The Nag Hammadi Library
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, a group of books that comprise the Gnostic Bible, sounds like the beginning of a Victorian adventure novel: in 1945, an Arab peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman, discovered a clay jar in the deserts of Upper Egypt, which contained 13 books that were bound in leather. He dumped the books at his family’s house while he and his brothers went out to enact a blood feud against another man. Some of the books were accidentally burned in a cooking fire, while the rest were eventually sold on the black market, until they attracted the attention of Egyptian officials, who confiscated several of the books, and housed them in the Coptic Museum of Cairo.
The codices were eventually discovered to be secret sacred Christian texts. The books were created over 1,500 years ago, during the first centuries of Christianity. Some of them had never been mentioned before, in any Christian literature; others had been declared heresy, and banned by the Church. They offer a counter-point to accepted ecclesiastical literature, and have been controversial ever since their discovery.
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, a group of books that comprise the Gnostic Bible, sounds like the beginning of a Victorian adventure novel: in 1945, an Arab peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman, discovered a clay jar in the deserts of Upper Egypt, which contained 13 books that were bound in leather. He dumped the books at his family’s house while he and his brothers went out to enact a blood feud against another man. Some of the books were accidentally burned in a cooking fire, while the rest were eventually sold on the black market, until they attracted the attention of Egyptian officials, who confiscated several of the books, and housed them in the Coptic Museum of Cairo.
The codices were eventually discovered to be secret sacred Christian texts. The books were created over 1,500 years ago, during the first centuries of Christianity. Some of them had never been mentioned before, in any Christian literature; others had been declared heresy, and banned by the Church. They offer a counter-point to accepted ecclesiastical literature, and have been controversial ever since their discovery.
