Nag Hammadi Library

The find happened in the course of ordinary farm work. Men from a village near Nag Hammadi were digging at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif for sabakh, the nitrogen-rich earth Egyptian farmers dig from ancient sites and spread on their fields, when they struck a large sealed jar. Broken open, it held books: papyrus codices in leather covers, some with the flaps and thongs still attached.

The fuller version of the story is dramatic and should be handled with care. In it the finder is named as Muhammad Ali al-Samman, who hesitated to open the jar for fear of a spirit, then hoped for gold; who was shortly afterwards involved in a blood feud in which his father's killer was hacked apart; and whose mother burned some of the papyrus as kindling in the family oven. That account comes from interviews conducted by James Robinson in the 1970s, some three decades after the events. The earlier account gathered by Jean Doresse in the late 1940s contains none of it. The books were certainly found, and pages were certainly lost between discovery and sale, but the circumstantial detail is testimony collected long afterwards rather than established fact, and careful writers now attribute it rather than assert it.

What is not in doubt is the dispersal. The codices passed through a local schoolteacher, dealers in Cairo and the antiquities market, were partly confiscated by the Egyptian state, and were partly smuggled abroad. Most of the material reached the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where it remains.

The haul is conventionally counted as thirteen codices: twelve substantially intact books plus the loose leaves of a thirteenth, tucked inside another cover. Between them they carry fifty-two tracts, with some duplication, and around forty of the works were entirely unknown before 1945. Not all are Christian. Three pieces belong to the Hermetic literature, and one is a clumsy Coptic rendering of a passage of Plato's Republic that the translator appears not to have understood.

The books can be dated with unusual precision because of their bindings. The leather covers were stiffened with cartonnage, waste papyrus pasted into layers, and that waste included dated documents: letters, receipts and accounts from the middle decades of the fourth century. The codices were therefore manufactured no earlier than that. The texts they carry are older, in some cases much older, being Coptic translations of Greek works whose composition ranges from the second century to the fourth.

Why they were buried is inference, not record. The cartonnage includes material with monastic connections, and one of the great Pachomian monasteries stood a few miles away. The most frequently offered explanation is that monks owned the books and concealed them after Athanasius of Alexandria, in his festal letter of 367, listed the acceptable scriptures and condemned the reading of apocryphal writings. It is a plausible reconstruction that fits the dates and the geography. It is not proven, and scholars who work on the cartonnage disagree about how firmly it ties the codices to the monastery.

Publication was slow, and the delay was not accidental. One codex was taken out of Egypt and bought in 1952 for the Jung Institute in Zurich, becoming the Jung Codex; its leaves were returned to Cairo only in 1975, and the arrangement soured relations for years. The Egyptian material was tied up by the Suez crisis and the 1967 war, and by a small circle of scholars who held exclusive publication rights and released little. Two decades after the discovery, most of the collection remained unavailable to anyone outside that circle.

James Robinson broke the impasse by assembling an international team under UNESCO auspices and forcing the material into the open. A complete facsimile edition appeared from Brill through the 1970s and early 1980s, so that anyone could work from photographs of the pages, and a one-volume English translation, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, was published in 1977. Everything written about these texts for a general readership dates from after that.

What the find changed is easy to state. Before it, the movements were known almost entirely through Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius, opponents summarising in order to refute. Reading the texts directly showed those writers to have been more reliable than expected in places, since Irenaeus's summary of the Apocryphon of John is recognisably accurate, and much less reliable elsewhere, since the sources turned out to be more varied, more Christian and less uniformly contemptuous of the body than the polemic suggested. The category itself came under pressure. Michael Williams and Karen King have argued that Gnosticism, as a single religion with a common creed, is a modern construct assembled from the heresiologists rather than a thing the texts describe, and that it is better to speak of particular systems, Valentinian, Sethian, Thomasine, and say what each one actually holds.