Nag Hammadi Library: The Buried Gnostic Books Found in 1945

Thirteen leather-bound books buried in a jar in Upper Egypt and found by farmers in 1945, holding lost Gnostic scriptures.

The Nag Hammadi library is thirteen leather-bound papyrus books found in a sealed jar in Upper Egypt in December 1945, holding fifty-two mostly Gnostic texts in Coptic.

In December 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman and his brothers were digging for fertile soil at the foot of the Jabal al-Tarif cliffs when they uncovered a sealed clay jar. Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus books, or codices: twelve books and loose pages from a thirteenth.

The codices contain fifty-two texts written in Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, most of them translated from Greek originals of the second and third centuries. They include the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings of Jesus; the Apocryphon of John, with its myth of Sophia, Yaldabaoth and the archons; the Hypostasis of the Archons; On the Origin of the World; and even a Coptic version of a passage from Plato's Republic.

Scraps of dated letters and receipts used to stiffen the bindings show the books were made in the mid-fourth century, and many scholars link them to monks of the nearby Pachomian monasteries. Why they were buried is unknown; one common theory is that they were hidden after church leaders condemned unapproved books.

The codices passed through dealers and antiquities markets before most were secured by the Coptic Museum in Cairo; one went to Zurich as the Jung Codex before being returned. A full English translation appeared in 1977. Until then, Gnostic ideas were known mostly from their opponents, and the find transformed the study of early Christianity.