The Nag Hammadi Library

According to the account later gathered by the scholar James M. Robinson, in December 1945 a farmer named Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman was digging for fertile soil at the foot of the Jabal al-Tarif cliffs, near the town of Nag Hammadi. He uncovered a large sealed jar. Fearing it might contain an evil spirit, but hoping for gold, he broke it open and found books bound in leather. The books passed through several hands and dealers, and the story of their journey includes a blood feud and pages reportedly burned as kindling.

In time the Egyptian authorities acquired most of the codices for the Coptic Museum in Cairo. One codex was smuggled out of Egypt and bought in 1952 for the Jung Institute in Zurich, which is why it became known as the Jung Codex; it was later returned to Cairo. Political turmoil and scholarly rivalries slowed publication. A facsimile edition appeared between 1972 and 1977, and in 1977 the first complete English translation was published as The Nag Hammadi Library in English.

The books were found a few miles from the sites of early Pachomian monasteries, among the first communal Christian monasteries. This proximity has encouraged the theory that monks once owned or hid the books.

The codices are physical objects that can be dated with some confidence. Scrap papyrus used to thicken the leather covers includes letters and receipts, some dated to the 340s, so the books were made in the second half of the fourth century. The texts themselves are Coptic translations, mostly of Greek originals composed between the second and third centuries, although dating individual works is difficult.

The collection is varied. It includes the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, partly known before from Greek fragments found at Oxyrhynchus. It also contains the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip and the Secret Book of John, works describing a higher unknown God, a flawed creator of the material world, and salvation through gnosis, a saving knowledge. There are also Hermetic texts and even a Coptic version of a passage from Plato’s Republic.

Scholars once used these writings to describe a single movement called Gnosticism. Michael Williams, Karen King and others have argued that this label groups together very different texts and communities, and many now prefer more specific terms such as Sethian or Valentinian. Who owned the codices, and why they were buried, remain open questions, though a link with monastic readers is often suggested. Because the codices are copies rather than originals, they also tell us about their fourth-century readers in Egypt, who evidently valued a wide range of spiritual writings. Several texts appear in more than one copy, which suggests the books came from more than one source or collection.

From the start the discovery was told as a dramatic story, and its romantic details became part of its fame. In recent years some scholars have questioned parts of the traditional account, including the blood feud and the burned pages, noting that it was collected decades later and shaped by retelling. The basic fact of the find is not in doubt, but its circumstances are less certain than the popular version suggests.

The texts reached a wide audience through Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels in 1979, which presented them as evidence of a diverse early Christianity. Since then they have inspired novels, films and spiritual movements. Some popular writers claim that they contain the true teachings of Jesus suppressed by the Church, or that the Church destroyed all such gospels to protect its power. Historians recognise that early Church leaders did attack these views and that the canon was gradually defined, but they also stress that the Nag Hammadi texts are later than most of the New Testament and represent particular theological schools rather than a hidden original faith.

For modern readers, the Nag Hammadi library offers something more interesting than a conspiracy: a rare glimpse into the variety of early Christian thought and experience.