Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

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. 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 but 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, 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.

• The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles
  
• Allogenes
  
• The Apocalypse of Adam
  
• The (First) Apocalypse of James
  
• The (Second) Apocalypse of James
  
• The Apocalypse of Paul
  
• The Apocalypse of Peter
  
• The Apocryphon of James:
  
  • (Williams translation)
  • (Cameron translation)
    
• The Apocryphon of John
  • Wisse translation
  • Waldstein & Wisse - Short Version translation
  • Waldstein & Wisse - Long Version translation
  • Davies translation
  • (See the Aprocryphon of John Collection for more information on the text)
• Asclepius 21-29
  
• Authoritative Teaching
  
• The Book of Thomas the Contender
  
• The Concept of Our Great Power
  
• The Dialogue of the Savior
  
• The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth
  
• Eugnostos the Blessed*
  
• The Exegesis on the Soul
  
• The Gospel of the Egyptians*
  
• The Gospel of Philip
  
• The Gospel of Thomas:
  • (Patterson & Meyer translation)
  • (Lambdin translation)
  • (Patterson & Robinson Translation)
  • (Grondin interlinear translation)
  • (See the Gospel of Thomas Collection for more information on the text)
• The Gospel of Truth:*
  
  • (Grant translation)
  • (Attridge & MacRae translation)
    
• The Hypostasis of the Archons
  
• Hypsiphrone
  
• The Interpretation of Knowledge
  
• The Letter of Peter to Philip
  
• Marsanes
  
• Melchizedek
  
• On the Anointing
  
• On the Baptism A
  
• On the Baptism B
  
• On the Eucharist A
  
• On the Eucharist B
  
• On the Origin of the World*
  
• The Paraphrase of Shem
  
• Plato, Republic 588A-589B
  
• The Prayer of the Apostle Paul
  
• The Prayer of Thanksgiving
  
• The Second Treatise of the Great Seth
  
• The Sentences of Sextus
  
• The Sophia of Jesus Christ
  
• The Teachings of Silvanus
  
• The Testimony of Truth
  
• The Thought of Norea
  
• The Three Steles of Seth
  
• The Thunder, Perfect Mind
  
• The Treatise on the Resurrection
  
• Trimorphic Protennoia
  
• The Tripartite Tractate
  
• A Valentinian Exposition
  
• Zostrianos