What Nag Hammadi Did to the Record
~ Monday, September 28, 2020 ~
Before December 1945, the argument that the early church had systematically suppressed competing apostolic traditions was a theological inference drawn from the shape of the canonical record — from what the canon excluded rather than from any surviving evidence of the exclusion. After a sealed earthenware jar was opened in the Egyptian desert near the town of Nag Hammadi, the inference became a documented finding.
The discovery was, by any measure, significant. In December 1945, Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman and others working near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt unearthed a large jar containing twelve leather-bound papyrus codices, together with pages from a thirteenth. The manuscripts are Coptic, dating to approximately the fourth century; they are translations of earlier Greek originals, most scholars placing the original compositions in the second and third centuries. The English edition, edited by James M. Robinson, was published in 1977.
What the Nag Hammadi library established is simple to state and difficult to overestimate: that Thomas, Philip, Judas, and others possessed independent and substantial teaching traditions that the canonical record does not transmit and does not acknowledge.
Three traditions that survived
The Gospel of Thomas (Codex II) contains 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. It has no crucifixion narrative and no resurrection account. The text was condemned by name by Cyril of Jerusalem, listed as forbidden in the Gelasian Decree, and effectively removed from circulation. Scholars continue to debate its date of composition, with estimates ranging from as early as 60 CE to as late as 250 CE; the range of uncertainty itself indicates how thoroughly the text had been excluded from the scholarly tradition that might otherwise have settled the question earlier.
The Gospel of Philip (Codex II) is a Valentinian Christian composition of the third century. Philip the Apostle is named within the text; the document attests an independent tradition built around him that the canonical record acknowledges in only the most minimal way.
The Gospel of Judas, found not at Nag Hammadi but in the Codex Tchacos — acquired by antiquities dealers in Egypt in the 1970s and published in 2006 after authentication by the National Geographic Society — presents a different Judas from the canonical betrayer. In this text, Judas is the disciple given “the mysteries of the kingdom.” The other eleven are portrayed as having “misunderstood the central tenets of his teaching.” Whether or not one accepts this portrayal as historically grounded, its existence establishes that an early tradition understood the apostolic relationships differently from the canonical account, and held that differently-organized understanding with enough conviction to commit it to writing.
Suppression as documented fact
The Nag Hammadi texts were buried. The prevailing scholarly hypothesis is that monks from the nearby Pachomian monastery at Chenoboskion buried them to preserve them from destruction following Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter of 367 CE, which explicitly ordered the destruction of non-canonical writings. The physical condition of the cache — sealed in a jar, deliberately preserved in a location unlikely to be disturbed — is consistent with this reading.
Explicit condemnation of these texts by name had begun much earlier. Irenaeus of Lyon describes the Cainites, a second-century group who venerated Judas as a hero and possessed a Gospel of Judas, in his Against Heresies (c. 180 CE). Cyril of Jerusalem identifies the Gospel of Thomas specifically. The Gelasian Decree compiles a list of prohibited texts. This is not theoretical suppression inferred from absence. It is documented suppression, with named authorities, named texts, and institutional mechanisms that operated over centuries.
The tradition divided against itself
One of the more instructive texts in the Nag Hammadi library is the Testimony of Truth (Codex IX,3). Unlike most of the other texts in the collection, the Testimony of Truth identifies rival Gnostic groups by name and condemns them — Valentinus, Basilides, Simon Magus. The alternative tradition was not a unified counter-tradition; it was itself internally fractured, competing over the correct transmission of hidden knowledge, deploying against competing factions the same language of condemnation that orthodoxy deployed against all of them.
Irenaeus’s account of the Cainites makes a similar point from outside: the diversity of heterodox positions was such that no single alternative to orthodoxy existed. What Nag Hammadi revealed was not a coherent opposing tradition but a field of competing ones, each with its own claim to legitimate transmission and its own account of what had been lost or hidden.
A marginal note, peripheral to the argument above. In several of the patristic manuscripts that engage with this contested landscape of transmission, Bishop has encountered a recurring notation in the margins of passages concerning the purchase or transfer of sacred knowledge — thirty marks, occasionally arranged in a pattern suggesting coins. The tradition from which this notation derives is unclear; it may belong to the internal polemics the Testimony of Truth documents, or to a later symbolic vocabulary for the unresolved question of who holds authentic transmission. Bishop has not found a satisfactory account of it in the secondary literature and does not advance a claim about it here. He notes it as something that has not been explained to his satisfaction.
In this series
- The Lists That Don’t Agree
- The Seventy and the Problem of Names
- Paul’s Argument
- The Number Beyond the Count
- The Missions North of the Danube
Sources
- Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
- Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.
- Irenaeus of Lyon. Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies), Book I, chapter 31. c. 180 CE (primary source).
- Athanasius of Alexandria. 39th Festal Letter. 367 CE (primary source, on destruction of non-canonical texts).