The Nag Hammadi Library

Heresy in Its Own Voice

First attested
4th centurythe codices themselves — Codex VII's cover was stiffened with waste documents bearing consular dates between 341 and 348 CE, so that cover at least was bound after 348; the rest of the group is dated with it by shared manufacture, not by the scraps
Claimed
around 50 CEasserted by the tractates' own ascriptions, which place them in the apostolic first century — the Gospel of Thomas opens as the secret sayings recorded by Didymos Judas Thomas, and the Apocryphon of John presents itself as a revelation given to John son of Zebedee

The claim runs about 300 years ahead of the evidence.

The find that let a Gnostic library speak in its own voice also undid the label: Codex VI holds Hermetic treatises and an inept Coptic Plato, and by 1996 Michael Williams was arguing that "Gnosticism" should be abandoned as a category.

Sixteen centuries of hearing a faith almost only through its accusers, ended by codices out of the ground.

Thirteen leather-bound Coptic papyrus codices came out of the ground near Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt, in 1945: fifty-two tractates, among them the Gospels of Thomas and Philip, the Apocryphon of John and the Thunder, Perfect Mind. Documentary scraps stiffening Codex VII's cover carry consular dates from 341 to 348, so that cover at least was bound after 348. Until they surfaced, Gnostic Christianity was known almost wholly through the men refuting it — Irenaeus about 180, Epiphanius about 375 — and here it answers back. The find story is Robinson's, assembled from interviews thirty years on — Muhammad Ali al-Samman digging fertiliser, a jar, a blood feud, his mother burning leaves for kindling — and Goodacre showed in 2013 that its versions contradict one another. Nor is the collection simply Gnostic: Codex VI holds Hermetic treatises and a Coptic Plato.

Light

For sixteen centuries the tradition was audible almost only through its accusers; Pistis Sophia, printed in 1851, the exception. Now it answers directly: the Apocryphon of John, whose myth Irenaeus knew in earlier form about 180, survives here in three copies, a fourth in Berlin.

Shadow

The complete English edition came only in 1977 — thirty-two years on, delayed by scholarly monopoly and a fight over the Jung Codex that kept it in Zurich until 1975. Denzey Lewis and Blount in 2014 called the celebrated discovery story implicitly colonialist.

Sources and verification8 sources · 6 links

Primary source

  • Irenaeus of Lyons (trans. Roberts and Rambaut), Against Heresies, Book I, in Ante-Nicene Fathers 1, 1885, newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm; Irenaeus writing c. 180 CEThe earliest detailed description of the Valentinian and Sethian systems, including at 1.29 a Barbeloite myth parallel to the first half of what is now read in full as the Apocryphon of John — though not that text in its surviving form. A polemicist's summary, never a group's self-description, and close to the whole of what anyone knew of these groups before 1945.
  • Marvin Meyer (ed.) et al., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition, 2007, HarperOneThe current standard English of every Nag Hammadi tractate plus the Berlin Codex, with current titles and versification — the default text for any quotation from the find, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John and the Thunder, Perfect Mind.

Scholarship

  • Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking 'Gnosticism': An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category, 1996, Princeton University PressThat 'Gnosticism' is a modern scholarly construct rather than a religion the texts themselves describe, and that blanket descriptors such as anticosmic and libertine do not survive contact with the Nag Hammadi material.
  • Mark Goodacre, How reliable is the story of the Nag Hammadi discovery?, 2013, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35, no. 4, pp. 303-322That James Robinson's discovery narrative exists in conflicting versions — a two-person account in 1977, seven people in 1979, eight in 1981, with disagreement over who first found the jar — that Martin Krause and Rodolphe Kasser had already questioned it in 1984, that the December dating was reconstructed from clues rather than testimony, and that Jean Doresse's earlier account may be the safer one.
  • Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount, Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 2014, Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2, pp. 399-419That the standard find story carries inconsistencies, ambiguities and implicitly colonialist attitudes; and their proposal that the codices came from private Greco-Egyptian owners and were deposited as grave goods, rather than being hidden by Pachomian monks after Athanasius's thirty-ninth Festal Letter of 367.
  • Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 2015, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 97, Mohr SiebeckThe counter-case that the codices were produced and read by Christian monks, probably Pachomian, in fourth- and fifth-century Upper Egypt; and their examination of the cartonnage papyri from the covers, in which Codex VII's dated documents of the 340s give the terminus for that cover's manufacture.

Further reading

  • Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, The Nag Hammadi Archive, ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/nhaPhotographs of the codices and the documentation of the 1945 discovery and its acquisition history. The archive holds documents rather than a settled story — the blood feud and the burned pages are precisely what later scholarship questions.
  • James M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. ed., 1988, free at gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html (HTTP; the HTTPS certificate has expired)A free, quotable English text for a reader who wants to check a passage without buying a book — the edition behind most quotations circulating online. Superseded by Meyer in wording and in several tractate titles, which is why stale renderings persist.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Egyptian Book of the DeadDisputed

    The Book of the Dead was written for the grave; these codices were not, and why they ended in the ground is unsettled — Denzey Lewis and Blount argued in 2014 that they were grave goods in the same long Egyptian manner, Lundhaug and Jenott in 2015 that they were monastic books.

  • Set againstThe ZoharA modern connection

    Philology cuts both ways: it dated the Zohar to thirteenth-century Castile against its claim of second-century authorship, while the Oxyrhynchus fragments printed in 1897 and 1904 as unidentified sayings of Jesus, matched to the Coptic only after 1945, showed a Greek Gospel of Thomas circulating by about 200.

  • Set againstThe Corpus HermeticumAttested

    Nag Hammadi Codex VI, copied in the fourth century, carries three Hermetic texts in Coptic — the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, the Prayer of Thanksgiving and part of the Asclepius — and none of them is in the Byzantine collection of seventeen. Hermetic literature was circulating in Egypt long before the Corpus was assembled.

  • Set againstThe Bardo ThödolA modern connection

    Two buried libraries with opposite evidential standing: the Nag Hammadi codices were physically dug up in 1945 and can be dated, while the terma model has the text concealed by Padmasambhava and revealed to Karma Lingpa, a claim the tradition makes and the manuscripts cannot corroborate.

  • Set againstThe Popol VuhAttested

    The Nag Hammadi codices went into the ground and came up in 1945 in their own hand; the Popol Vuh stayed in K'iche' hands at Chichicastenango, out of Spanish sight, and reached us in a copyist's.

  • Set againstThe Greek Magical PapyriAttested

    A codex buried in Upper Egypt and a magician's formulary from the same country carry the same Hermetic prayer — Greek at PGM III.591–611, Coptic as Nag Hammadi Codex VI,7.

Follow the thread