Response Essay

 

Several scholars have called into question the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts.  Their arguments may have profound consequences for our understanding of these texts.  Read the following articles:

Denzey Lewis, Nicola, and Justine Ariel Blount. “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” JBL 133.2 (2014): 399–419 (

PDF (Links to an external site.)

)

Goodacre, Mark. “How Reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” JSNT 35.4 (2013): 303–22 (PDF (Links to an external site.))

Your assignment is to summarize these articles and then analyze their conclusions.  Why does it matter where these texts were found, and by whom? How does our understanding of these texts change if Denzey Lewis and Blount are correct?  How should scholars evaluate accounts of the discovery of manuscripts? 1700 Words

due at 8pm est 

Rethinking the Origins of the Nag
Hammadi Codices

nicola denzey lewis
ndenzey@brown.edu

Brown University, Providence, RI 02912

justine ariel blount
justineariel@icloud.com

1383 Pacific Street, Brooklyn, NY 11216

The famous find-story behind the Nag Hammadi codices, discovered in Egypt in
1945, has been one of the most cherished narratives in our field. Yet a close
examination of its details reveals inconsistencies, ambiguities, implicitly colo-
nialist attitudes, and assumptions that call for a thorough reevaluation. This
article explores the problematic moments in the find-story narrative and chal-
lenges the suggestions of James M. Robinson and others that the Nag Hammadi
codices were intentionally buried for posterity, perhaps by Pachomian monks, in
the wake of Athanasius’s thirty-ninth Festal Letter. We consider, rather, that the
Nag Hammadi codices may have derived from private Greco-Egyptian citizens
in late antiquity who commissioned the texts for personal use, depositing them
as grave goods following a practice well attested in Egypt.

The Nag Hammadi codices, discovered in 1945, have perhaps the most com-
pelling find-story of any ancient Egyptian book cache. When Mohamed Ali al-
Samman, both the hero and the antihero of this story, discovers that his brother
has found a jar while digging for fertilizer, he immediately takes control of the
operation. Taking the jar into his hands, the moment is tense. Should he open it?
He is a cautious, superstitious man, clearly pious and afraid of jinni; yet he also loves
gold, and as in those old Arabian nights tales, his curiosity gets the better of him
and he smashes the jar, only to find—is it gold?!—pieces of golden papyrus, flying
through the air. Little does Mohamed Ali know, when he takes them home and
tosses them into the little barn attached to his mother’s home, that he has discov-
ered thirteen books of more than fifty “lost Gospels” representing a Gnostic library

JBL 133, no. 2 (2014):

399

–419

399

400 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

of heretical documents, carefully secreted away in the increasingly theologically
oppressive atmosphere of late-fourth-century Egypt.1

But what if this famous story, which has become the canonical genesis for
scholars of Gnosticism, is merely a fiction? Even the earliest and most direct versions
of the story reveal unsettling inconsistencies. Elements are unstable, and the key
witness, Mohamed Ali, himself recants and changes his account.2 While we may
speculate on the reasons for these inconsistencies, it becomes difficult to believe
Mohamed Ali at all, not to mention the orientalizing fantasy of his encounter with
a papyrus-filled jar somewhere in the geese-grazing territories of Chenoboskion.
Indeed, two prominent Coptologists, Rodolphe Kasser and Martin Krause, long
ago went on record to distance themselves from the “official”—that is, much pub-
licized and disseminated—find-story.3

We begin by reexamining different accounts of the find-story, noting the cen-
tral instability of its narrative. We take this starting point because it matters whether
this story is true: from it, scholars of Gnosticism have built up fifty years of work
based on the assumption that back in the late fourth century, the codices were
secreted away together in a jar in order to preserve them for “posterity.” We argue
here that this was unlikely to have been the intention of those who buried the
codices. Rather than parts of a Pachomian library that had been intentionally hid-
den by monks to avoid persecution by the emerging Alexandrian orthodoxy, we
suggest that the Nag Hammadi codices could just as plausibly have been private
productions commissioned by late ancient Egyptian Christians with antiquarian
interests. The books were later deposited in graves, following a late antique modi-
fication of a custom known in Egypt for hundreds of years. Furthermore, we

1 The details here come from Marvin Meyer’s version of the story, which he credits to
James M. Robinson in a chapter called “Fertilizer, Blood Vengeance, and Codices” in his book The
Gnostic Discoveries: The Impact of the Nag Hammadi Library (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
2005), 13–32.

2 See James M. Robinson, “The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” BA 42 (1979):
208–13.

3 The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, vol. 1, Introduction (Published under
the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt. In conjuction with
the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization; Leiden: Brill, 1972), 3 n. 1
offers a lengthy disclaimer: “Kasser and Krause and others who were involved do not consider as
assured anything more than the core of the story (the general location and approximate date of
the discovery), the rest not having for them more than the value of stories and fables that one can
collect in popular Egyptian circles thirty years after an event whose exceptional significance the
protagonists could not at the time understand. R.K. and M.K.” An English publication that also
casts suspicions on the find-story is C. Wilfred Griggs, Early Egyptian Christianity: From Its
Origins to 451 c.e. (Brill Scholars’ List; Leiden: Brill, 2000), 217: “The doubts and concerns
expressed by this author are similar to those held by Rodolphe Kasser and Martin Krause.” Very
recently, the veracity of the find-story has also been raised by Mark Goodacre, “How Reliable Is
the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” JSNT 35 (2013): 303–22. We thank Mark Goodacre
for making this article available prior to its publication, and for our discussions on the topic.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 401

contend that their eventual placement in graves may not have been coincidental;
the arrangement of certain volumes reflects eschatological as well as antiquarian
interests, meaning that at least some volumes may have been intentionally crafted
as funerary deposits, Christian “Books of the Dead” that only made sense in the
context of late antique Egypt.

I. Find-Stories and Suspicions

A full thirty years after the initial appearance of the Nag Hammadi codices on
the Cairo antiquities market, James M. Robinson traveled to Egypt to survey the
area and to see if he might track down the person who initially made the discovery.4
Robinson’s efforts yielded a vastly entertaining account of the codices’ discovery
and brief sojourn in a “modern” Upper Egyptian village; riveting details included
the burning of an unspecified number of papyrus leaves by Mohamed Ali’s mother
(horrors! how could they not have known their value?) and his family’s acts of
murder and cannibalism. In this modern, Western recounting of 1940s fellaheen
life, we have not come far from W. Robertson Smith’s 1889 Religion of the Semites
(where the “birth” of Judaism comes from a primordial act of sacrifice and collec-
tive consumption of a tribe’s totem animal in the desert),5 a text much beloved by
Freud, who transmuted Smith’s postulated sacrifice and consumption of the totem
animal into a communal act of parricide in his Totem and Taboo (1913).6 Like
Smith’s account of primordial religion and Freud’s revisioning of it with an Oedipal
cast, the Nag Hammadi find-story is one more appropriate for fantastic literature,
with parts surely lost in translation, other parts surely fabricated.7

4 Robinson, head of the UNESCO-funded project to generate critical editions and trans-
lations of the Nag Hammadi codices, published numerous accounts of the find-story: see
James M. Robinson, “From the Cliff to Cairo: The Study of the Discoverers and Middlemen of the
Nag Hammadi Codices,” in Colloque international sur les textes de Nag Hammadi (Québec, 22–25
août 1978) (ed. Bernard Barc; Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi, “Etudes” 1; Québec: Les
presses de l’Université Laval, 1981), 21–58; idem, “The Coptic Gnostic Library Today,” NTS 14
(1968): 356–401; and idem, “Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” 206–24.

5 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: First Series, Fundamental Institutions
(London: A. & C. Black, 1889); 2nd ed. [posthumous], edited by J. S. Black (1894), repr., New
York: Meridian, 1956; 3rd ed., introduced by S. A. Cook (1927); later edition with introduction
by James Muilenburg (New York: Ktav 1969).

6 Freud, Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der
Neurotiker (Leipzig: H. Heller, 1913); published in English as Totem and Taboo: Some Points of
Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (trans. James Strachey; New York:
Norton, 1952).

