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Thirteen Fourth-Century Coptic Books From Upper Egypt

Nag Hammadi Codices

Also called Nag Hammadi Library

Twelve surviving papyrus books and part of a thirteenth, dug up in Egypt in about 1945 and carrying forty-five otherwise mostly lost works of Greek-speaking Christianity's stranger edges — the single most important manuscript find for understanding the movements the early church argued with.

Type
Papyrus codices with leather covers, single-quire except Codex I, the covers stiffened with scrap papyrus
Language
Coptic — mostly Sahidic, with Codices I and X and the first two texts of XI in a variety of Lycopolitan. Every text is a translation from Greek
Contents
Fifty-one texts, being forty-five distinct works of which thirty-six were previously unknown; at least 1,240 written pages originally, 1,156 of them now represented by at least a fragment, plus 713 unplaced scraps. Among them the Gospel of Truth, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas. Popular counts of "52 tractates" and scholarly counts of 45 differ because several works occur twice
Written
The codices, fourth century — a dated document reused in the cover of Codex VII places that cover after AD 348. The works copied into them were composed at various dates over the first four centuries
Origin
The individual works were composed in Greek across the first four centuries in various parts of the Mediterranean world; the Coptic translations and the books themselves are generally placed in the latter half of the fourth century, somewhere near where they were found
Found at
Reported as the foot of the Jabal al-Tarif near Hamrah Dum, Upper Egypt — but this rests on interviews conducted thirty years later, later excavation at the spot corroborated nothing, and J. Doresse's earlier account places the find in an ancient cemetery at Qasr es-Sayyad instead. The books' only documented appearance is on the Cairo antiquities market
Found in
Conventionally December 1945. N. Denzey Lewis notes that "neither the year nor the place of the books' discovery was initially specified" and that early accounts range from 1945 to 1949
Found by
Credit is contested. The standard account names a farmer, Muhammad Ali al-Samman, digging for fertiliser with his brothers; the number of people present varies between two, seven and eight across Robinson's own retellings, and the excavators R. Kasser and M. Krause published a signed disclaimer against the whole reconstruction
Now held at
Coptic Museum, Cairo (the bulk). The leather cover and cover stiffening of Codex I are at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California; part of one leaf of Codex III is at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
Shelfmark
Coptic Museum, Cairo, inv. nos. 4851, 10544-10555, 10589, 10590, 11597, 11640; Yale 1784 for the Yale leaf
Facsimile
View the manuscript

Books in a Jar, in 1945 or Thereabouts

The account everybody tells goes like this. In December 1945, near the cliff of Jabal al-Tarif in Upper Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for sabakh, the soft nitrous earth used as fertiliser, when his mattock struck a large sealed jar. He hesitated in case a jinn lived inside it, broke it open anyway hoping for gold, and found thirteen leather-bound papyrus books. He took them home, where some of the loose leaves went into his mother's bread oven. Weeks later he and his brothers avenged their father in a blood feud. The books reached the Cairo antiquities market, and from there the Coptic Museum.

Almost every element of that paragraph is disputed, and the second and third sections of this article are about why. What is not disputed is the outcome. The Coptic Museum in Cairo began acquiring the books in 1946 and holds the bulk of them today under inventory numbers 4851, 10544 to 10555, 10589, 10590, 11597 and 11640. Part of Codex I travelled a different route: it was bought from a dealer in Belgium by the Jung Institute of Zurich on 10 May 1952, which is why it is still called the Jung Codex, and it was returned to Cairo and reunited with the rest of Codex I in 1975 and 1976. The leather cover of Codex I and the scrap papyrus lining it belong to the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont, California, and part of one leaf of Codex III is at Yale.

The physical facts are firmer than the story. S. Emmel, who worked on the editing project, records that what survives is "extensive remains of eleven papyrus books in codex form with leather covers (Codices I-XI); eight leaves (as well as two large fragments that probably represent two further leaves) of a twelfth codex, the bulk and leather cover of which are assumed to have been lost since the discovery (Codex XII); and eight leaves (Codex XIII) that had been removed in antiquity from a thirteenth codex and laid inside the front cover of Codex VI." The original collection ran to at least 1,240 written pages, of which 1,156 are represented by at least a fragment. Seven hundred and thirteen inscribed scraps have never been placed.

What the Books Contain, and What They Are Not

Fifty-one texts, of which forty-five are distinct works and thirty-six were previously unknown in any form. All were composed in Greek, over the first four centuries, in various parts of the Mediterranean world, and translated into Coptic — most into Sahidic, some into a variety of Lycopolitan. The books themselves are fourth-century: one of the dated documents reused as stiffening in the cover of Codex VII shows that cover was made some time after AD 348. They are among the oldest well-preserved bound books of any kind to survive. Among them are the Gospel of Truth, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Thomas.

