The Nag Hammadi Library

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The Nag Hammadi library is a cache of thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices, written in Coptic, that was dug out of the ground near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in December 1945. Together the books hold more than fifty separate texts, most of them previously unknown and almost all of a kind the later church had set out to destroy. Their recovery is the single most important event in the modern study of Gnosticism.

The find itself is half legend and half record. By the account that the excavator Muhammad Ali al-Samman gave years afterward, he and his brothers were digging for fertilizer at the foot of a cliff when they struck a sealed jar and broke it open. What followed — books burned for fuel, sold piecemeal, smuggled, one codex carried to Europe and bought back for an institute in Zurich — took the better part of a decade to reverse, and not every detail of the discovery story survives cross-examination. The texts were eventually gathered, conserved, and published in facsimile, with a complete English translation appearing in 1977.

What the codices contain is a library in the literal sense: a working collection, copied in the fourth century, of writings that reach back through Greek originals to the second and third. The bulk is Gnostic — the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, treatises of the Valentinian and Sethian schools, and texts that recount the world as the work of a lesser, ignorant maker. But the collection is not narrowly sectarian. It includes a fragment of Plato’s Republic, rendered loosely into Coptic, and three Hermetic pieces — among them a version of the Asclepius and the prayer and discourse now called On the Ogdoad and the Ennead — which gave scholars, for the first time, Hermetic material in something other than Greek and Latin. That Platonic, Hermetic, and Gnostic writings sat in one buried set is itself a fact about how these currents were read in late-antique Egypt.

Who buried them, and why, is not settled. The codices were found in the region of Chenoboskion, near the early Pachomian monasteries, which has prompted the widely held but unproven suggestion that monks concealed books their bishops had ordered suppressed. What is certain is the consequence. Before 1945 the Gnostics were known mainly through the heresiologists who quoted them in order to refute them; afterward their own voices could be read at length, in their own arrangement of ideas. The texts did not confirm the old polemics so much as complicate them — the sources proved more various, and more internally argued, than the single label “Gnosticism” had ever allowed. The jar in the cliff turned a caricature back into a literature.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (first ed. 1900) · Mead — Pistis Sophia (1921) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Gnosis · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism