What Is the Nag Hammadi Library?

It is the most important discovery of ancient Christian-era writings in the twentieth century after the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it is widely misdescribed as a “library of Gnostic gospels.” Only some of it is either.

The discovery

In December 1945, local men digging for fertilizer near the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif, close to the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, found a large sealed jar. Inside were thirteen books, each a codex (an early form of bound book) made of papyrus pages in leather covers. The story of how they reached scholars is tangled: some of the codices passed through dealers and one, now called the Jung Codex, was bought for a Zurich foundation. The full set was not brought together in a single Cairo collection and published in translation until the 1970s.

What was in the jar

The thirteen codices hold about fifty-two tractates, though several are duplicate copies, so the number of distinct works is around forty-six. The manuscripts were copied in the fourth century, but they are Coptic translations of texts originally written in Greek, some of them a century or two older. Among the best known are the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Apocryphon of John, On the Origin of the World and the Apocalypse of Adam.

It is not all Gnostic

Many tractates teach the myth of the lesser creator and the fallen Wisdom described in the companion article on Gnosticism, but not all. The Gospel of Thomas is a list of sayings with no such myth. The collection also includes the Sentences of Sextus, a Christian wisdom collection, a passage translated from Plato's Republic, and three Hermetic treatises in Codex VI (see the article on Hermeticism). Whoever assembled these books evidently read across several traditions.

Who buried them?

Nearby stood a monastery founded by Pachomius, and many scholars suspect monks read and copied these books, then hid them in the fourth century when bishops such as Athanasius pressed for the removal of non-approved writings. That theory is plausible but not proven, since the jar carried no note. Some scholars doubt the monastic link and see private owners.

What it changed

Before 1945, most of what we knew about gnostic teaching came from its opponents, such as Irenaeus. Nag Hammadi let scholars read the texts themselves and showed that early Christianity was more varied than the later picture suggests. It also revealed, for the first time in full, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, of which only three Greek fragments had turned up at Oxyrhynchus around 1900 without anyone recognizing what they were. What it does not do is add anything to the New Testament: these are second-century and later texts, not first-century witnesses.

Reading them here

Most English translations of the Nag Hammadi library, including the standard Robinson edition, are still under copyright, so this site cannot carry them. It does carry four Nag Hammadi texts whose translator, Mark M. Mattison, released his translations into the public domain: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth and the Secret Book of James, on the Nag Hammadi and Gnostic Writings shelf, together with his Gospel of Mary and Gospel of Judas from two other Coptic codices. It will add others where a public-domain translation is found.