In 1945, a collection of thirteen leather bound papyrus codices was discovered buried near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, containing over fifty religious and philosophical texts, most previously known only by title or brief quotation in the writings of early Christian heresiologists who wrote to refute them. The texts, preserved in Coptic though many were originally composed in Greek, include the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus that lacks a narrative frame and differs substantially in form and theology from the four New Testament gospels, and a range of other Gnostic Christian and related philosophical writings addressing themes including the nature of the divine, the origin of the material world, and the path to spiritual knowledge.
Scholars generally date the underlying compositions to the second through fourth centuries CE, produced within and around Christian communities whose theology diverged from what became mainstream orthodox Christianity and was subsequently suppressed and largely destroyed, making the Nag Hammadi find one of the most significant primary source discoveries in the study of early Christian diversity. The circumstances of the codices' burial, likely connected to fourth century condemnations of such writings as heretical, mean the discovery preserved a snapshot of theological positions the wider church had otherwise worked to erase from the historical record. Interpretation of these texts remains an active and sometimes contested area of scholarship, particularly regarding how representative they are of a broader lost Gnostic Christian movement versus more localized or idiosyncratic theological communities, a question treated here as genuinely open rather than settled.