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The Nag Hammadi Library
B I B L I O T H È Q U E D E N A G H A M M A D I
Introduction from « The Gnostic Gospels »
by Elaine Pagels
In December 1945 an Arab peasant made an astonishing archeological discovery in Upper Egypt.
Rumors obscured the circumstances of this find--perhaps because the discovery was accidental,
and its sale on the black market illegal. For years even the identity of the discoverer remained
unknown. One rumor held that he was a blood avenger; another, that he had made the find near
the town of Naj 'Hammádì at the Jabal al-Tárif, a mountain honeycombed with more than 150
caves. Originally natural, some of these caves were cut and painted and used as grave sites as
early as the sixth dynasty, some 4,300 years ago.
Thirty years later the discoverer himself, Muhammad 'Alí al-Sammán; told what happened.
Shortly before he and his brothers avenged their father's murder in a blood feud, they had saddled
their camels and gone out to the Jabal to dig for
sabakh,
a soft soil they used to fertilize their
crops. Digging around a massive boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar, almost a meter high.
Muhammad 'Alí hesitated to break the jar, considering that a
jinn
, or spirit, might live inside. But
realizing that it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, smashed the jar, and discovered
inside thirteen papyrus books, bound in leather. Returning to his home in al-Qasr, Muhammad
'All dumped the books and loose papyrus leaves on the straw piled on the ground next to the
oven. Muhammad's mother, 'Umm-Ahmad, admits that she burned much of the papyrus in the
oven along with the straw she used to kindle the fire.
A few weeks later, as Muhammad 'Alí tells it, he and his brothers avenged their father's death by
murdering Ahmed Isma'il. Their mother had warned her sons to keep their mattocks sharp: when
they learned that their father's enemy was nearby, the brothers seized the opportunity, "hacked off
his limbs . . . ripped out his heart, and devoured it among them, as the ultimate act of blood
revenge."
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Fearing that the police investigating the murder would search his house and discover the books,
Muhammad 'Alí asked the priest, al-Qummus Basiliyus Abd al-Masih, to keep one or more for
him. During the time that Muhammad 'Alí and his brothers were being interrogated for murder,
Raghib, a local history teacher, had seen one of the books, and suspected that it had value. Having
received one from al-Qummus Basiliyus, Raghib sent it to a friend in Cairo to find out its worth.
Sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo, the manuscripts soon attracted the
attention of officials of the Egyptian government. Through circumstances of high drama, as we
shall see, they bought one and confiscated ten and a half of the thirteen leather-bound books,
called codices, and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. But a large part of the
thirteenth codex, containing five extraordinary texts, was smuggled out of Egypt and offered for
sale in America. Word of this codex soon reached Professor Gilles Quispel, distinguished historian
of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Excited by the discovery, Quispel urged the Jung
Foundation in Zurich to buy the codex. But discovering, when he succeeded, that some pages
were missing, he flew to Egypt in the spring of 1955 to try to find them in the Coptic Museum.
Arriving in Cairo, he went at once to the Coptic Museum, borrowed photographs of some of the
texts, and hurried back to his hotel to decipher them. Tracing out the first line, Quispel was
startled, then incredulous, to read: "These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and
which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down." Quispel knew that his colleague H.C. Puech, using
notes from another French scholar, Jean Doresse, had identified the opening lines with fragments
of a Greek
Gospel of Thomas
discovered in the 1890's. But the discovery of the whole text raised
new questions: Did Jesus have a twin brother, as this text implies? Could the text be an authentic
record of Jesus' sayings? According to its title, it contained the
Gospel According to Thomas;
yet,
unlike the gospels of the New Testament, this text identified itself as a
secret
gospel. Quispel also
discovered that it contained many sayings known from the New Testament; but these sayings,
placed in unfamiliar contexts, suggested other dimensions of meaning. Other passages, Quispel
found, differed entirely from any known Christian tradition: the "living Jesus," for example,
speaks in sayings as cryptic and compelling as Zen koans:
Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not
bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
What Quispel held in his hand, the
Gospel of Thomas,
was only one of the fifty-two texts
discovered at Nag Hammadi (the usual English transliteration of the town's name). Bound into the
same volume with it is the
Gospel of Philip,
which attributes to Jesus acts and sayings quite
different from those in the New Testament:
. . . the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the
disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended] . . .
They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to
them, "Why do I not love you as (I love) her?"
Other sayings in this collection criticize common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the
bodily resurrection, as naïve misunderstandings. Bound together with these gospels is the
Apocryphon
(literally, "secret book")
of John,
which opens with an offer to reveal "the mysteries
[and the] things hidden in silence" which Jesus taught to his disciple John.
Muhammad 'Alí later admitted that some of the texts were lost--burned up or thrown away. But
what remains is astonishing: some fifty-two texts from the early centuries of the Christian era--
including a collection of early Christian gospels, previously unknown. Besides the
Gospel of
Thomas
and the
Gospel of Philip,
the find included the
Gospel of Truth
and the
Gospel to the
Egyptians,
which identifies itself as "the [sacred book] of the Great Invisible [Spirit]." Another
group of texts consists of writings attributed to Jesus' followers, such as the
Secret Book of James,
the
Apocalypse of Paul,
the
Letter of Peter to Philip,
and the
Apocalypse of Peter.
What Muhammad 'Alí discovered at Nag Hammadi, it soon became clear, were Coptic
translations, made about 1,500 years ago, of still more ancient manuscripts. The originals
themselves had been written in Greek, the language of the New Testament: as Doresse, Puech, and
Quispel had recognized, part of one of them had been discovered by archeologists about fifty
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years earlier, when they found a few fragments of the original Greek version of the
Gospel of
Thomas.
About the dating of the manuscripts themselves there is little debate. Examination of the datable
papyrus used to thicken the leather bindings, and of the Coptic script, place them c. A.D. 350-400.
But scholars sharply disagree about the dating of the original texts. Some of them can hardly be
later than c
.
A.D. 120-150, since Irenaeus, the orthodox Bishop of Lyons, writing C. 180, declares
that heretics "boast that they possess more gospels than there really are,'' and complains that in his
time such writings already have won wide circulation--from Gaul through Rome, Greece, and
Asia Minor.
Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the
Gospel of Thomas,
suggested the date of c.
A.D. 140 for the original. Some reasoned that since these gospels were heretical, they must have
been written later than the gospels of the New Testament, which are dated c. 60-l l0. But recently
Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University has suggested that the collection of sayings in the
Gospel of Thomas,
although compiled c. 140, may include some traditions even
older
than the
gospels of the New Testament, "possibly as early as the second half of the first century" (50-100)--
as early as, or earlier, than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts tell the origin of
the human race in terms very different from the usual reading of Genesis: the
Testimony of Truth,
for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the
serpent, long known to appear in Gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces
Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while "the Lord" threatens them with death, trying
jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they
achieve it. Another text, mysteriously entitled
The Thunder, Perfect Mind,
offers an extraordinary
poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:
For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin....
I am the barren one, and many are her sons....
I am the silence that is incomprehensible....
I am the utterance of my name.
These diverse texts range, then, from secret gospels, poems, and quasi-philosophic descriptions of
the origin of the universe, to myths, magic, and instructions for mystical practice.
Why were these texts buried-and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000
years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it
turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag
Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were
denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long
known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but
nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. Bishop
Irenaeus, who supervised the church in Lyons, c. 180, wrote five volumes, entitled
The
Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge,
which begin with his promise to set
forth the views of those who are now teaching heresy . . . to show how absurd and inconsistent
with the truth are their statements . . . I do this so that . . . you may urge all those with whom you
are connected to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ.
He denounces as especially "full of blasphemy" a famous gospel called the
Gospel of
Truth. Is
Irenaeus referring to the same
Gospel of Truth
discovered at Nag Hammadi' Quispel and his
collaborators, who first published the
Gospel of Truth,
argued that he is; one of their critics
maintains that the opening line (which begins "The gospel of truth") is not a title. But Irenaeus
does use the same source as at least one of the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi--the
Apocryphon
(Secret Book)
of John--
as ammunition for his own attack on such "heresy." Fifty
years later Hippolytus, a teacher in Rome, wrote another massive
Refutation of All Heresies
to
"expose and refute the wicked blasphemy of the heretics."
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This campaign against heresy involved an involuntary admission of its persuasive power; yet the
bishops prevailed. By the time of the Emperor Constantine's conversion, when Christianity
became an officially approved religion in the fourth century, Christian bishops, previously
victimized by the police, now commanded them. Possession of books denounced as heretical was
made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt,
someone; possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the banned books and
hid them from destruction--in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.
But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard
themselves
as "heretics. Most of the
writings use Christian terminology, unmistakable related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer
traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from "the many" who constitute what, in the second
century, came to be called the "catholic church." These Christians are now called gnostics, from the
Greek word
gnosis,
usually translated as "knowledge." For as those who claim to know nothing
about ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, "not knowing"), the person who does claim to
know such things is called gnostic ("knowing"). But
gnosis is
not primarily rational knowledge.
The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge ("He knows
mathematics") and knowing through observation or experience ("He knows me"), which
is gnosis.
As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as "insight," for
gnosis
involves an intuitive
process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and
human destiny. According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160),
the gnostic is one has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we
were... whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is
rebirth.
Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of
gnosis.
Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says:
Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by
taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own
and says, "My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body." Learn the sources of sorrow:, joy,
love, hate . . . If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him
in yourself
.
What Muhammad 'All discovered at Nag Hammadi is, apparently, a library of writings, almost all
of them gnostic. Although they claim to offer secret teaching, many of these texts refer to the
Scriptures of the Old Testament, and others to the letters of Paul and the New Testament gospels.
Many of them include the same
dramatic personae
as the New Testament--Jesus and his disciples.
Yet the differences are striking.
Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from Its creator: God is
wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is
knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.
Second, the "living Jesus" of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and
repentance, like the Jesus of
the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes
as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains
enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal--even
identical.
Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way: he remains
forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic
Gospel of
Thomas
relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both
received their being from the same source:
Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the
bubbling stream which I have measured out.... He who will drink from my mouth will become as I
am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him."
Does not such teaching--the identity of the divine and human. the concern with illusion and
enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord, but as spiritual guide sound more
Eastern than Western? Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the "living
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