Any Nag Hammadi Library Summary tends to arrive as a list of famous titles. The Gospel of Thomas sits at the top, and the rest trail behind it. That list hides the thing that matters most about the find.
The texts did not turn up loose in a heap. They came bound into thirteen books, and somebody chose what went into each one.
Read as thirteen volumes rather than as fifty-two titles, the collection starts to say something about its owner. A table of contents is evidence, and this collection has thirteen of them.
What Thirteen Codices Actually Means
The count itself needs a small correction before anything else follows. Twelve codices survive more or less whole, and the thirteenth is eight leaves that somebody tucked inside the front cover of another book.
Those thirteen books hold fifty-two tractates between them, of which six are duplicates, so the number of distinct works is closer to forty-six.
All of them are in Coptic, and nearly all are translations from Greek that no longer survives. The binding, the choosing and the ordering are Egyptian and fourth-century, while much of the content is Greek and second-century.
Codex I, a Volume With a Theme
The first codex left Egypt separately and reached the Jung Institute in Zurich, which is why scholars still call it the Jung Codex. Its five texts hang together unusually well for an ancient collection, and it opens with a short prayer attributed to Paul. Then come the Apocryphon of James, the Gospel of Truth, the Treatise on the Resurrection and the Tripartite Tractate. Four of the five lean toward the school of Valentinus, and the fifth is a prayer that would suit that school.
Whoever assembled this book was not collecting curiosities. He was putting together a coherent volume, in the way anyone shelves the books that argue one case.
Codex II, Where the Famous Texts Live
Almost everything a general reader knows from this library sits in one binding. Codex II carries seven works in a single binding. They are the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip, followed by the Hypostasis of the Archons and On the Origin of the World. The Exegesis on the Soul and the Book of Thomas the Contender close the volume.
The arrangement inside is not random either. A cosmological revelation opens the book, two gospels follow, and three treatises then work out the consequences of the opening myth.
That order rewards a little attention from anyone reading them. The sayings of Thomas read differently when the volume has just explained where the world came from and who made it.
The Duplicates, and What a Nag Hammadi Library Summary Misses
Six texts appear twice or more, and the repetition is informative in itself. The Apocryphon of John turns up in three of the codices alone. A fourth copy sits in a Berlin manuscript that has nothing to do with this find.
Eugnostos the Blessed appears twice, On the Origin of the World twice, and the Gospel of Truth twice, the second time in fragments.
Two explanations compete here, and both may be right. Somebody may have merged several private collections before the burial, or these may simply be the texts a community wanted twice.
Codex III, Where One Text Becomes Two
The third codex holds the single most instructive pair in the whole collection. It contains a
treatise called Eugnostos the Blessed, and it also contains the Sophia of Jesus Christ.
The two are in substance the same work. Eugnostos is a philosophical letter about the unknowable God and the structure of the heavens, with no Christian content whatever. The Sophia is that same letter cut into questions and answers, with the risen Christ answering named disciples.
A reader can put the columns side by side and watch a Greek treatise become a gospel. The additions stand out clearly enough. An opening scene on a mountain, the disciples’ questions and a closing commission wrap around sentences that were already there.
Nothing else in ancient Christian literature shows the process so plainly. Whoever
bound this codex kept both versions, which suggests he valued the treatise as well as the
gospel made out of it.
Codex VI, the Volume That Breaks the Pattern
One book in the set refuses to fit the label Gnostic library. Codex VI opens with the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles, and follows with the poem called Thunder. Authoritative Teaching and the Concept of Our Great Power come next, and then the volume changes register completely. A passage from Plato’s Republic comes next, in a Coptic translation whose author plainly struggled with the Greek. After it stand three Hermetic pieces: a discourse on the eighth and ninth heavens, a prayer of thanksgiving and an excerpt from the Asclepius.
Christian acts, a mythological poem, Greek philosophy and Egyptian Hermetism, in that order, inside one cover. No sect produced that shelf, and no heresy hunter would have described it.
The Scribe Who Left a Note
Codex VI also contains something rarer than any of its texts. Between the prayer of thanksgiving and the Asclepius excerpt, the copyist stopped and wrote a note to the man he was working for.
