It was on a December day in the year of 1945, near the town of
Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, that the course of Gnostic studies was
radically renewed and forever changed. An Arab peasant, digging
around a boulder in search of fertilizer for his fields, happened
upon an old, rather large red earthenware jar. Hoping to have found
a buried treasure, and with due hesitation and apprehension about
the jinn who might attend such a hoard, he smashed the jar
open. Inside he discovered no treasure and no genie, but instead
books: more than a dozen old codices bound in golden brown leather.6
Little did he realize that he had found an extraordinary collection
of ancient texts, manuscripts hidden a millennium and a half before
-- probably by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius
seeking to preserve them from a destruction ordered by the church as
part of its violent expunging of heterodoxy and heresy.
How the Nag Hammadi manuscripts eventually passed into scholarly
hands is a fascinating story too lengthy to relate here. But today,
now over fifty years since being unearthed and more than two decades
after final translation and publication in English as The Nag
Hammadi Library, 7 their importance has become astoundingly
clear: These thirteen papyrus codices containing fifty-two sacred
texts are representatives of the long lost "Gnostic Gospels", a last
extant testament of what orthodox Christianity perceived to be its
most dangerous and insidious challenge, the feared opponent that the
Church Fathers had reviled under many different names, but most
commonly as Gnosticism. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts has
fundamentally revised our understanding of both Gnosticism and the
early Christian church.
PLEASE NOTE -
Several of the major texts in the Nag Hammadi collection have
more than one English translation; where more than one
translation is available, we have listed the translators' names
in parenthesis below the name of the text. Texts marked with the
{*} had more than one version extant within the Nag Hammadi
codices; often these several versions were used conjointly by
the translators to provide the single translation presented
here.
Click
HERE for a list of all of the
extrabiblical texts I could find online, including the apocrypha,
pseudepigrapha, and other extrabiblical writings.