The Nag Hammadi Codices: A Library in a Jar

In December 1945, near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman and his brothers were digging for sabakh, a nitrate-rich soil used as fertiliser, at the foot of the cliff called Jabal al-Tarif. They uncovered a sealed clay jar about a metre tall. By Muhammad Ali's later account, he hesitated to break it, fearing a jinn inside, then smashed it and found no gold, only leather-bound books of papyrus. The find passed through village hands, antiquities dealers and a family feud before the books reached scholars. What they held was the largest discovery of lost early Christian writings ever made: twelve codices and eight leaves of a thirteenth, containing some fifty-two texts, most of them unknown for sixteen centuries.

The object

• Thirteen codices (the thirteenth survives only as eight leaves tucked inside another), written in Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, in Greek-derived letters. Most of the texts are translations of Greek originals.
• Books of papyrus in leather covers, among the oldest surviving bound books.
• Dating. Scraps of used papyrus (cartonnage) glued inside the covers to stiffen them include dated letters and receipts from the 340s CE. The books were therefore bound after the mid-fourth century. The texts themselves are older. Many are thought to have been composed in Greek in the second and third centuries.
• The codices are kept in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, apart from a fragment elsewhere. The full photographic facsimile edition was published between 1972 and 1977.

Who buried them, and why, is not known. A widely repeated hypothesis links them to monks of the nearby Pachomian monasteries. It suggests that they hid their books after Archbishop Athanasius's Easter letter of 367, which listed the approved books of scripture. This is plausible but unproven. Some scholars have argued instead for private owners, for an ancient burial custom, or for a library that belonged to no monastery at all.

What they contain

The library is not one school's scripture. It gathers texts of several kinds:

• Sethian Gnostic texts, which tell of a transcendent God, a flawed creator (the Demiurge, often called Yaldabaoth) and the heavenly Seth: the Apocryphon of John (in three copies), Hypostasis of the Archons and Trimorphic Protennoia.
• Valentinian texts: the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip.
• The Gospel of Thomas, 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Some parallel the canonical Gospels and many do not. Greek fragments of it had been found at Oxyrhynchus decades earlier without anyone knowing what they were.
• Hermetic texts, including a Coptic version of part of the Asclepius and the previously unknown Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth.
• Even a garbled Coptic translation of a passage of Plato's Republic.

Hearing the texts

A few lines that have become famous, in this archive's own working renderings from the Coptic as published in the standard editions:

Gospel of Thomas, opening (Codex II):
These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down.

Gospel of Thomas, saying 77:
Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

The Thunder, Perfect Mind (Codex VI):
I am the first and the last. I am the honoured one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Myth as code. Sethian texts tell cosmic history as a drama of emanated powers: aeons, Barbelo, Sophia, the Demiurge. The names work as a symbolic system in which the fall of Sophia explains a world made by an ignorant power. The archive's chapters on Gnosticism (ch17) and Pistis Sophia (ch45) trace the same mythic grammar.

Secret sayings. The Gospel of Thomas frames itself as hidden sayings. Whoever finds their interpretation "will not taste death" (saying 1). Here the text itself is the key to salvation, a sacred encoding of knowledge (gnosis) rather than a narrative of events.

Vowel strings and sacred names. Several texts, including the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth and the Gospel of the Egyptians, contain long sequences of vowels and secret names used in hymns and invocations. They are a documented ritual technique also known from Greek magical papyri.

Connections

Gnosticism (ch17), Pistis Sophia (ch45), Early Christianity (ch16), Manichaeism (ch55) and the Emerald Tablet (V03), through the Hermetic tractates.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/nag-hammadi-codices.html