Nag Hammadi Library

Background

In the second and third centuries, the Mediterranean world was home to a variety of religious movements known collectively as Gnosticism. Gnosticism taught that salvation comes through attaining secret knowledge, or gnosis. It frequently regarded the material world as an imperfect creation made by an inferior god. The Church Fathers, the leading theologians of the early church, regarded these teachings as heretical and wrote works refuting them. A representative example is Against Heresies, written in the late second century by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon.

Until the first half of the twentieth century, Gnosticism was known chiefly through such polemical writings. Apart from a few manuscripts, almost nothing written by the Gnostics themselves had survived.

Discovery and Subsequent Developments

• December 1945: A farmer is reported to have found a buried jar near the village of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt. The jar contained papyrus books bound in leather. The books were dispersed through the antiquities market, but most were eventually collected at the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
• 1950s: Codex I was taken out of Egypt and purchased by the Jung Institute in Switzerland. For this reason it became known as the "Jung Codex"; it was later returned to Egypt.
• 1970s: With the support of UNESCO and the Egyptian government, an international team of scholars published a photographic facsimile edition. In 1977 a complete English translation appeared, making the contents accessible to general readers.

The documents are in codex form. A codex is a book made of stacked and bound leaves rather than a scroll. There are thirteen in all (twelve codices plus a separate bundle of leaves tucked into another cover), and they are translations of Greek originals into Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language written in the Greek alphabet.

Scrap papyrus used to reinforce the covers included documents bearing dates from the mid-fourth century. The books are therefore thought to have been produced in or after the mid-fourth century. Many of the texts are believed to have been composed much earlier, in the second or third century.

Contents

The collection contains fifty-two tractates, some of which appear in more than one copy. Notable works include the following:

• Gospel of Thomas: A collection of 114 sayings of Jesus. After the Nag Hammadi discovery, Greek fragments found earlier at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt were identified as portions of this work.
• Gospel of Philip and Gospel of Truth
• Apocryphon of John (Secret Book of John): Presented as a revelation received by the apostle John, it sets forth a Gnostic creation myth.

The collection also includes a variety of other material, such as Hermetic writings, a partial translation of Plato's Republic, and wisdom literature with little direct connection to Gnosticism.

Who buried these books, and why, remains unknown. One scholarly hypothesis connects the burial to the year 367, when Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament in his Easter letter and urged believers to avoid other books; according to this view, monks from a nearby monastery hid the books around that time. There is, however, no conclusive evidence for this.

Impact and Influence

The Nag Hammadi library made it possible to read Gnostic writings in the Gnostics' own words, greatly broadening the scope of Gnostic studies. Together with the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered two years later, it is counted among the most significant twentieth-century discoveries for biblical scholarship and the study of early Christianity. The Gospel of Thomas in particular shares many sayings with the canonical Gospels, and it is therefore widely used as a source for studying how the sayings of Jesus were transmitted.

In popular culture the documents have often been presented as "hidden gospels." Claims that the church suppressed the true story of Jesus have appeared in novels and documentaries.

Assessment

Scholars are divided on several issues:

• Date of the Gospel of Thomas: Some favor an early date in the late first century, while others argue for a later date in the second century.
• Relationship to the canonical Gospels: Debate continues over whether it represents a tradition independent of the canonical Gospels or depends on them.
• The category of "Gnosticism": Some scholars call for reexamining whether it is appropriate to group many distinct groups under a single category.

Church assessments are largely uniform. Protestant denominations, including the Presbyterian, Methodist, Holiness, Baptist, and Pentecostal denominations in Korea, regard these documents as lying outside the canon, and they distinguish their value as historical sources from authority in matters of faith. The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church likewise do not recognize them as canonical.

Many church scholars hold that these documents contain ideas criticized by the Church Fathers, such as Docetism, the claim that Christ did not truly take on a physical body but only appeared to do so. They explain that the documents in fact help illuminate the process by which the early church discerned the canon.