Nag Hammadi Codex II

In December 1945 a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for soft earth to use as fertiliser at the foot of Jabal al-Tarif, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, and struck a sealed jar. Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. What happened next was not archaeology: the books were divided among the finders, some pages were used as fuel, and the rest went out onto the antiquities market and were scattered before any scholar saw them.

Codex II is the best preserved of the thirteen and the most important. It is a papyrus book of the mid-fourth century, written in Sahidic Coptic, still in its tooled leather cover with the flap that wrapped around it. It contains seven works: the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.

Its date does not rest on handwriting. The leather covers of the Nag Hammadi books were stiffened with waste papyrus, and that waste turned out to include dated Greek documents, letters and receipts, which places the binding of the collection in the second half of the fourth century. It is one of the rare cases where a manuscript can be dated by the rubbish used to make it.

Before 1945 the Gospel of Thomas was three scraps of Greek papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, published at the turn of the century and impossible to place: sayings attributed to Jesus, some familiar and some not, with no framework to fit them into. Codex II contains the whole thing in Coptic, one hundred and fourteen sayings, no narrative, no crucifixion, no resurrection, just a sequence of statements introduced by the words Jesus said.

That completeness reorganised a field. It made it possible to ask whether a sayings collection of this kind lay behind the canonical gospels, a question that had been theoretical, and it gave the study of Christian origins a text to argue over rather than a hypothesis.

The wider effect of the codex is broader still. Almost everything known about Gnostic Christianity before the find came from the men who wrote against it, Irenaeus and Hippolytus and Epiphanius, who quoted their opponents in order to refute them and who had no reason to quote them fairly. Nag Hammadi put the other side of that argument on the table. The Apocryphon of John, also in this codex, turns out to correspond closely to a system Irenaeus described, which is a rare piece of good news for his accuracy, and the Gospel of Philip turns out to be something his summaries had not prepared anyone for.