The Nag Hammadi Codices
Papyrus books in Coptic, found near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in the 1940s and holding over fifty religious texts, many of them unknown before. They include writings of the groups that early Christian authors called Gnostics.
See the object at ccdl.claremont.edu ↗Codex II, pages 32 and 111, where the Gospel of Thomas begins (Claremont Colleges Digital Library) ↗Photograph of Jabal al-Tarif, the cliff named as the place of the find (Claremont Colleges Digital Library) ↗
The codices are bound papyrus books in leather covers, written in Coptic. The scholars who first announced them in 1948 dated the handwriting of the first volume no later than the second half of the fourth century. Among the texts are the Gospel according to Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth and the Secret Book of John.
The Claremont archive describes the codices as kept in the Coptic Museum in Cairo and as no longer fully legible, so that the photographs of the 1970s are now a main witness to the text. Its captions to Robinson’s photographs repeat his account of the discovery, which rests on what villagers told him some thirty years afterwards. See the Nag Hammadi Library Is Found.
Cited in
- about December 1945, estimated date