Questions from the Foundations
Nag Hammadi And The Lives of Jesus
(I)
“Human Beings live in Stories like
Fish in the Sea.”
— John Dominic
Crossan
Discovery of the
Nag Hammadi Library
It was on a December day in the year
of 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, that the
course of Chrisian studies was
radically renewed and
forever changed. An Arab
peasant, digging around a boulder in search of fertilizer for his fields,
happened upon
an old, rather large red
earthenware jar. Hoping to have found
a
buried treasure, and with due
hesitation and apprehension about the jinn who might attend such a
hoard, he smashed the jar open. Inside he discovered no treasure and no
genie, but instead books: more than a dozen old codices bound in golden
brown leather.
Little did he realize that he had found an extraordinary
collection of ancient texts, manuscripts hidden a millennium and a half
before—probably by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius
seeking to preserve them from a destruction ordered by the church as
part of its violent expunging of heterodoxy and heresy.
How the Nag Hammadi manuscripts
eventually passed into scholarly hands is a fascinating story too
lengthy to relate here. But today, now over fifty years since being
unearthed and more than two decades after final translation and
publication in English as The Nag Hammadi Library, 7 their importance
has become astoundingly clear: These thirteen papyrus codices
containing fifty-two sacred texts are representatives of the long lost
“Gnostic Gospels”, a last extant testament of what orthodox
Christianity perceived to be its most dangerous and insidious
challenge, the feared opponent that the Church Fathers had reviled
under many different names, but most commonly as Gnosticism. The
discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts has fundamentally revised our
understanding of both Gnosticism and the early Christian church.
above notes from Gnostic Society Library: http://www.gnosis.org/library/dss/dss.htm
The Nag Hammadi codexes unlike the
Dead Sea Scrolls are clearly part of specifically Christian
times. They are book-like, bound in leather with pages sewn
together. They contain contains religious and hermetic texts,
works of moral maxims, Apocryphal texts, and more curiously, a
rewriting of Plato's Republic.
In
addition to the importance of the manuscripts for the history of books
(they are the oldest known books to date) and Coptic writing, they
represent a key source of evidence for the history of philosophy and
primitive Christianity.
Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to analyse them, because
we know nothing of their authors, circumstances or place where they
were written. On the other hand, they can currently
be considered as a decisive element in the research of the beginnings
of the church and gnosticism.
Many scholars deem the finding
of what appears to be a complete text of the Gospel of Thomas
particularly important. This Gospel is seen so much like the as
yet undiscovered written source scholars call Q that Matthew and Luke
use to write their own Gospels that scholars believe it comes from a
very early time in the life of Christianity. It provides another
independent source into the time of the writing of the gospels and the
creation of the Chrisitian community.
Information found on the Nag Hammadi
Library page: http://www.nag-hammadi.com/
Dictionary of technical terms used:
Apocryphal: refers to texts
that bear a resemblance to canonical books and present figures from
Christianity, but do not belong to the New Testament.
Coptic: refers to the
Christians originating from Egypt and the language used in the Nag
Hammadi library
Esotericism: a doctrine
according to which some types of knowledge must not be disclosed to the
general public, but reserved for a closed group of disciples.
Gnosticism: Gnosticism
encompasses the various forms of religious thought in the Roman empire
between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AC, and was mainly based
in Alexandria. All these forms are strongly characterised by the
duality between the material, which was rejected, and the spiritual.
Gnostic thought was declared heretical by the Church.
Heresy: all the religious
trends running parallel to Catholicism, but condemned by the Church as
corrupting the dogma.
Hermetism: an obscure doctrine
resulting from a series of texts traditionally attributed to Hermes.
Source Q: this term comes
from the German Quelle, meaning source, and refers to the passages
common to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, also known as the double
tradition
What is contained in the Nag
Hammadi Library:
Codex I (Jung Codex)
1. The Prayer of the Apostle Paul
2. The
Apocryphon of James
3. The
Gospel of Truth
4. The
Treatise on the Resurrection
5. The
Tripartite Tractate
Codex II
6. The Apocryphon of John
7. The
Gospel According to Thomas
8. The
Gospel According to Philip
9. The
Hypostasis of the Archons
10. On the
Origin of the World
11. The
Exegesis on the Soul
12. The Book
of Thomas the Contender
Codex III
13. The Apocryphon of John
14. The
Gospel of the Egyptians
15.
Eugnostos the Blessed
16. The
Sophia of Jesus Christ
17. The
Dialogue of the Saviour
Codex IV
18. The Apocryphon of John
19. The
Gospel of the Egyptians
Codex V
20. Eugnostos the Blessed
21. The
Apocalypse of Paul
22. The
Apocalypse of James
23. The
Apocalypse of James
24. The
Apocalypse of Adam
32. Fragment
of the Perfect Discourse
Codex VII
33. The Paraphrase of Shem
34. The
Second Treatise of the Great Seth
Codex VI
25. The Acts of Peter and the Twelve
Apostles
26. The
Thunder, Perfect Mind
27.
Authoritative Teaching
28. The
Concept of Our Great Power
29. Plato's
Republic 588A-589B
30. The
Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth
31. The
Prayer of Thanksgiving
35. The
Apocalypse of Peter
36. The
Teachings of Silvanus
37. The
Three Steles of Seth
Codex VIII
38. Zostrianos
39. The
Letter of Peter to Philip
Codex IX
40. Melchizedek
41. The
Thought of Norea
42. The
Testimony of Truth
Codex X
43. Marsanes
Codex XI
44. The Interpretation of Knowledge
45. A
Valentinian Exposition
46. Allogenes
47.
Hypsiphrone
Codex XII
48. The Sentences of Sextus
49. The
Gospel of Truth
50.
Unidentified fragments
Codex XIII
51. Trimorphic Protennoia
52. On the
Origin of the World
Further
Reading:
*Davies, Stephen, et al. The Gosepl of Thomas: Annotated and
Explained. New York: Skylight Illuminations, 2002.
* Patterson, Stephen J. The Fifth Gospel : The Gospel of Thomas
Comes of Age (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press 2000).
* Ehrman, Bart D., ed. The New Testament and Other Early
Christian Writings: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press,
1998.
Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New
York: Vintage, 1998.
* Miller, Robert J., ed. The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars
Version. Rev and enl. ed. Sonoma: Polebridge, 1994.
* Elliott, J.K., ed. The Apocryphal New Testament.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
* Meyer, Marvin. The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings
of Jesus. San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1992.
* Schneemelcher, Wilhem, ed. Gospels and Related Writings.
Translated by R. McL. Wilson. Vol. 1 of New Testament Apocrypha. Rev.
ed. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991.
* Robinson, James M., ed. Nag Hammadi Library In English. San Fransisco:
HarperCollins, 1988.
* Cameron, Ron, ed. The Other Gospels: Non-Canonical Texts.
Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982.
The Gospel of Thomas website, with many links, is maintained by Stevan
Davies: http://home.epix.net/~miser17/Thomas.html.
