Nag Hammadi library

Thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local farmer named Muhammed al-Samman.

[1] The writings in these codices comprise 52 mostly Gnostic treatises, but they also include three works belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation/alteration of Plato's Republic.

In his introduction to The Nag Hammadi Library in English, James Robinson suggests that these codices may have belonged to a nearby Pachomian monastery and were buried after Saint Athanasius condemned the use of non-canonical books in his Festal Letter of 367 A.D.

Making careful inquiries from 1947–1950, Jean Doresse discovered that a local farmer, who was a teenager at the time, dug up the texts from a graveyard in the desert, located near tombs from the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt.

Burials of books were common in Egypt, in the early centuries AD; but if the library was a funerary deposit, it conflicts with Robinson's belief that the manuscripts were purposely hidden out of fear of persecution.

Instead, Lewis & Blount (2014) have proposed that the Nag Hammadi codices had been privately commissioned by a wealthy non-monastic individual, and that the books had been buried with him as funerary prestige items.

After an attempt was made to sell the codex in both New York City and Paris, it was acquired by the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich in 1951, through the mediation of Gilles Quispel.

At this conference, intended to allow scholars to arrive at a group consensus concerning the definition of Gnosticism, James M. Robinson assembled a group of editors and translators whose express task was to publish a bilingual edition of the Nag Hammadi codices in English, in collaboration with the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where Robinson was a faculty member.

Robinson was elected secretary of the International Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices, which had been formed in 1970 by UNESCO and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture; it was in this capacity that he oversaw the project.

[12] Another English edition was published in 1987, by Yale scholar Bentley Layton, called The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1987).

It includes extensive historical introductions to individual gnostic groups, notes on translation, annotations to the text, and the organization of tracts into clearly defined movements.

Paterson Brown has argued that the three Nag Hammadi Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Truth cannot be so labeled, since each, in his opinion, may explicitly affirm the basic reality and sanctity of incarnate life, which Gnosticism by definition considers illusory.