7 The sole scholar to have manifestly criticized the overtly colonialist and orientalizing
aspects of the Nag Hammadi find-story is Maia Kotrosits, “Romance and Danger at Nag
Hammadi,” Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012): 39–52.

402 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

When we press at its contours, this famous and oft-recounted find-story of the
Nag Hammadi codices becomes vexing because of its revisionist nature. It turns
out, to begin with, to have been rather late in coming; the very first account of the
codices’ discovery came from the French scholar Jean Doresse, who, five years after
the appearance of the codices in Cairo, traveled to the hamlet of Hamra Dum, close
to Nag Hammadi and the actual location of the codices’ provenance.8 Local villag-
ers directed him to the southern part of an ancient cemetery at Qasr es-Sayyad. It
was there, in the cemetery, that some had found the codices, secreted in a jar.
Doresse writes,

Was it in one of these tombs that the papyri were found? Certainly, one cannot,
even if one searches very far around, see any other place—any ruin or sepulcher
—from which they could have come. The peasants who accompanied us …
showed us a row of shapeless cavities. Not long since, they said, some peasants
of Hamra-Dûm and of Dabba, in search of manure, found here a great zir—which
means jar—filled with leaves of papyrus; and these were bound like books. The
vase was broken and nothing remains of it; the manuscripts were taken to Cairo
and no one knows what then became of them. As to the exact location of the find,
opinion differed by some few dozen yards, but everyone was sure that it was just
about here. And from the ground itself we shall learn nothing more; it yields
nothing but broken bones, fragments of cloth without interest and some
potsherds.9

When Robinson returned to Hamra Dum twenty-five years later to pick up the trail,
his persistence yielded more satisfying results. He came up with names and a more
specific (and in fact, quite different) find-spot: Mohamed Ali al-Samman was out
that day in December of 1945 on the Gebel al-Tarif, looking for sabakh, a natural
fertilizer. He dug, according to Robinson, along a talus—a slope of debris along the
cliff face and just beyond the area of Nile cultivation. There he found the jar. So let
us start here with this puzzling detail. If the jar were embedded in alluvial soil at
the base of a cliff, it is highly unlikely that a papyrus codex would have survived for
sixteen centuries of Nile inundations and shifting soil at the base of the cliffs. And
yet, if the jar had actually been found up higher, inside a cave along the Gebel al-
Tarif, this is hardly the place to dig for sabakh. In fact, it is even debatable whether
the base of the Gebel al-Tarif would have produced this sabakh, as the areas of
cultivation around the Nile end abruptly and turn very quickly to desert, where
nothing exists but sand. Whatever Mohamed Ali was doing that day, it is safe to say

8 Doresse visited Upper Egypt three times in the lead-up to his 1950 investigations—in 1947,
1948, and 1949. See Jean Doresse, “Sur les traces des papyrus gnostiques: Recherches à Cheno-
boskion,” Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, 5th series 36 (1950):
432–39.

9 Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics: An Introduction to the Gnostic Coptic
Manuscripts Discovered at Chenoboskion (trans. Philip Mairet; New York: Viking, 1960), 133.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 403

that he was not digging for fertilizer. It is entirely reasonable to suspect that he was
searching for illegal antiquities: tomb robbing. The jar—one of the only details on
which Doresse and Robinson agree—is equally mysterious; as the NT scholar Mark
Goodacre noted recently, it grows in size from 20 cm to 3–4 ft in height, depending
on who is telling the story.10 At any rate, the jar no longer exists.11

A quick cross-referencing of various versions of the story reveals many such
shifting details. In one account, a “party” of sabakh gatherers find the jar at the foot
of a cliff sheltered by a large boulder.12 The number in this party appears to change;
sometimes it is Mohamed Ali and his brother Khalifah Ali and/or another brother
Abu al-Magid;13 sometimes Mohamed Ali is alone;14 sometimes more are present.15
Sometimes Mohamed Ali finds the jar; sometimes it is Abu al-Magid. Bart Ehrman
retains the detail that Abu al-Magid (unnamed in his account) digs and finds a
skeleton first, then a “large earthenware jar”;16 curiously, most modern versions of
the story omit the detail of the corpse found alongside.17 However, if we are search-
ing for a “smoking gun” to prove that the Nag Hammadi codices were deposited

10 Goodacre, “How Reliable Is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” 305–6. According
to Robinson (“Discovery,” 214), the jar was 60 cm tall, with an opening of some 20 cm. He includes
Ali’s discovery of the jar on p. 212.

11 Robinson reports that, although the jar was smashed, Mohamed Ali’s brother, Khalifah
Ali, kept the small bowl that he says sealed the mouth of the jar, affixed with bitumen (Robinson,
“Discovery,” 218). A photograph of it remains in Claremont’s archives. It is a fairly standard piece
of fourth- or fifth-century pottery of the sort that litters the Thebaid, fully intact, and we remain
skeptical that the artifact in Khalifah’s possession once sealed the jar.

12 J. W. B. Barns, G. M. Browne, and J. C. Shelton, eds., Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and
Coptic Papyri from the Cartonnage of the Covers (Coptic Gnostic Library; NHS 16; Leiden: Brill,
1981), 1.

13 Mohamed Ali and one brother: James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 21.

14 See, for instance, the Border Television documentary produced in 1987 entitled The
Gnostics, in which Gilles Quispel interviews Mohamed Ali, who reports that he was all alone
when he found the jar, later returning alone to break it open, and finally returning with six
others. “So I took it to the ministry over here and he told me, well we really don’t need it.” The
antecedent of “it” is unclear. The Gnostics was written by Tobias Churton and produced and
directed by Stephen Segaller. It was aired on UK’s Channel 4 in November 1987. For a “transcript”
of the interview (which, strangely, varies from the videotape version), see Tobias Churton, The
Gnostics (New York: Barns & Noble, 1999), 9.

15 Bart Ehrman (Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 52) says that seven people were present, following
Robinson (“Discovery,” 213), which lists three brothers and four camel drivers. The Facsimile
Edition (p. 5) lists eight camel drivers. Robinson (“From the Cliff to Cairo,” 37) mentions that ten
people were present (three brothers and seven camel drivers).

16 Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 52.
17 The skeleton is mentioned in Barns et al., Nag Hammadi Codices, 2, where it is dismissed

as “modern.”

404 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

with a burial, here indeed is one, with Mohamed Ali’s insistence that the jar was
next to a corpse with oddly elongated fingers and teeth.18

The “afterlife” story of the codices’ discovery, trapped as they were in a sort of
fugue state that was neither the protective dry soils of Egypt nor a proper museum
conservatorship, points to a Western collector’s mentality that perdured in the field
of Egyptian archaeology. The reported incident of Mohamed Ali’s mother tossing
some of the ancient papyrus folios into the fire proved to Western minds that
peasants—native Egyptians—could not be trusted with their own antiquities; only
enlightened Europeans knew their true value. The story has a remarkable parallel
in Constantin von Tischendorf ’s “rescuing” of the Codex Sinaiticus from St.
Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai in 1845. Tischendorf reports that the monks charged
with caring for the precious manuscript tossed papyri leaves into the fire for
warmth.19 The message was clear: native Egyptians could not be trusted to care for
their own antiquities, which required “rescuing” by scholars and collectors in the
West. A similar colonialist meme emerges in the story circulated at the end of the
nineteenth century concerning the Cureton manuscript, a fifth-century biblical
manuscript discovered by Western travelers in a monastery in Nitria: apparently
William Cureton found ancient papyrus folios being used as coverings for the
monk’s butter jars.20 Concerning the Scottish explorer Agnes Lewis’s 1892 discov-
ery of a precious Syriac NT manuscript at St. Catherine’s in Sinai, the rumor also
emerged that it was (mis)used to cover butter dishes at the monastery, although
Lewis herself notes that in fact the manuscript there was safely under lock and key.21

But let us return to the Nag Hammadi find-story. Its details—particularly
salacious moments such as the blood vengeance scene and the ostensible tossing
of the codices into the fire—dissemble; they deflect our attention from key ques-
tions: What were these texts doing together? Who could have put them there? What
was the relationship of the books to the corpse lying nearby?22 Egypt has a rich

18 Robinson, “Discovery,” 213. Robinson writes that Mohamed Ali’s brother denied the
existence of a corpse, which makes some sense: Mohamed Ali’s insistence that the jar and corpse
were found together on what looked like a “bed of charcoal” certainly looks like grave robbing.
Either the assemblage had been sitting out in the open at the base of a cliff when the brothers
found it, or they were exploring a burial cave. They could not have dug down to the level of a jar
buried in rubble and also noted what material it (and the skeleton) were sitting on unless they
carried out some fairly sophisticated archaeological investigation to reach the ground level of the
jar.

