The Nag Hammadi Library

In December 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman digging for fertilizer under a cliff-face broke open a sealed jar and found thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices — fifty-two texts, in Coptic, buried around 350 CE, most of them unread for sixteen centuries. His mother is said to have burned some of the pages for kindling. The rest went through the antiquities market, a murder feud, the Cairo Coptic Museum, Jung's foundation, and an embargo of scholarly access that lasted until 1977. Before Nag Hammadi the Gnostics were known almost entirely through the writings of people refuting them. After it, they speak in their own voices — and turn out to be stranger, more varied, more beautiful and less unified than either their enemies or their modern admirers had said. It is the closest thing in the study of religion to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it happened two years earlier.