The Nag Hammadi Library

Several works appear both here, among the esoteric texts, and separately in this site's listing of scriptures, and the two treatments are not consistent with one another. The overlap is worth stating because a reader who follows a cross-reference will find the same work described twice on different assumptions.

The duplicated works are this codex collection, the Gospel of Thomas, the Pistis Sophia, the Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, and the Egyptian funerary compilation usually called the Book of the Dead.

The two listings sort them on different principles. Among the scriptures each is placed by religion and assessed for canonicity, so the Gnostic works are marked non-canonical and the Tao Te Ching is marked canonical, both judgements made relative to a religious community that recognises or does not recognise a text. Here the same works are placed by esoteric tradition and dated, with no canonicity judgement made at all, because the question does not arise in the same form.

Neither treatment is wrong, and the disagreement is not a data error so much as a consequence of two genuine and incompatible ways of cataloguing religious literature. A text can be scripture to a community and a source to a tradition of practice, and the I Ching is both in an especially clear way: a Confucian classic with a canonical commentary tradition, and simultaneously a divinatory manual used by people with no relation to that canon.

The cases that sit least comfortably are the Gnostic works. The codices were buried in the fourth century by people for whom they were scripture, not esoterica; the category of Western esotericism that places them here is a modern scholarly construction, and Wouter Hanegraaff has written on how retrospectively it has been applied. Calling them esoteric texts describes how they have been read since 1945 rather than what they were to those who wrote and hid them.

Where a reader finds the two entries differing, the difference is one of frame rather than of fact, and neither entry supersedes the other.

The Nag Hammadi find is thirteen leather bound papyrus codices, containing some fifty two tractates, of which around forty were previously unknown. They are in Coptic, translated from Greek originals, and they were buried in a jar in Upper Egypt in the fourth century and recovered in 1945.

What they contain is not one system. There are Sethian and Valentinian works with elaborate emanationist cosmologies; there is the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings collection with no narrative and no crucifixion; there is a heavily damaged Coptic version of part of Plato's Republic, apparently included by a compiler who took it for a revelation text; there is a fragment of the Hermetic Asclepius; and there is material that is plainly ascetic Christian without being gnostic in any technical sense.

That variety is the collection's main scholarly consequence. Before 1945, gnosticism was known almost entirely through the polemics of the heresiologists who opposed it, and it looked like a coherent movement because they described it as one. The library shows a range of unrelated and sometimes incompatible positions, and it is a large part of why some historians now argue the category itself should be retired.