19 David C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible (London: British
Library, 2010), 128–31.

20 “The Current,” 1, no. 1 (Dec. 22, 1883): 348.
21 Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo

Geniza (New York: Schocken, 2011), 5.
22 The corpse is a troubling detail, since tomb robbing has always been a serious problem in

Egypt; see Pascal Vernus, Affairs and Scandals in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2003). In addition, the likelihood of the body being identified as Christian would have

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 405

history of books and corpses found together, and indeed all our other so-called
Gnostic manuscripts—the Berlin Codex, the Askew Codex, and the Codex Tchacos
—came from, or most probably came from, burial sites. Yet, for the Nag Hammadi
codices, it is asserted that they were hidden for posterity by Pachomian monks, the
result of Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367.23 This story is repeated again and again,
as if it were not scholarly conjecture but rather a “believed” fact of early Christian
history: as if it were hand in hand with the Donatist controversy, for instance, with
letters, trials, and creeds to go alongside it. There are no letters or trials for our
“controversy,” and so we must rely on what we can safely piece together from Pacho-
mian monastic resources. The role of these monks and the presumed monastic Sitz
im Leben for these texts deserve more attention.

II. The Nag Hammadi Codices and Monasticism:
Rethinking the Links

Jean Doresse’s initial suggestion that what had been discovered near Nag
Hammadi was a secret library of Egyptian Sethian Gnostics was fairly quickly aban-
doned. Torgny Säve-Söderbergh suggested an intriguing alternative: perhaps the
Nag Hammadi “library” constituted a heresiological compilation of primary
“Gnostic” sources from which heresiologists could draw their ammunition.24 By

caused additional problems in the environs of Nag Hammadi, where tensions between Copts and
Muslims historically run high.

23 See Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library in English, 19; idem, in Facsimile Edition of the Nag
Hammadi Codices, 12:20; Meyer, Gnostic Discoveries, 30; Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New
York: Random House, 1979), 120–21; Charles Hedrick, “Gnostic Proclivities in the Greek Life of
Pachomius and the Sitz im Leben of the Nag Hammadi Library,” NovT 22 (1980): 93. The notion
of the texts buried “for posterity” trickles down into popular literature: see, e.g., Lewis Keizer, The
Kabbalistic Words of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas (Kindle Book; Amazon Digital Services, 2009),
17; Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), xi (Kripal also mentions the detail of the skeleton: “was the
skeleton a monk?”); Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., This Tragic Gospel: How John Corrupted the Heart of
Christianity (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2008), 132: Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much about the
Bible: Everything You Need To Know about the Good Book But Never Learned (San Francisco:
Harper, 1999), 344.

24 Torgny Säve-Söderbergh, “Gnostic and Canonical Gospel Traditions (with Special Refer-
ence to the Gospel of Thomas),” in Le origini dello gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina 13–18 Aprile
1966. Testi e discussioni (ed. Ugo Bianchi; SHR 12; Leiden: Brill, 1970), 552–53; and, more
developed, idem, “Holy Scriptures or Apologetic Documentations? The Sitz im Leben of the Nag
Hammadi Library,” in Les Textes de Nag Hammadi: Colloque du Centre d’histoire des religions,
Strasbourg, 23–25 octobre 1974 (ed. Jacques-É. Ménard; NHS 7; Leiden: Brill, 1975), 9–17. Here
Säve-Söderbergh argues persuasively that Pachomians had no reason to house the Nag Hammadi
documents based on what we know about Pachomian attitudes toward heresy; therefore, if in fact
Pachomians kept them, they must have been kept out of circulation and thus “to study them in

406 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

far the most popular theory, however, is that the codices found their home in a
monastic setting, perhaps that of Pachomian monks whose sense of the orthodox/
heretical divide may have been less well entrenched than elsewhere in Egypt or than
it came to be after the middle of the fourth century.25 The Pachomian theory
emerges as early as Robinson’s 1975 Preliminary Report on the excavation, which
in fact establishes it as self-evident truth:

… since it is hardly conceivable that there would have been more than one ortho-
dox monastic organization simultaneously operating in the same place, we
should be justified in concluding, even without further evidence, that the Nag
Hammadi material came from a Pachomian monastery.26

The arguments for the Nag Hammadi codices having been housed in, if not created
by and for, a Pachomian monastery are founded on two main circumstantial facts.
The first is simply physical proximity of the find-spot to known Pachomian centers:
Pabau was 8 km away; Tabennesi, 12 km; and Chenoboskion, 9 km.27 At the same
time, the physical environs of Hamra Dum and El Bousa and the tomb caves of the
Gebel al-Tarif are better suited to the life of anchorites than coenobites.28 They are
also far closer; the grave site of the Sixth Dynasty Pharaoh Thauti is a mere 750 m

order to be able to refute them” (p. 12). If, however, the purpose of the Nag Hammadi codices
were to serve as a compendium of heretical works, their arrangement in codices—including
duplications of individual writings and organization across established sectarian lines—makes
little sense; see Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 247.

25 See, notably, F. Wisse, “The Nag Hammadi Library and the Heresiologists,” VC 25 (1971):
220–21; see also his “Language Mysticism in the Nag Hammadi Texts and in Early Coptic
Monasticism, I: Cryptography,” Enchoria 9 (1979): 101–19. Compare James E. Goehring, “New
Frontiers in Pachomian Studies,” in idem, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early
Egyptian Monasticism (SAC; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1999), 185–86; and
idem, “Some Reflections on the Nag Hammadi Codices and the Study of Early Egyptian
Monasticism,” Meddelanden fran Collegium Patristicum Lundense 25 (2011): 61–70. In a later
article, Wisse appears to reverse his view somewhat, claiming that the books were in the hands of
a variety of individuals: F. Wisse, “Gnosticism and Early Monasticism in Egypt,” in Gnosis:
Festschrift für Hans Jonas (ed. Barbara Aland; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 438.
A different, “closed stacks” theory is that the texts came from a Pachomian monastery where they
were gathered for posterity but kept away from the monks; see Clemens Scholten, “Die Nag-
Hammadi-Texte als Buchbesitz,” JAC 31 (1988): 145–49.

26 Robinson, Preliminary Report on the Excavation, 12–13 (emphasis added). See further
Goehring, who, while admitting that the evidence for the Pachomian provenance of the Nag
Hammadi codices is “purely circumstantial,” nevertheless feels that the amount of evidence is
mounting (Ascetics, Society, and the Desert, 180). For more on the excavation, see Bastiaan Van
Elderen, “The Nag Hammadi Excavation,” BA 42 (1979): 225–31.

27 So W. C. van Unnik, Evangelien aus dem Nilsand (Frankfurt: Scheffler, 1960); Robinson’s
estimations in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (p. 21) are slightly different (Pbow, 5.3 km
and Chenoboskion, 8.7 km).

28 So Hedrick, “Gnostic Proclivities,” 78.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 407

from the jar’s ostensible find-spot29 and the tombs of two more Sixth Dynasty
pharaohs, Pepi I and II (2332–2184 b.c.e.) perched just above the talus where the
jar was ostensibly uncovered.30 Indeed, anchorites came to inhabit these burial
caves, which were still decorated with painted red crosses and inscribed lines from
the psalms in Coptic.31 They prayed in them; they also were buried in them.

The second piece of circumstantial evidence for a Pachomian provenance
is the cartonnage of the codices. The first to have made this claim, papyrologist
John W. B. Barns, died suddenly before all the cartonnage was fully analyzed. The
team of papyrologists assigned to complete the task concluded, against Barns, that
they could not think of a satisfactory single source for the wide range of documents
contained in the cartonnage other than a “town rubbish heap.”32 The conclusion of
the team was unequivocal: there is no evidence that the codices were created in a
Pachomian monastery.33 Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the connections
between the Nag Hammadi codices and Pachomian monasticism are still virtually
assumed by a wide range of scholars, no doubt because of the surety with which an
early generation of Nag Hammadi scholars asserted them in the first place.

