Nineteenth century novelists felt constrained to supply their readers with well-chosen epigraphs, and the personal canons from which they drew them, whilst seldom exclusively Biblical, provided a convenient index to their individual literary and philosophical predilections. Thomas Pynchon's canon is wilfully idiosyncratic and frequently apocryphal, but his epigraphs are no less apposite than George Eliot's; for in creating a fictional world out of what is largely palpable history Pynchon produces a homogenous medium which is neither fiction nor history. I have chosen the epigraph above because in addition to illustrating this admixture of fiction and history it also intimates to the reader an aspect of Pynchon's technique which may go some way towards explaining the rationale behind it. Some parts of Gravity's Rainbow, I think, might best be described as an attempt at writing a twentieth century “gospel.”

The Oxyrhynchus papyri, referred to in the epigraph actually exist. They were discovered in 1898 and 1904 in Egypt, and were fragments of purported sayings of Jesus of Nazareth dating from the second century A.D. Not until 1956, when the translation of a gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammedai in Egypt was completed, did it become clear that the Oxyrhynchus papyri were fragments of a work calling itself the Gospel of Thomas.