The Nag Hammadi library

The Nag Hammadi library^[1] is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. Twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman.^[2][3] The writings in these codices comprised fifty-two 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 Bishop Athanasius condemned the use of non-canonical books in his Festal Letter of 367 AD.
The contents of the codices were written in the Coptic language, though the works were probably all translations from Greek.^[4] The best-known of these works is probably the Gospel of Thomas, of which the Nag Hammadi codices contain the only complete text. After the discovery it was recognized that fragments of these sayings attributed to Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1898 (P. Oxy. 1), and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources. Subsequently, a 1st or 2nd century date of composition circa 80 AD has been proposed for the lost Greek originals of the Gospel of Thomas. The buried manuscripts themselves date from the third and fourth centuries.
The Nag Hammadi codices are housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt. To read about their significance to modern scholarship into early Christianity, see the Gnosticism article.

Discovery at Nag Hammadi
The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 has been described as 'exciting as the contents of the find itself'.^[5] In December of that year, two Egyptian brothers found several papyri in a large earthenware vessel while digging for fertilizer around the Jabal al-Ṭārif caves near present-day Hamra Dom in Upper Egypt. The find was not initially reported by either of the brothers, who sought to make money from the manuscripts by selling them individually at intervals. It is also reported that the brothers' mother burned several of the manuscripts, worried, apparently, that the papers might have 'dangerous effects' (Markschies, Gnosis, 48). As a result, what came to be known as the Nag Hammadi library (owing to the proximity of the find to Nag Hammadi, the nearest major settlement) appeared only gradually, and its significance went unacknowledged until some time after its initial uncovering.
In 1946, the brothers became involved in a feud, and left the manuscripts with a Coptic priest, whose brother-in-law in October that year sold a codex to the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo (this tract is today numbered Codex III in the collection). The resident Coptologist and religious historian Jean Doresse, realizing the significance of the artifact, published the first reference to it in 1948. Over the years, most of the tracts were passed by the priest to a Cypriot antiques dealer in Cairo, thereafter being retained by the Department of Antiquities, for fear that they would be sold out of the country. After the revolution in 1952, these texts were handed to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and declared national property.^[6] Pahor Labib, the director of the Coptic Museum at that time, was keen to keep these manuscripts in their country of origin.
Meanwhile, a single codex had been sold in Cairo to a Belgian antique dealer. After an attempt was made to sell the codex in both New York and Paris, it was acquired by the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich in 1951, through the mediation of Gilles Quispel. There it was intended as a birthday present to the famous psychologist; for this reason, this codex is typically known as the Jung Codex, being Codex I in the collection.^[6]
Jung's death in 1961 caused a quarrel over the ownership of the Jung Codex, with the result that the pages were not given to the Coptic Museum in Cairo until 1975, after a first edition of the text had been published. Thus the papyri were finally brought together in Cairo: of the 1945 find, eleven complete books and fragments of two others, 'amounting to well over 1000 written pages' are preserved there.^[7]

Translation

The first edition of a text found at Nag Hammadi was from the Jung Codex, a partial translation of which appeared in Cairo in 1956, and a single extensive facsimile edition was planned. Due to the difficult political circumstances in Egypt, individual tracts followed from the Cairo and Zurich collections only slowly.
This state of affairs changed only in 1966, with the holding of the Messina Congress in Italy. At this conference, intended to allow scholars to arrive at a group consensus concerning the definition of gnosticism, James M. Robinson, an expert on religion, 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. Robinson had been 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. In the meantime, a facsimile edition in twelve volumes did appear between 1972 and 1977, with subsequent additions in 1979 and 1984 from publisher E.J. Brill in Leiden, called The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, making the whole find available for all interested parties to study in some form.
At the same time, in the German Democratic Republic a group of scholars—including Alexander Bohlig, Martin Krause and New Testament scholars Gesine Schenke, Hans-Martin Schenke and Hans-Gebhard Bethge--were preparing the first German language translation of the find. The last three scholars prepared a complete scholarly translation under the auspices of the Berlin Humboldt University, which was published in 2001.
The James M. Robinson translation was first published in 1977, with the name The Nag Hammadi Library in English, in collaboration between E.J. Brill and Harper & Row. The single-volume publication, according to Robinson, 'marked the end of one stage of Nag Hammadi scholarship and the beginning of another' (from the Preface to the third revised edition). Paperback editions followed in 1981 and 1984, from E.J. Brill and Harper respectively. A third, completely revised edition was published in 1988. This marks the final stage in the gradual dispersal of gnostic texts into the wider public arena—the full complement of codices was finally available in unadulterated form to people around the world, in a variety of languages. A cross reference apparatus for Robinson's translation and the Biblical canon also exists.^[8][1]
A further 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). The volume unified new translations from the Nag Hammadi Library with extracts from the heresiological writers, and other gnostic material. It remains, along with The Nag Hammadi Library in English one of the more accessible volumes translating the Nag Hammadi find, with extensive historical introductions to individual gnostic groups, notes on translation, annotations to the text and the organization of tracts into clearly defined movements.
Not all scholars, however, agree that the entire library should be considered Gnostic. Paterson Brown has argued forcefully that the three Nag Hammadi Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Truth cannot be so labeled, since each explicitly affirms the basic reality and sanctity of incarnate life, which Gnosticism by definition considers illusory or evil: 'Are the Coptic Gospels Gnostic?'.[9]