III. The Curious Case of the Dishna Papers

The Nag Hammadi codices were not the only set of late antique Egyptian writ-
ings discovered in Upper Egypt. The Dishna papers, also known as the Bodmer
papyri after their purchase by the Swiss banker Martin Bodmer, appear to have
been found in 1952 (seven years after the Nag Hammadi discovery) in the Thebaid
7.5 miles from Nag Hammadi and a mere 5 km from the major Pachomian site of
Pbow.34 Now dispersed from Barcelona to Oslo with a substantial number in

29 Facsimile Edition, 15:5; see also Robinson, “Discovery,” 212.
30 Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library in English, 21.
31 Ibid., 22.
32 Barns et al., Nag Hammadi Codices, 11.
33 Ibid., 2. See also Ewa Wipszycka, “The Nag Hammadi Library and the Monks: A

Papyrologist’s Point of View,” JJP 30 (2000): 179–91, who similarly demolishes the Pachomian
provenance theory. More agnostic is Goehring in his unpublished paper “Some Reflections on the
Nag Hammadi Codices and the Study of Early Egyptian Monasticism”; he maintains the same
cautious refusal to reject the Pachomian theory in virtually all his publications. See Goehring,
“The Provenance of the Nag Hammadi Codices Once More,” in Ascetica, Gnostica, Liturgica,
Orientalia: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in
Oxford 1999 (ed. M. F. Miles and E. J. Yarnold; StPatr 35; Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 234–53; and
idem, “Monastic Diversity and Ideological Boundaries in Fourth-Century Christian Egypt,” JECS
5 (1997): 61–84.

34 The original circumstances of the find are hazy, since the seller of the hoard did not want
to reveal his sources; thus, indeed, the story of the provenance of the Dishna papers seems to us
to be as potentially suspicious as that of the Nag Hammadi codices. At any rate, they are curiously

408 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

Dublin at the Chester Beatty library, the original cache consisted of nine Greek
papyrus rolls, twenty-two papyrus codices, and seven parchment documents, dat-
ing from approximately 100 to 699 c.e. The languages of the hoard show that its
audience was multilingual, moving not just between Greek and Coptic but also
between Greek and Latin. All told, we have in the Dishna papers an astonishing
range of materials: nine classical texts, including parts of Homer plus its scholia,
Menander, Achilles Tatius, Thucydides, and Cicero,35 twelve papyri with writings
from the Hebrew Bible; six with writings from the NT; three that include both. We
also find a few apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts, plus a great deal of liturgi-
cal and homiletic material.

Robinson, fascinated with the points of contact between the Nag Hammadi
codices and the Dishna papers—both were found in jars in the same vicinity—
hypothesized that the Dishna papers were buried for safekeeping following the
imposition of Chalcedonian orthodoxy.36 In effect, the case of the Dishna papers
appeared to raise the likelihood that Pachomian monks, around 387 c.e., had
engaged in a dramatic purge of their libraries, at the same time ridding themselves
of their clearly heretical Nag Hammadi books.

And yet we should not make the mistake of assuming that the two book caches
had the same audiences or were deposited for the same reason. Regardless of
whether the Dishna papers were from the first Pachomian library at Pbow, they are
far different from the Nag Hammadi codices in content. For example, the Sahidic
Coptic Crosby-Shøyen Codex (ca. 250 c.e.) consists of fifty-two leaves written in a
large bold Coptic uncial and contains three biblical texts (Jonah, 2 Macc 5:27–7:41,
1 Peter) plus two other texts for liturgical use: Melito of Sardis’s Peri Pascha and an
unidentified paschal sermon.37 Another codex, now disassembled and scattered to
various modern libraries, once contained the Nativity of Mary, apocryphal corre-
spondence between Paul and the Corinthians, the eleventh Ode of Solomon, Jude,
Melito’s Homily on the Passion, a fragment of a liturgical hymn, the Apology of
Phileas, Pss 33:2–34:16 from the LXX, and 1–2 Peter.38 The Dishna papers and the

parallel. Furthermore, both accounts trace back to the research of Robinson. On the Dishna find,
see James M. Robinson, The Pachomian Monastic Library at the Chester Beatty Library and the
Bibliothèque Bodmer (Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Occasional Papers 19; Claremont,
CA: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, 1990).

35 On Dishna’s classical sources, see Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church:
A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 173; Juan Gil,
Hadrianvs: P. Monts. Roca III, 29 (Orientalia Montserratensia; Montserrat: Publicacions de
l’Abadia de Montserrat y CSIC, 2010).

36 Robinson, Pachomian Monastic Library, 28.
37 R. Pintaudi, “Proprietà imperiali e tasse in un papiro della Collezione Schoyen,” ZPE 130

(2000): 197–200; James E. Goehring, The Crosby-Schøyen Codex MS 193 in the Schøyen Collection
(CSCO 521, Subsidia 85; Louvain: Peeters, 1990).

38 Tommy Wasserman, “Papyrus 72 and the Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex,” NTS 51 (2005):
140.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 409

Nag Hammadi codices share no common texts. We will return presently to the
significance of this point.

The assignation of a Pachomian provenance to the Nag Hammadi collection
lies in part with its similarity to the Dishna papers. Yet this argument is largely
circumstantial, based on (1) the physical proximity of the Dishna papers to the Nag
Hammadi codices, on the one hand, and of both to Pbow, on the other; and (2) the
circumstances of their deposition.39 Papyrologists have argued, however, that the
Dishna papers were apparently hidden in a jar during the Arabic conquest—long
after Athanasius’s Festal Letter. But we can also note some significant differences in
the contents of the two collections. There are no overlaps across the collections;
thus even the canons of apocryphal or pseudepigraphic writings on which the two
sets of scribes drew appear to have been significantly different, with the Dishna
collection being much closer to what we might tentatively call a “standard” list of
apocrypha set apart from canonical writings but nevertheless in wide circulation.
To put this differently, there are among the Dishna papers no so-called Gnostic
writings. This is indeed remarkable, if one considers that a few of the Nag Hammadi
writings do in fact appear in other ancient codices. The Apocryphon of John, in dif-
ferent recensions, can be found in Codices II, III, and IV but is also in the Berlin
Codex (BG 8502). The Sophia of Jesus Christ is in the Berlin Codex as well as in
Codex III; we also have this text in a complete Greek copy from Oxyrhynchus,
P.Oxy. 8.1081.40 The Gospel of Thomas of Codex II also appears in Greek fragments
discovered at Oxyrhynchus. If, then, the Dishna hoard is a highly eclectic collection
from a Pachomian library, the fact that it shares not a single tractate with the Nag
Hammadi is curious. Conversely, the Nag Hammadi codices contain not a single
fragment of Scripture or any monastic correspondence. In short, while the two
collections appear to have shared a general provenance (and this is speculative
rather than factual), this is all that the two collections share, and this ultimately
reveals little about whether the Nag Hammadi library was truly Pachomian.

It should be said, finally, that not all scholars accept the Pachomian prove-
nance of the Dishna papers. The case against it includes the high number of docu-
mentary and school texts preserved, including exercises in grammar, lexicography,
and mathematics in three different languages including several dialects of Coptic.41
There is also a Greek–Latin lexicon for deciphering Paul’s letters.42 Raffaella Cribiore
argues that the collection derived from a “Christian school of advanced learning,”43

39 The case for the equation of the two is made by Goehring, “Monastic Diversity and Ideo-
logical Boundaries,” 81–82.

40 Cornelia Römer, “Manichaeism and Gnosticism in the Papyri.” in The Oxford Handbook
of Papyrology (ed. Roger S. Bagnall; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 631.

41 Gil, Hadrianvs, 29.
42 Wasserman, “Papyrus 72,” 139.
43 Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 200 and n. 74. See, too, A. Blanchard, “Sur le milieu

410 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

perhaps even as examples of paideia, which experienced a revival in the second
century and remained popular among elites until the sixth century.

