The Nag Hammadi Library — The Rediscovery of Gnosis
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 — 52 texts buried in Egypt in the 4th century — transformed the study of early Christianity and restored the Gnostic voice that had been suppressed for 1,600 years.
In December 1945, a peasant named Muhammad Ali discovered a sealed clay jar near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi containing 52 Coptic texts written on papyrus, buried in the 4th century CE by monks who wished to preserve them from destruction following the Bishop Athanasius's Easter letter of 367 CE (which first defined the Christian biblical canon and implicitly condemned all other texts). The library includes: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Truth, the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Trimorphic Protennoia, the Allogenes, the Three Steles of Seth, and dozens of other extraordinary texts. Their publication (complete English translation: The Nag Hammadi Library, 1977, edited by James Robinson) transformed the study of early Christianity — demonstrating that the earliest Christian movement was far more diverse than the orthodox canon reveals, and giving Gnostic texts the opportunity to speak for themselves rather than being known only through the hostile reports of their opponents.
The discovery at Nag Hammadi was not merely an archaeological find — it was the rediscovery of a world of spiritual experience that had been buried for 1,600 years.
Historian Bart Ehrman (Lost Christianities) documents how the Nag Hammadi discovery demonstrated that early Christianity was not a unified phenomenon from which Gnosticism deviated, but a diverse field in which multiple forms of Christianity competed — the 'heresy' of Gnosticism was the loser in a power struggle, not necessarily the theological deviant.
The Gnostic Gospels