None of this is a suppressed Bible. The popular "banned books" framing fails on the plainest evidence there is, which is dates and public records. Specialists date these works to the second century or later, with the Gospel of Thomas the one genuine argument about that — long after the four Gospels were circulating and being copied. And where the early church discusses such books, it does so openly and in writing. Eusebius of Caesarea, listing the books of his own day around AD 325, sorts them into the accepted, the disputed, the rejected, and then a fourth group he describes as "those that are cited by the heretics under the name of the apostles" — of which he says they "are not to be placed even among the rejected writings, but are all of them to be cast aside as absurd and impious." That is a hostile verdict, and this article's position is that it was broadly the right one. But it is a published verdict in a widely-read book, naming names. Suppression is what you do when you cannot argue; cataloguing your opponents' titles in a history everyone reads is the opposite.

What the codices are is something better than a conspiracy: the best evidence anyone has for what the early church was actually arguing against. Before 1945 the teachings in these books were known almost entirely from the churchmen who attacked them, which is a poor way to learn what anyone believed. Now they can be read directly. A reader who wants to see why the New Testament's own warnings about "what is falsely called knowledge" were not shadow-boxing has, for the first time in sixteen centuries, the other side of the correspondence.

Nobody Can Say Where They Came From

These books were not excavated. There is no dig report, no stratigraphy, no photograph of them in the ground. Excavation was attempted later, at the reported spot, and produced nothing that corroborated the account — which is a harder fact than "nobody looked". What is known of the find comes from interviews J. M. Robinson conducted from the 1970s onward, thirty years after the event, and the objection to that method is not new: R. Kasser and M. Krause put a signed disclaimer into the introductory volume of the facsimile edition itself, stating that they "have serious reasons to put in doubt the objective value of a number of important points" of Robinson's account and do "not consider as assured anything more than the core of the story (the general location and approximate date of the discovery)." Robinson answered that his was ordinary historical method and could be checked: "This methodical and critical investigation is what history is made of, not fable. Like scientific experiment, it can be repeated, and unless that is done with contrary results, it is unscientific to deny the validity of the result attained thus far." M. Goodacre, who has pressed the case against the story hardest, does not answer that on its merits: he observes that too much time has now passed for such a re-investigation to be possible at all, and that "Robinson's critics themselves never attempted to do this, perhaps not surprisingly given the content of their criticism, which is about the unreliable nature of this kind of testimony in general."

Goodacre's own objection is that the story exists in irreconcilable versions — two people present in 1977, seven in 1979, eight in 1981, with the name of the first finder changing — and that the reasons it is repeated are not evidential: "In its orientalizing representation of illiterate, ignorant, blood-thirsty peasants, it enables academics to celebrate their literacy, civilization and wealth," and "pedagogical usefulness is not a barometer of truth." He also asks a plainly practical question: "Should we continue to speak about 'thirteen codices' when it is clear that only twelve complete codices have survived?" N. Denzey Lewis and J. A. Blount pressed further in 2014, arguing that a jar of papyrus could not have survived sixteen centuries of Nile flooding at the base of a cliff, and that higher up "is hardly the place to dig for sabakh" — so "it is entirely reasonable to suspect that he was searching for illegal antiquities: tomb robbing." Denzey Lewis has since softened the part of that case aimed at Robinson personally, writing in 2018 that she is now "less inclined to say that" he "himself invented this story" and thinks instead that "he believed a story that came together from a well-organized ring of dealers." Her verdict on how much is recoverable is worth quoting because it is the honest floor: "We can only guess."

One further dispute follows from all this and is very much alive. If the books were not monastic property hidden after Athanasius of Alexandria's festal letter of 367 — the standard explanation for decades — then what were they? Denzey Lewis and Blount argue the monastic setting is unevidenced, that the papyrologists who examined the cover stiffening concluded against a monastic source and for a "town rubbish heap," and — following D. Brakke, whose article this one has not read directly and cites at second hand through them — that the writings Athanasius's letter was aimed at were his Arian and Meletian opponents rather than anything in these books. But H. Lundhaug and L. Jenott answered in 2015 with a book-length case that the codices were made and read by monks in fourth- and fifth-century Upper Egypt, arguing from the scribal notes and colophons the books themselves carry. P. Linjamaa's 2024 survey of the whole quarrel describes the debate as "polarised" and reports that the sceptical case has itself "received considerable critique." It is not settled, and an article that told you it was would be telling you something the specialists do not know.

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