Early Christianity · Part 4 · Nag Hammadi · B1–B2
The Jar at Nag Hammadi: Thirteen Books and a Gospel of Sayings
Part 4 of Early Christianity: in 1945, by the cliffs of Upper Egypt, a farmer found a jar full of ancient books. Who buried them, and why? What is the Gospel of Thomas, and what can it tell us about Jesus? Modals of deduction about the past: must have, might have, can’t have.
Most ancient books are lost. Those we have usually survived because people copied them again and again, century after century. Books that a church stopped copying slowly disappeared, and we know them, if at all, through quotations by their critics.
But Egypt is dry, and in its sand papyrus can survive for thousands of years. In the twentieth century, Egypt gave back many lost texts. The most important for the history of early Christianity is a collection of thirteen leather-bound books, found in December 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi, far up the Nile in Upper Egypt. Do not confuse them with the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947 near the Dead Sea: those are Jewish texts, older, and…
A book that nobody copies can only survive if somebody hides it.
According to the account he gave many years later, a farmer called Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging near the cliffs for soft soil to use as fertiliser when he found a large sealed jar. Afraid that it might have held an evil spirit, or hoping for gold, he broke it open and found the books. His story, recorded by the American scholar James Robinson in the 1970s, includes a blood feud and a mother who burned some pages in the…
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