Thirteen Codices, and What Was in Them

The Nag Hammadi find is thirteen leather bound papyrus codices, containing some fifty two tractates, of which around forty were previously unknown. They are in Coptic, translated from Greek originals, and they were buried in a jar in Upper Egypt in the fourth century and recovered in 1945.

What they contain is not one system. There are Sethian and Valentinian works with elaborate emanationist cosmologies; there is the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings collection with no narrative and no crucifixion; there is a heavily damaged Coptic version of part of Plato's Republic, apparently included by a compiler who took it for a revelation text; there is a fragment of the Hermetic Asclepius; and there is material that is plainly ascetic Christian without being gnostic in any technical sense.

That variety is the collection's main scholarly consequence. Before 1945, gnosticism was known almost entirely through the polemics of the heresiologists who opposed it, and it looked like a coherent movement because they described it as one. The library shows a range of unrelated and sometimes incompatible positions, and it is a large part of why some historians now argue the category itself should be retired.