The Nag Hammadi Library in English: Introduction
The first complete English translation of the Nag Hammadi texts, with an introduction in which James M. Robinson tells how the books were found. His account is built on interviews with villagers thirty years after the event.
James M. Robinson directed the project that photographed, edited and translated the codices in the 1970s. Section 3 of his introduction, “The Discovery”, gives the story that has been repeated since: two brothers of the al-Samman clan, digging for fertiliser at the foot of the Jabal al-Tarif in December 1945, found a jar, and one of them, Muhammad Ali, broke it open.
The account reports what Muhammad Ali and others told Robinson in the 1970s. It is a primary source for that testimony, not a record made at the time. Robinson’s own later tellings differ in their details, and the reliability of the story has been questioned; see the dating note of the Nag Hammadi Library Is Found.
Cited in
- about December 1945, estimated date