-predications are in the text. No fall, no archons' mother, only descent and rescue.
Interesting claims
The voice before scripture
The form reading: Protennoia speaks as pure voice, the text is all monologue, no narrator, no frame. Scholars connect it to the aretalogy tradition and the Isis aretalogies, goddess self-praise hymns, meaning the tractate is a Christian-era gnostic text wearing the oldest liturgical costume in the Mediterranean.
Assessment: Interesting: the Isis aretalogy parallels are documented in the scholarship. The voice is older than the doctrine.
Sources and further reading
Nag Hammadi Codex XIII, tractate 1, Coptic text (primary manuscript)
John D. Turner translation in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (standard critical translation)
The three-descent structure and the five seals baptismal rite (in-text exhibits); Isis aretalogy parallels (documented scholarship)
Worth asking
If God speaks in the first person as a mother descending, whose voice is scripture?