In summary, the evidence for a Pachomian provenance for the Nag Hammadi
codices is entirely lacking, as is any solid basis for their monastic setting. We are
forced to concur with Stephen Emmel, who some time ago commented, “I—like
many others—am not convinced that the Nag Hammadi Codices, as particular
books, as artifacts, are the direct products of a monastic milieu.”44 Emmel follows
the conclusions of Alexandr L. Khosroyev, who, through an intensive study of lin-
guistic and codicological data, demolished the “Pachomian monastic milieu” the-
ory in a 1995 volume that has not had the impact that it should have.45

IV. Athanasius and the Burying of Books:
Dispelling a Myth

The theory that the Nag Hammadi codices found their way out of their Pacho-
mian setting in the wake of Athanasius’s thirty-ninth Festal Letter (367 c.e.) has
also recently been revealed to be unfounded. As David Brakke has convincingly
argued, the heretical writings with which Athanasius was concerned were not
“Gnostic” but Arian and Meletian.46 The idea that the letter in any way effected the
removal of the Nag Hammadi codices from a Pachomian library is merely scholarly
conjecture too often taken as fact. If we admit that the Pachomian, or even generally
monastic, context for the codices is entirely absent, then Athanasius’s letter becomes
irrelevant. We are still left with a final Sitz im Leben for which we do have clear
evidence: the tomb sites of the Gebel al-Tarif. If the codices were not likely to have

d’origine du papyrus Bodmer de Ménandre,” ChrEg 66 (1991): 211–20; J.-L. Fournet, “Une
éthiopée de Caïn dans le codex des Visions de la Fondation Bodmer,” ZPE 92 (1992): 253–66;
R. Kasser, “Status quaestionis 1988 sulla presunta origine dei cosidetti Papiri Bodmer,” Aegyptus
68 (1988): 191–94. Some would retort that obviously not all Pachomians were unlettered; see
Elizabeth Ann Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 54; it is certainly possible that monks took their book
collections with them into the monastery.

44 Emmel, “The Coptic Gnostic Texts as Witnesses to the Production and Transmission of
Gnostic (and Other) Traditions,” in Das Thomasevangelium: Entstehung, Rezeption, Theologie (ed.
Jörg Frey, Enno Edzard Popkes, and Jens Schröter; BZNW 157; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 36.

45 Khosroyev, Die Bibliothek von Nag Hammadi: Einige Probleme des Christentums in
Ägypten während der ersten Jahrhunderte (Arbeiten zum spätantiken und koptischen Ägypten 7;
Altenberge: Oros, 1995), esp. ch. 4, “Zur Frage nach dem vermutlichen Besitzer der Bibliothek.”
See, similarly, idem, “Bemerkungen über die vermutlichen Besitzer der Nag-Hammadi-Texte,” in
Divitiae Aegypti: Koptologische und verwandte Studien zu Ehren von Martin Krause (ed. Cäcilia
Fluck et al.; Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1995), 200–205.

46 Brakke, “Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of
Alexandria’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter,” HTR 87 (1994): 395–419.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 411

been buried by Pachomian monks for safekeeping, it is safe to say that the site of
Gebel al-Tarif does not represent an extension of Pachomian monastic life and that
Athanasius’s letter was meant to address an entirely different phenomenon.

Brakke has examined the social contexts in which Athanasius wrote the thirty-
ninth Festal Letter, pointing out that “teachers and Meletians” posed the greatest
threat to Athanasius’s authority as bishop and therefore were the target of many of
his letters.47 Brakke points out that “study circles,” an important feature of Alexan-
drian life since arguably the second century b.c.e., represented the source of fun-
damental anxieties confronted by early Christian bishops like Athanasius because
to follow a charismatic teacher both undermined the emerging ecclesiastical author-
ity and was dangerously like following Christ—or, the wrong Christ.48 Indeed,
Athanasius’s thirty-ninth Letter is tremendously important to the formation of
early Christianity for all of the reasons Brakke outlines, but if we are to read this
letter as a warning against so-called heretics who read apocryphal literature (as the
narrative of the fate of the Nag Hammadi codices is interpreted), the attack is rather
innocuous. In fact, a close reading of the letter reveals an almost bureaucratic tone,
as if Athanasius is sighing in the subtext, saying: “Must we go over this?”

Compare, for instance, Athanasius’s list of canonical texts in the thirty-ninth
letter to Letter 40, To Adelphius, where he fights tooth and nail against Arianism
and for his own orthodox Christology: “Where has this evil of theirs erupted
from?” and “We do not worship a creature. Never!”49 These Arian “heretics” he calls
“enemies of Christ … urged on by their father the devil.”50 This is the standard
polemic for which Athanasius is known and that is markedly missing in Letter 39.
In this letter, those who do not read the Scriptures according to the list are merely
called “heretics and … simple folk.”51 Here our argument is not much different
from Brakke’s. Athanasius was concerned with Arianism and the threats that such
a belief posed to both his view of Christology and his right to authority. And regard-
less of whether the community for which the Letter was written accepted this
authority, it is safe to say that those who did not—the Arians, Meletians, and other
unnamed “heretics”—paid little attention to a list of canonical books.

Yet this is not the final point of our argument. We have attempted to remove
the Nag Hammadi codices from a Pachomian monastic origin and place them in
the hands of an Egyptian who commissioned them for private use. Once these texts
are removed from the ecclesiastical struggles against “heresy,” they belong to a little
explored history of fourth-century Egypt. For even if Athanasius’s letter is meant
to define a canon, what can be said of the Nag Hammadi codices if we venture to

47 Ibid., 398.
48 Ibid., 398–99.
49 Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius (Early Church Fathers; New York: Routledge, 2004), 236.
50 Ibid., 236.
51 David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford Early Christian Studies;

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 330.

412 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

say that they were not being read in a monastic setting? Like the Theban Magical
Library, they exist beyond the reach of the episcopate. One of the purposes of this
article is to suggest, or recall, that fourth-century Egypt was not a landscape domi-
nated by ecclesiastical struggles. While such conflicts certainly played a major role
in the formation of Egyptian Christianity, we argue that a significant portion of the
Egyptian population was not concerned with these struggles. The reason they
dominate the literature of fourth-century Egypt is because voices such as that of
Athanasius are dynamic ones that live on in the orthodox world. So dynamic is his
voice, in fact, that we often forget that he was banished five times during his career,
his ecclesiastical authority called into question by many in spite of his victory over
Arian theology. And so, while Athanasius remains a posthumous authority, his
writings only reflect the politics of fourth-century Egyptian Christianity in propor-
tion to his turbulent career. The archaeological record, not surprisingly, does not
reveal the strict oppressiveness that scholars read into the literature of the era but
instead reveals a fruitful desert of newly commissioned books of all natures: pagan,
Christian, monastic, liturgical, classical, and magical.

V. Books and Tombs

The Gebel el-Tarif, where the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered, was not
a monastic site; it was (and had been for millennia) a vast ancient burial ground.
In the fourth century, numerous caves and rock-cut tombs were still in use for
burials. Twenty meters south of the Nag Hammadi find-spot, in Cave T1, excava-
tors found bones and pottery remains; in T114, eight hundred meters away, exca-
vators found a burial shroud that yielded a 14C date of the fifth century c.e.52
Robinson himself concludes, “at least the talus was used as a burial site at the time
in question.”53 Even Doresse’s earlier, unelaborated account of the find-spot places
it in a cemetery, although in that case the cemetery was not a series of caves but a
flatter plain.54 Although Doresse believed the cemetery to have been pagan and
thus earlier than the codices, there is some evidence that it was still in use by late
antique Christians.

