Steve Watson

Text Hoard: Nag Hammadi Library

Nature of the Hoard

• 12 codices
  • Contain 52 tractates (51 bound and one unbound)
    • The unbound tractate, formerly ‘Codex XIII,’ was found inside the front cover of Codex VI
  • Comprise at least parts of 1139 pages of text
• Written in Coptic.
• Dated to the 4^th C AD.
• Principally gnostic – both Christian and some non-Christian – though with other material included: e.g. three texts from the Corpus Hermeticum and an extract from Plato’s
• Generally assumed to be the concealed property of the nearby Pachomian monastery. They may have been removed from the monastery collection after Athanasius in his 39^th Festal Letter in 367 AD published a list of texts he deemed canonical and condemned the use of texts he deemed non-canonical.

Location

Discovery

The existence of the codices became known in 1946. Between 1947 and 1950 French historian Jean Doresse investigated their origins, establishing that in 1945 a buried jar containing the codices had been unearthed by a farmer, reportedly from a graveyard near some 6^th Dynasty tombs. In the 70s the farmer, one Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman, was found and interviewed by James Robinson who described to him the circumstances of the discovery, which was at the base of the Jabal el Tarif cliffs near the village of Hamra Dom, within sight of the Pachomian monastery of Pbau/Pbow (modern Faw Qibli) 5 km from the Pachomian monastery of Chenoboskion/Seneset (modern al-Qasr wa as-Sayyad,) and 11 km from Nag Hammadi. The story he told is not much to be trusted, but his mother did mention that she used some of the texts as kindling and Robinson believes that that explains the poor condition of Codex XII.

Acquisition

1. Most of the texts were initially collected from 1946 onwards by Phokion J. Tano(s), a Cypriot antiques dealer in Cairo.
   In 1948 they were taken by the Department of Antiquities and in 1956 they were given to the Coptic Museum.
2. In 1947/8 Codex I was sold to Albert Eid, a Belgian antiques dealer in Cairo.
   It was then bought by the Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich in 1952 as a gift for Gustav Jung and named the ‘Jung Codex.’
   In 1975, after the text had been published, it was given to the Coptic Museum.

Photo: Courtesy of Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, CA

Publication

The editio princeps of the Jung Codex (NHC I) appeared in stages from 1956 to 1975, prepared by scholars for the Jung Institute using material from both Zurich and Cairo, after which NHC I was returned to Egypt.

The Gospel of Thomas (NHC II, 2) was published in a photographic edition in 1956 and an English translation with Coptic text was issued in 1959 as The Gospel of Thomas by A Guillaumont, H-C Puech, G Quispel, WC Till, Y ‘Abd al-Masih (eds.)

The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices in 12 volumes was published largely between 1972 and 1977 (with the volumes Cartonnage appearing in 1979 and Introduction in 1984) by the International Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices, established in 1970 by UNESCO and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, under the direction of JM Robinson of Claremont Graduate University.

Images of the original codices may be seen via the Claremont Colleges Digital Library’s Nag Hammadi Archive.

An English translation by members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity of Claremont CA (James M. Robinson, Director and General Editor,) appeared as The Nag Hammadi Library in English in 1977.

Contents

1. Tractate References

2. C2SRC Maps