He explains that he has copied one Hermetic discourse and has many others. They stay behind, he says, because he suspects the man has them already. He does not want to duplicate what the man already owns, and three things follow from those four sentences. Somebody commissioned the copying rather than sharing it communally. The patron kept a collection of his own, and Hermetic writings circulated in quantity in fourth-century Egypt.
What a Nag Hammadi Library Summary Shows About the Owner
Put the thirteen volumes side by side and a reader appears rather than a sect. He wanted revelation dialogues, and he also wanted moral maxims, a philosophical excerpt and prayers.
The Sentences of Sextus, a collection of Christian moral sayings that circulated widely and offended nobody, sits in the twelfth codex. It would be at home in any orthodox monastery of the period.
That mixture is the reason the phrase Gnostic gospels does the collection a disservice. The label describes some of the contents and misdescribes the collection, which behaves like a library rather than a manifesto.
What a Nag Hammadi Library Summary Cannot Settle
Some questions stay open no matter how carefully anyone reads the shelf. Nobody knows who owned the books. The candidates run from a Pachomian monastery a few miles away to a private household with money and curiosity.
The order inside each codex may belong to the binder rather than to the reader. A workshop that sewed quires together for a customer would have followed instructions, and those instructions have not survived.
Even the manner of the burial stays uncertain. The story of a jar under a boulder comes from interviews recorded thirty years after the event. More than one specialist has since taken the standard account of the discovery apart in detail.
The Thirteenth Book, Which Is Not a Book
The thirteenth codex is the strangest object in the whole find, and it is not a volume at all but eight leaves. Somebody cut them out of a book and pushed them inside the front cover of Codex VI, apparently for safekeeping.
Those leaves carry a complete work, the Trimorphic Protennoia, and then break off in the opening lines of On the Origin of the World. Somebody wanted the first text and stopped
cutting once he had it.
The rest of that codex has disappeared entirely, and whatever else stood in it went the way of most fourth-century papyrus. The eight leaves survive only because they were hiding inside another cover.
Where the Nag Hammadi Library Summary Ends: the Books Today
Twelve of the thirteen codices are in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and the Jung Codex returned there after its years in Zurich. The leaves sit under glass, and full facsimiles have appeared in print.
A complete English translation did not appear until 1977, thirty-two years after the find. For three decades the argument about early Christianity went on without the evidence. That is worth remembering whenever somebody describes the collection as having transformed the field overnight.
The burial itself may well have had a trigger. In 367 Athanasius of Alexandria circulated a festal letter that listed the books fit for reading in the churches, and dismissed the rest. The dates in the bindings put the codices within a generation of it.
That timing is suggestive rather than probative, and careful writers say so.
Anyone can read the whole library today in a single volume, because the old barrier was access and it has gone.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many texts are in the Nag Hammadi library?
Fifty-two tractates in thirteen codices, of which six are duplicates. That leaves about forty-six distinct works, nearly all translated into Coptic from lost Greek originals.
Are they all Gnostic?
No. The collection includes a passage of Plato and three Hermetic pieces. It also holds a book of Christian moral sayings, and several works no ancient writer would have called heretical.
When were the codices made?
The bindings are fourth-century, and waste papyrus reused to stiffen the covers carries dates from the 340s. The texts themselves are older, and the earliest material is second-century.
Which codex has the Gospel of Thomas?
Codex II, second in order, between the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Philip. That same volume holds five other works besides.
Which text shows a treatise turning into a gospel?
Eugnostos the Blessed and the Sophia of Jesus Christ, both in Codex III. The first has no Christian content at all, and the second is the same material cut into questions that the risen Christ answers.
Is anything still missing?
Yes. Several tractates are damaged and some survive only as fragments. The thirteenth codex amounts to eight leaves, which survived because somebody tucked them inside another book’s cover.
A Nag Hammadi Library Summary that lists titles gives a reader the least useful part of the find. The bindings, the order and the duplicates carry information that the titles alone cannot.
Somebody buried thirteen books together in the fourth century, and somebody had assembled each one with a purpose. Reading them as volumes rather than as titles is how that purpose becomes visible.
Check out the author’s book here: The Gnostic Gospels.
Leave a Reply