Story
The Nag Hammadi discovery
What the 1945 codices are, and what they do not prove about 'the gnostics.'
Step 1
A jar near the Nile
In 1945 a jar of bound Coptic books was found near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The popular account of the finder comes from later interviews and should not be told as a courtroom fact. The books themselves are real.
Step 2
Fourth-century copies of older works
The codices were copied in the fourth century. Many of the works they contain are older, some probably second-century. They include the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocryphon of John, and the Gospel of Truth. They are not a single church's Bible.
Step 3
Do not equate the library with one heresy
Irenaeus attacked teachers he called gnostic. The Nag Hammadi books overlap that world and also sit outside it. Some are more philosophical, some more ascetic, some hard to classify. 'Gnostic' remains a useful and a slippery word.