The Nag Hammadi Library

Heresy in Its Own Voice

Earliest record
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
Said to date from
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 is about 300 years older than the evidence.

The find that let Gnostics speak also undid the label: Codex VI holds Hermetic texts and a piece of Plato's Republic. In 1996 Michael Williams urged dropping "Gnosticism" as a category.

Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking 'Gnosticism': An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (1996); Marvin Meyer (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition (2007).

Thirteen fourth-century Coptic codices found near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945.

More context

Thirteen leather-bound Coptic papyrus codices came out of the ground near Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt, in 1945. They hold 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. It has Muhammad Ali al-Samman digging fertiliser, a jar, a blood feud, and his mother burning leaves for kindling. 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

Now the tradition answers directly: the Apocryphon of John, whose myth Irenaeus summarised about 180, survives here in three copies.

Shadow

The find story is contested: Goodacre (2013) showed its versions conflict, and Denzey Lewis and Blount (2014) found it implicitly colonialist.

Sources8 sources

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.