December 1945 — the jar under the cliff

Near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman, digging for fertiliser under a cliff-face, breaks open a sealed jar and finds thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices: fifty-two texts, in Coptic, buried around 350 CE. His mother is said to have burned some pages for kindling. The rest go through the antiquities market, a murder feud, the Cairo Coptic Museum, Jung's foundation, and an embargo of scholarly access that lasts until 1977.

Before this, the Gnostics were known almost entirely through the writings of people refuting them. After it, they speak in their own voices — and turn out stranger, more varied, more beautiful and much less unified than either their enemies or their modern admirers had said.