The concrete link between the Nag Hammadi codices and late antique graves
has largely, if mystifyingly, been replaced by the unfounded assumption that
monks intentionally hid the books for posterity. Is it not more likely that someone
put them in a grave as a funerary deposit? One scholar to have proposed the tomb
theory was the esteemed Coptologist Martin Krause, who, in an article from
1978, com mented,

52 Robinson, “Discovery,” 213.
53 Ibid.
54 Doresse, Secret Books, 58.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 413

Das Auffinden der Bibliothek in einem Grabe spricht für eine, und zwar wohl
reiche, Einzelperson als Besitzer.… Es ist ein auch in christlicher Zeit noch
nachweisbarer altägyptischer Brauch, dem Toten heilige Bücher ins Grab
bei zugeben.55

Krause maintained—and we present a similar thesis here—that a private individual
with eclectic and esoteric interests commissioned the collection, which was buried
with him at the time of his death.56

If indeed the jar containing the Nag Hammadi codices came from a burial
cave rather than a ruinated monastic library, it would be in good company. The
Berlin Codex, which contains the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, the
Sophia of Jesus Christ, and the Acts of Peter, appeared on the antiquities market in
1896. Although the dealer claimed that the book had been found in a wall niche,
the text’s first editor, Carl Schmidt, assumed it had been taken from one of Akhmim’s
cemeteries.57 The Codex Tchacos, which contains (among other so-called Gnostic
texts) the Gospel of Judas, was discovered near El-Minya, in a family tomb by Gebel
Qarara. At this late antique Christian burial site, the Codex Tchacos was only one
of the books found in a limestone box that tomb robbers unearthed; the three oth-
ers do not survive intact, having been divided up by antiquities dealers. However,
we know that one of these was a fourth- or fifth-century papyrus codex containing
a Greek version of Exodus.58 The second, dating from the same period, was a Coptic
translation of Paul’s letters; the third, interestingly, was a Greek mathematical text
called the Metrodological Tractate.59 “If nothing else,” comments April DeConick,
their burial together

points to their privileged place in the life of an early Christian living in ancient
Egypt, a Christian who seems to have had esoteric leanings. This ancient person
buried with these books had no difficulty during his or her lifetime studying
canonical favorites like Paul and Exodus alongside the Gnostic Gospel of Judas.
As for the mathematical treatise, its burial along with these others should not be
that surprising given that both the Hermetics and Gnostics studied mathematical
theorems in order to understand and map their universe.60

55 Krause, “Die Texte von Nag Hammadi” in Aland, Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas, 243.
Armand Veilleux cautiously seconds the idea (“Monasticism and Gnosis in Egypt,” in The Roots
of Egyptian Christianity [ed. Birger A. Pearson and James E. Goehring; SAC; Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1986), 278–83.

56 Krause, “Die Texte von Nag Hammadi,” 242–43.
57 Schmidt, Die alten Petrusakten im Zusammenhang der apokryphen Apostellitteratur nebst

einem neuentdeckten Fragment untersucht (TU n.F. 9/1; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903), 2.
58 The Greek papyrus now exists in pieces in private collections at the Schøyen Collection,

Yale’s Beinecke Library, and Ashland Theological Seminary.
59 Heavily illustrated, the codex was bisected, with half being purchased by Lloyd Cotsen

and donated to Princeton University, and half to an anonymous private collector.
60 DeConick, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says (New York:

Continuum, 2009), 64–65.

414 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

Thus, in the history of late antique Egyptian books, we have some intriguing com-
monalities between the Nag Hammadi codices and the El-Minya find: a Christian
tomb site, a durable container, and a cache of books. In the case of the El-Minya
find, we are clearly dealing with a private commission or collection of books, not a
monastic library.

There are other cases of manuscripts found in burial sites in late antique Egypt.
The parchment Codex Panopolitanus, which contained a full Greek version of
1 Enoch’s Book of the Watchers, fragments of an Apocalypse of Peter, and the Gospel
of Peter, was excavated by a French archaeological team in the winter of 1886–87;
it was found in an eighth-century Christian grave in Akhmim.61 Interestingly, as
in the case of the Codex Tchacos, the Codex Panopolitanus was found along with
a mathematical treatise.62 Among non-Christian texts, the fourth-century Theban
Magical Library—composed of both scrolls and codices—was, like the Nag Ham-
madi codices, discovered by fellaheen under suspicious circumstances, almost cer-
tainly tomb robbing in the Thebaid.63

Our hypothesis here that the Nag Hammadi codices were intentionally depos-
ited in a grave or graves rather than buried for “posterity”—the latter practice, in
contrast to the former, not attested in Egypt—raises an inevitable question: what
was the rationale for burying a book in a grave? Put simply, as a grave good, a book
was a luxury item that marked the prestige of the grave owner.64 It is helpful, per-
haps, to think (as Emmel does) of the codices as artifacts rather than as books,
where the primary importance is the social meaning of the object rather than its
contents.65 In this way of thinking, there is no need to connect the content of a book
with the practice of depositing it with a corpse. This explains why a mathematical
book would be deposited in a grave with the Codex Tchacos and the Codex Pano-
politanus; it also helps us to make sense of other book finds from Egyptian graves.
For example, W. M. Flinders Petrie reported having found a copy of the second
book of the Iliad, in Greek, on a papyrus roll tucked under the head of an elite

61 Isaac H. Hall, “The Newly Discovered Apocryphal Gospel of Peter,” Biblical World 1, no.
2 (1893): 88.

62 George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Two Enochic Manuscripts: Unstudied Evidence for Egyptian
Christianity,” in Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism,
and Christian Origins presented to John Strugnell (ed. Harold W. Attridge, John J. Collins, and
Thomas H. Tobin; College Theology Society Resources in Religion 5; Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1990), 251–60, esp. 254.

63 For more on the Theban Magical Library, see Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites:
The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (Religions in the
Graeco-Roman World 153; Leiden: Brill, 2005); and also Roger Bagnall, Early Christian Books in
Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Both Dieleman and Bagnall note the inter-
esting parallels between the Theban Magical Library and the Nag Hammadi codices.

64 AnneMarie Luijendijk, “Sacred Scriptures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,”
VC 64 (2010): 232 n. 50.

65 Emmel, “Coptic Gnostic Texts,” 32.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 415

woman in a grave at Hawara in the Fayyum.66 The papyrus dates to the fifth century
c.e. and was both well copied and well preserved. The practice of placing the roll
at the head of a corpse in a sense continued the Ptolemaic practice of placing brief
“Documents for Breathing”—the Greco-Egyptian form of earlier “Books of the
Dead” written in Demotic, hieratic, and Greek—at the top of a mummy’s head at
burial.67

However, because of Egypt’s rich history of funerary texts, there remains the
possibility that there was intended to be a connection between individual books’
contents and their function as grave deposits. The speculation that archaeologists
had discovered a Christian “Book of the Dead” had already been made in the case
of Codex Panopolitanus, with its apocalyptic, “heavenly journey” writings.68 The
Nag Hammadi codices are particularly interesting to consider from this perspec-
tive, for a few reasons. First, they are an apparently deliberate collection of docu-
ments that are overwhelmingly concerned with cosmology and eschatology. They
contain no “secular” writings, no Scripture, no correspondence, and precious little
homiletical, ethical, or paraenetic material, with the exception of (for example) the
Gospel of Truth in Codex I and what remains (very little) of the Interpretation of
Knowledge in Codex XI. Still, even these works are very far in tone and spirit from,
let us say, Melito’s sermons and homilies, which we find in papyrus copies from late
antique Egypt. Therefore, the Nag Hammadi collection as a whole is far from a
random one, but seems to specialize in obscure cosmologically and eschatologi-
cally focused treatises with a liturgical dimension.69

66 Petrie, Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe with Thirty Plates (London: Field & Tuer, 1889),
24–28.

67 Werner Forman and Steven Quirke, Hieroglyphs and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). These documents Quirke likens to “passports”
held by the deceased to give them free access into the next world; they contained a sort of
declaration by Thoth that the traveler was to be allowed to pass through the stomach of Nut
through the circuit of the otherworld. A standard line went, “O guardians of the Underworld, let
me come and go.” The last secure date for a “Document for Breathing” included with a burial is
late first to early second century c.e., from the family grave of Soter, a governor of Thebes.

