The Nag Hammadi Codices

A Question from a Reader

some of the Nag Hammadi codices

Did you know that when you become a paid supporter of this Substack, you not only help me sustain this writing habit of mine, but you also get to assign me a writing prompt? You can give me an assignment to write about, and I’ll write a post—just like this one—responding as best I can.

Back before Christmas one of my earliest supporters (and a former student) Craig sent me a question. “Of all the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi,” Craig asked, “which is your favorite and what impact does (or would) it have on Christianity in modernity, in your view?” It’s a good question—so good that I’ve spent about a month thinking about it, and trying to figure out how to do it justice.

First of all, some background. If you’ve heard of “the Gnostic Gospels,” chances are good that you’ve heard of Nag Hammadi and the books discovered there, even if you didn’t realize it. If the Dead Sea Scrolls had not been discovered around the same time, there is no doubt in my mind that the Nag Hammadi discoveries would have been considered the archaeological find of the 20^th century. These were a big deal when they were found in 1945, and they have remained so ever since. They have been overshadowed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the Nag Hammadi texts are also incredibly important.

Nag Hammadi is the name of a town in Egypt, and the books were discovered nearby and named after the town. In a parallel with the Dead Sea Scrolls, these books were found in a clay jar. But there are some key differences too. Whereas the Dead Sea Scrolls were, well, scrolls, the books found at Nag Hammadi were codices (which is the plural of codex), which is a book in the sense that we know it today, with a spine and pages. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic, while the Nag Hammadi books were written in Coptic, an Egyptian language. And while the Dead Sea Scrolls provided a deep view into second temple Judaism and contained nothing about Christianity (despite many conspiracy theories and rumors to the contrary), the Nag Hammadi codices were Christian in nature. One more parallel with the Dead Sea Scrolls: we don’t exactly know where these texts came from, or why they were buried in a jar. We don’t know who owned them or copied them. But we can guess; a monastery was located nearby, and some scholars think that a monk from there might have buried them, as this kind of book went out of style or was even anathematized.

That theory gains support if you think about the kinds of writings found at Nag Hammadi, and their relationship to other Christian writings. These writings likely date to the 3^rd and 4^th centuries (though dating manuscripts is a notoriously tricky business), which was around the time the canon of the New Testament was beginning to coalesce (but probably before it actually became an established list). It might have been the case that as a canon of authoritative and accepted books became more clear, books like the ones at Nag Hammadi became more marginal, and maybe even became a source of embarrassment or danger. This is just speculation, but it could be that the monks nearby held on to these books until they could not do so any longer, for whatever reason, and then buried them respectfully in a jar—as a final resting place, or to be retrieved later.

The Nag Hammadi books themselves are considered “Gnostic.” I put “Gnostic” in quotes, because recent scholarship has called that whole category into question. No ancient group called itself “Gnostic,” and the term is used to lump together many groups that had nothing to do with each other and might have even opposed each other. The category was first used by early Christians of the proto-Orthodox tradition (the group that would eventually prevail and set the agenda for Christianity in the West), as a heretical category. That is, these proto-Orthodox Christians were calling their enemies “Gnostic,” even though that is not what those enemies called themselves. Much of modern scholarship simply takes this category for granted and uses it as if it were a natural grouping of ideas and people. But historically speaking, “Gnostic” might be an incoherent grouping that served only second-and-third century heresiologists.

Nevertheless, most or all of the writings found at Nag Hammadi fit into that category of “Gnostic” as it was described by those proto-Orthodox Christians. They are writings that presume secret or special knowledge, imagine a dualism to the world (good/evil, light/dark, etc.), and denigrate the physical while elevating the spiritual. These books can be, to modern Christian inheritors of the proto-Orthodox tradition, strange. It seems clear to me, reading them, why they were not ultimately canonized: because they don’t fit very well with the other books of the New Testament, and they don’t seem to be telling the same basic story that the New Testament tells. Lots of conspiracy theories have popped up about the “Gnostic Gospels,” especially among liberal or left-wing Christians, suggesting a widespread campaign of suppression of ideas and book-burning and the like. Dan Brown and his sensationalistic fiction didn’t help in that regard. But I suspect (and a lot of scholarship supports this) that the real story is more mundane: among many early groups of Christians, some gained control of powerful institutions and others did not, and the ones who had big mouthpieces were heard the best. We have the New Testament we have because those books made sense together and alongside the lives of a group of early Jesus-followers, and the things that were excluded were left out because they did not make as much sense that way.

So back to Craig’s question: what, among the Nag Hammadi texts, is my favorite, and what has the most potential to speak to or change modern Christianity?

The easy answer for a favorite is the Gospel of Thomas. This book has been the headliner since the codices were discovered in 1945, and for good reason. It’s a “sayings gospel,” without a narrative structure, sort of like a Greatest Hits of Jesus album. That kind of gospel had been predicted by scholars who had been trying to figure out how the Jesus traditions developed; based on similarities between canonical gospels, many scholars had said that a sayings gospel had once existed and had been lost. So when Thomas was discovered, it was a sensation. People speculated that it was a forerunner to the synoptic gospels that are in the New Testament today, although that quickly fizzled out for lack of evidence. But just the idea that a sayings gospel had once existed is very powerful, and if there was one, there might have been more. The Gospel of Thomas itself is also a very compelling thing to read. At times, it is indistinguishable from reading Matthew or John. At other times, it’s disorientingly off, like seeing your teacher at the grocery store. To modern readers who are used to encountering the Jesuses of the four gospels, surrounded by twenty centuries of interpretation, this Gospel of Thomas Jesus can be bizarre and provocative. Personally, my favorite saying is 77b: “Split a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone, and you will find me there.” Saying 114 is also notoriously misogynist—and sort of in-character for Peter—but many scholars think it was appended to the end of the text and not part of earlier versions.

But if I’m answering Craig’s question for myself, right now, it would have to be The Thunder, Perfect Mind. If you click that link and read through the text, you’ll get a sense of the strangeness that I mentioned above. It’s an odd text, if we are comparing it to other early Christian writings, and its oddness is compounded by its sometimes-fragmentary nature. But I am convinced by arguments and commentary in this book and translation, prepared by some friends and acquaintances of mine, which interprets Thunder as a beguiling artifact of the early Jesus movement engaging with playful gender and sexuality metaphors and tapping into the long tradition of wisdom literature. I assign this book in one of the classes I teach, and it always captivates students with its beauty and its angle into the tradition, which is more oblique and glancing than what many are used to. The “I” of the poem draws the reader in, reconfiguring any ideas of the holy and its place in the world. “For I am the first and the last,” the poem says, “I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin…I am the members of my mother. I am the barren one, and many are her sons.” It’s just fascinating. And in a time when Christianity is being shredded by debates over gender, sexuality, shallow pop morality, and cynical political deployments of Christian ideas in culture wars, The Thunder, Perfect Mind strikes me as an antidote and a counter-story with the ability to give us new metaphors and new ways of imagining who God is and where God shows up in the world.

I’m grateful for Craig’s question (and his support), and I encourage all of you to click on some of those links above, or click on the gnosis.org site that has all the translations, read through some of the Nag Hammadi books, and pick your own favorites. What do you like, and why? Then drop into the comments and share with the rest of us!