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The Nag Hammadi Library
 
The collection of books contains religious and hermetic texts, works of moral maxims, Apocryphal texts, and more curiously, a rewriting of Plato's Republic.

In addition to the importance of the manuscripts for the history of books (they are the oldest known books to date) and Coptic palaeography, they represent a key source of evidence for the history of philosophy and primitive Christianity.

Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to analyse them, because we know nothing of their authors, circumstances or place where they were written.

On the other hand, they can currently be considered as a decisive element in the research of the beginnings of gnosticism.

The Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi
 
These religious (or Gnostic) texts propose interpretations and Christian rituals that are different from those officialised in 325 AC and which were immediately rejected as heretical at the time. That is why they were gathered together, protected and hidden by the so-called deviant communities.

Gnosis means knowledge. In this respect, Gnostics differed from Christians in their relation to the sacred texts, given that they attached importance to the esoteric, and not the historical sense. Gnostics consequently considered the divine to include aspects like interior and secret knowledge, which is passed on by tradition and initiation.

The Nag Hammadi library offers a wealth of evidence of such trends in Gnosticism that claim to contain a secret teaching whilst sometimes drawing inspiration from the Old Testament.

Nag Hammadi and Hermetisme
 
The corpus of the collection contains so-called hermetic books in line with the tradition of the Corpus Hermeticum.

Codex VI actually comprises an untitled treatise, known as The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, a prayer of thanksgiving and a long fragment of the Perfect Discourse. These last two texts are partly included in the Asclepius, whereas the first one is a completely original work.

These texts can be sidelined, as they digress from the Gnostic theories widely spread in the rest of the collection. Their main interest, however, lies in their highly pronounced Egyptian inspiration, compared to the Greek and Latin texts currently known. Furthermore, they do not reject the Egyptian religion, but offer to spiritualise it. Hermetism is more than a Christian-like religious system, is it a way.

These three texts provide a complementary and sufficient overview of the entire hermetic doctrine, the initiatory path supposed to lead to divine enlightenment. It represents one of the fundamental differences between Christians and Gnostics (or Hermetics). Whereas Christianity is based on the historical truth, the Gnostic and hermetic trends attach great importance to symbolism and even the allegorical

Apocryphal:

refers to texts that bear a resemblance to canonical books and present figures from Christianity, but do not belong to the New Testament.

Coptic:

refers to the Christians originating from Egypt.

Esotericism:

a doctrine according to which some types of knowledge must not be disclosed to the general public, but reserved for a closed group of disciples.

Gnosticism:

Gnosticism encompasses the various forms of religious thought in the Roman empire between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AC, and was mainly based in Alexandria. All these forms are strongly characterised by the duality between the material, which was rejected, and the spiritual. Gnostic thought was declared heretical by the Church.

Heresy:

all the religious trends running parallel to Catholicism, but condemned by the Church as corrupting the dogma.

Hermetism:

a doctrine resulting from a series of texts traditionally attributed to Hermes.

Source Q:

this term comes from the German Quelle, meaning source, and refers to the passages common to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, also known as the double tradition.
 
Content of the Nag Hammadi Library




The library comprises 13 books, known as codices according to the scientific name given to any collection of sheets folded in two and sown together. These books represent the oldest known specimens to date.

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