68 For the site report, see Klaus P. Kuhlmann, Materialien zur Archäologie und Geschichte des
Raumes von Achmim (Sonderschrift, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Abteilung Kairo 11;
Mainz: von Zabern, 1983), 53, 62. The codex was published by U. Bouriant, “Fragments grecs de
Livre d’Enoch,” in Mémoires publiés par les membres de la Mission archéologique française au Caire
9.1 (Paris: Leroux, 1892), 91–147, esp. 93–94. For additional manuscript information, plates, and
the editio princeps of both the Gospel of Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter, see A. Lods, “L’evangile
et L’apocalypse de Pierre: Le texte grec du livre d’Énoch,” in Mémoires publiés par les membres de
la Mission archéologique française au Caire 9.3 (Paris: Leroux, 1893), 217–35 and plates 1–34. For
the Christian “Book of the Dead” claim, see Nickelsburg, “Two Enochic Manu scripts,” 254.

69 Some may argue that the existence of the Apocryphon of John in four different copies
argues against the obscurity of that text at least; the Gospel of Thomas is also present in multiple
versions. See, however, the observations of Larry Hurtado, “The Greek Fragments of the Gos pel
of Thomas as Artefacts: Papyrological Observations on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1, Papyrus

416 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

VI. A New Context: Exploring the Possibilities

Who, in late antique Egypt, might have been particularly interested in com-
missioning an eschatologically oriented collection of texts to deposit in a burial?
There exists a range of possible suspects, from the Melitians to the class of monks
Jerome called the remnuoth (Ep. 22.34).70 Robinson has speculated that perhaps
the codices belonged to a monk or monks who began in the Pachomian monastery
but then moved out to an eremitic life.71 In support of this theory, Robinson cites
the case of Hierakas of Leontopolis, a fourth-century monk of the Delta who was
both a scribe and a biblical exegete. He was also a radical encratite—so radical, in
fact, that he was declared a heretic for his views.72 The example of Hierakas, so far
from the Thebaid, reminds us only that the lines between coenobitic monks, ancho-
rites, and private citizens were fluid in the fourth century.

Our intuition is that the Nag Hammadi codices belonged to private (i.e., non-
monastic) individuals who commissioned them for their own purposes. Whether
the scriptoria that composed them were monastic or not we cannot tell, but private
scriptoria certainly existed in the fourth century.73 The “private individual” model
requires that we break with our tendency to interpret the landscape of late antique
Egypt as purely populated by monks, a perception largely influenced by Derwas J.
Chitty’s highly influential The Desert a City.74 These individuals may or may not
have been Christians; if it was correct in any sense to call them “Gnostic,” they
certainly did not ascribe to any sectarian Gnostic school.75

Oxy rhynchus 654 and Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 655,” in Frey et al., Das Thomasevangelium, 23, on
the total number of copies of Christian texts from late ancient Egypt.

70 Veilleux first suggested the Nag Hammadi documents might have held special appeal for
Melitians (“Monasticism and Gnosis in Egypt,” 10). See also Brakke, “Canon Formation,” 249:
“while the nature of the apocryphal books accepted and used by the Melitians seems different
from the texts found in the Nag Hammadi codices, the undecided nature of the canon evidenced
in the debate suggests a period in which one can well imagine individual ascetics and ascetic
groups involved in the sort of textual exploration that led to an interest in such texts.”

71 Robinson suggests this (Nag Hammadi Library in English, 18).
72 Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library in English, 18; Wisse, “Gnosticism and Early Monas-

ticism,” 438–40.
73 Although Pachomians had scriptoria and copied texts, the evidence is later than the fourth

century. There is no evidence for fourth-century Pachomian scriptoria. For the earliest references,
see Palladius, Lausiac History 32.12 (where working in the kalligreiphon is one form of Pachomian
monastic labor) and John Cassian, Institutes 4.12 (which details how a Pachomian monk must
stop writing immediately if called by a superior). We thank David Brakke for the references.

74 Chitty, The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian
Monasticism under the Christian Empire (1966; repr., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1995).

75 See the loosely affiliated Christian fellowships discussed by E. Wipszycka, “Les confréries

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 417

That the Nag Hammadi codices were commissioned by private individuals
was the hypothesis of Krause, but also of Khosroyev, who systematically and pains-
takingly demolished the theory of Pachomian provenance and argued instead that
the codices had been commissioned by urban intellectuals among whom they were
copied and exchanged.76 These intellectuals operated outside the reach of the devel-
oping orthodox Christianity and represented the religious complexity of their day,
like their contemporary Zosimus of Panopolis or those who read and circulated the
Theban Magical Papyri. Indeed, the concept of paideia once again comes to mind.
If elite education meant to instruct even Christian theologians, like Basil the Great,
in the reading of classical Greek mythology, it is not difficult to suggest that some
Egyptian elites were interested in the cosmological and eschatological writings of
the Neoplatonic era, during which paideia experienced a revival, thus necessarily
including the so-called Gnostic writings of the second century in their learning in
the fourth century.

Emmel has also cautiously agreed with Khosroyev’s analysis, although he sees
no reason to locate the Nag Hammadi codices in Egypt’s major urban centers as
products of life in the city. He posits, instead,

bilingual “Hellenized” Egyptians who grew up and remained in the largely
Greek-speaking metropoleis of the Nile Valley, where they were in communica-
tion with like-minded members of the same “class” or “group” who shared an
interest in this sort of esoteric and in some sense also erudite literature.”77

In a different article, Emmel suggests that to understand the codices in their con-
text, we need to “reconstruct the reading experience of whoever owned each of the
Codices,” taking into full consideration the culture of Upper Egypt from the third
to the eighth centuries and developing a “theory of Coptic reading and Coptic
readers.”78 But Emmel raises a vital question: why are the Nag Hammadi Codices
in Coptic (and often poor Coptic, at that)? Rejecting the idea that they could have
been translated from Greek to Coptic for the benefit of those who could not read
Greek (the tractates are unintelligible without an advanced knowledge of Greek
language and culture), he proposes an intriguing hypothesis:

I think we have to do with the products of a kind of Egypt-wide network (more
or less informal) of educated, primarily Greek-speaking … philosophically and
esoteric-mystically like-minded people, for whom Egypt represented (even if

dans la vie religieuse de l’Égypte chrétienne,” in Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress
of Papyrology (Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1970), 511–25.

76 This is the central argument of Khosroyev, Die Bibliothek von Nag Hammadi.
77 Emmel, “Coptic Gnostic Texts,” 36.
78 Emmel, “Religious Tradition, Textual Transmission, and the Nag Hammadi Codices,” in

The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature
Commemoration (ed. John D. Turner and Anne McGuire; Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies
44; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 34–43.

418 Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014)

only somewhat vaguely) a tradition of wisdom and knowledge to be revered and
perpetuated … it is easy to imagine a kind of rush to create a new “esoteric-
mystical Egyptian wisdom literature”—being “Egyptian” above all by virtue of
being in Coptic rather than in Greek (even if the Coptic was sometimes barely
comprehensible.79

If Emmel is right, then it seems that Egyptian, rather than Greek, would be the
“natural” language for these new Christian Books of the Dead. Even though the
content of the writings betrayed Greek thought, the language connected those who
commissioned such volumes with an archaic practice of leaving guides for the
afterlife in Egyptian graves. In fact, seen in this light, the sometimes poor Coptic,
the mishmash of writings (Valentinian and Sethian; Christian and non-Christian),
and the theological inconsistencies that vex modern scholars were likely to have
been of no concern whatsoever to a fourth-century elite who planned out in advance
a “real, Egyptian” burial.

It is worth asking, in conclusion, what difference it makes if the Nag Hammadi
find-story was, indeed, a scholarly fiction. To begin, we might do well to recognize
its many colonialist, orientalizing elements as relics of a bygone era in Egyptian
archaeology. The narrative is a fine one for classroom telling, but it works less and
less effectively as we become more sensitized to our own Western prejudices and
assumptions. Egyptian peasants do not fear jinni in bottles or rip out each other’s
hearts and eat them on the spot—and shame on us for believing, even for a moment,
that they do.

To those whose work has been in uncovering the second-century contexts of
the various tractates contained in the Nag Hammadi codices, it may not matter at
all whether the books derived from a grave or were secreted away by monks. On
the other hand, the attention to the second-century, posited Greek “originals” of
these writings has steered us down a path that virtually ignores the vital context of
the writings in the only form in which they have survived, as if this real, fourth-
century setting means nothing and only our reconstructed and imagined Greek
“originals” have anything to teach us about the development of Christianity. To be
suspicious of the find-story and the assumed Pachomian provenance is to allow
these late antique codices to belong to a uniquely Egyptian archaeological context,
placing them in a funerary tradition that began in the dynastic era and endured,
arguably, well into the Muslim era. To think of the Nag Hammadi codices as fourth-
century artifacts that may have been intentionally created, in some instances, as
grave goods radically changes the way we think about late antique Egyptian Chris-
tianity, where studies have been divided between those who study monasticism and
those who study documentary papyri. Yet what of the vibrant cultural life of the
late antique Roman era, the systems of learning that fostered an interest in these
second-century heritages, be they pagan or Christian, Roman or Egyptian? If we

79 Emmel, “Coptic Gnostic Texts,” 48.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 419

group the Nag Hammadi codices with other similar products—namely, the Tchacos,
Bruce, and Askew codices—we have a rather large corpus of late antique Egyptian
books that stand in a class of their own and demand from us not only contextualiza-
tion but also a deeper understanding of the diversity of the fourth-century Roman
world.

Reevaluating the true provenance of the Nag Hammadi codices also means
that we need to change the way we think about so-called Gnostic texts as being
theologically marginal writings that really only had one century of good use before
they became dangerous curiosities that some theologically suspect monks felt com-
pelled to hide. Contextualizing the Nag Hammadi codices in the grave of a private
citizen removes them from the background drama of fourth-century ecclesiastical
politics. It has been difficult for scholars of Gnosticism to avoid the temptation to
connect the Nag Hammadi codices with dominant figures such as Athanasius or
movements such as Pachomian monasticism; however, such a connection situates
our field of study conveniently within the narrative that Athanasius himself propa-
gated: a community of unified Christians, loyal to their bishops, all together fight-
ing groups of renegade monks and teachers who commission heretical texts and
then, like demons, disappear into the night. Could there be any other way to under-
stand the landscape of late antique Egypt? Yes, of course.

Our job has been to draw threads of connection, however tenuous, between
one historical figure or moment and another. But if we sever these silken threads
and admit to what we simply do not know about late antique Egypt, the true reason
that someone saw fit painstakingly to copy the Nag Hammadi codices and carefully
to preserve them becomes a compelling mystery we might begin to consider with
a fresh set of eyes.

Journal for the Study of
the New Testament

35(4) 303 –322
© The Author(s) 2013

Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0142064X13482243
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How Reliable is the Story of
the Nag Hammadi Discovery?

Mark Goodacre
Duke University, USA

Abstract
James Robinson’s narrative of how the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered is
popular and compelling, a piece of fine investigative journalism that includes intrigue
and blood vengeance. But there are several different, conflicting versions of the story,
including two-person (1977), seven-person (1979) and eight-person (1981) versions.
Disagreements include the name of the person who first found the jar. Martin Krause
and Rodolphe Kasser both questioned these stories in 1984, and their scepticism is
corroborated by the Channel 4 (UK) series, The Gnostics (1987), which features
Muhammad ‘Ali himself, in his only known appearance in front of camera, offering his
account of the discovery. Several major points of divergence from the earlier reports
raise questions about the reliability of ‘Ali’s testimony. It may be safest to conclude that
the earlier account of the discovery offered by Jean Doresse in 1958 is more reliable
than the later, more detailed, more vivid versions that are so frequently retold.

Keywords
Nag Hammadi, discovery, James Robinson, Jean Doresse, the Gnostics

The ‘Canonical’ Nag Hammadi Story

The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945 has attained
near canonical status in scholarship of early Christianity. James Robinson’s
compelling narrative of how Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman and his brothers
unearthed the jar containing the codices combines skilled investigative journal-
ism with tales of intrigue and blood vengeance.1 It is a staple of introductory

1. James Robinson has told the story on multiple occasions but the three key versions are best
represented in Robinson 1977: 21-25 (= Robinson 1988: 22-26), 1979 and 1981. See also
Robinson et al. 1984.

Corresponding author:
Mark Goodacre, Department of Religion, Duke University, Gray Bldg/Box 90964, Durham NC 27708-0964, USA.
Email: goodacre@duke.edu

Article

304 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

classes on Christian origins, particularly important for courses introducing the
Gospel of Thomas. Books on the Nag Hammadi collection narrate the story to
grab the reader’s attention and to set the scene. The story is comparable to the
often-narrated, near contemporary story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
in 1947, a story that similarly sets the scene in discussions of Qumran and early
Judaism.2

One of the most popular retellings of the story is told at the beginning of
Elaine Pagels’s seminal Gnostic Gospels:

In December 1945 an Arab peasant made an astonishing archeological discovery
in Upper Egypt … Thirty years later the discoverer himself, Muhammad ‘Ali al-
Samman, told what happened. Shortly before he and his brothers avenged their
father’s murder in a blood feud, they had saddled their camels and gone out to the
Jabal to dig for sabakh, a soft soil they used to fertilize their crops. Digging around
a massive boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar, almost a meter high. Muhammad
‘Ali hesitated to break the jar, considering that a jinn, or spirit, might live inside. But
realizing that it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, smashed the jar, and
discovered inside thirteen papyrus books, bound in leather. Returning to his home in
al-Qasr, Muhammad ‘Ali dumped the books and loose papyrus leaves on the straw
piled on the ground next to the oven. Muhammad’s mother, ‘Umm-Ahmad, admits
that she burned much of the papyrus in the oven along with the straw she used to
kindle the fire.

This find story is already compelling, but it is capped with the tale of an appall-
ing murder:

A few weeks later, as Muhammad ‘Ali tells it, he and his brothers avenged their
father’s death by murdering Ahmed Isma’il. Their mother had warned her sons to
keep their mattocks sharp: when they learned that their father’s enemy was nearby,
the brothers seized the opportunity, ‘hacked off his limbs … ripped out his heart, and
devoured it among them, as the ultimate act of blood revenge’ (Pagels 1979: xiii).

It is a fantastic story, irresistible for introducing these amazing and important
discoveries.3 The bloodthirsty, illiterate peasants happen upon an amazing
find while out looking for fertilizer. They worry about genies but lust for
gold, they have no inkling of the magnitude of their find, and their mother is
as stupid as she is callous, burning valuable documents and then encouraging
her sons to use the very mattocks that had broken open the earthenware jar

2. See Collins 2013: 1-32 for a full discussion of the discovery story, a story that has often been
simplified and romanticized for pedagogical appeal.

3. For its media appeal, see, for example, From Jesus to Christ, broadcast on PBS in 1998,
which includes a dramatization of the find, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/
religion.

Goodacre 305

now to murder a man. The narrative scarcely hides its moral, that important
artefacts like this need to be wrested from the hands of those who cannot
hope to understand them, and placed in the hands of responsible, Western
academics.

The status of this story in the guild, our love of retelling it, our fondness for its
dramatic impact, has deterred us from subjecting it to the kind of critical scrutiny
that we apply to ancient texts. In this article, I would like to draw attention to
legendary embellishments of the story, contradictions between the different ver-
sions, and curiosities that are sufficient to place a question mark over the
confidence with which we like to tell this familiar tale.

The Mystery of the Growing Jar

Like many a canonical narrative, the story is subject to legendary embellish-
ment. One interesting example relates to the size of the jar in which the codi-
ces were found. The jar itself is no longer in existence.4 The bowl that was
used as a lid allegedly survived,5 but nothing of the pottery itself survived the
discovery. According to James Robinson’s interviews, Muhammad ‘Ali
smashed into the jar with his mattock, taking the volumes and leaving the
broken shards of pottery behind. They were never retrieved. Robinson there-
fore estimates the size of the jar on the basis of his interviews in the 1970s6 as
follows:

The pottery was red slip ware, distinguishing it from the creamy color of the modern
Qina ware common in the region, and had four small handles near the opening. The
jar was also large, with dimensions roughly illustrated by Muhammad ‘Ali as 60 cm
or more in height and an opening of some 15 to 20 cm widening to some 30 cm in the
flank. The jar had been closed by fitting a bowl into its mouth. Khalifah7 had taken
this bowl with him to the home in al-Qasr where he was a servant for the Copt, Salib
‘Abd al-Masih, who preserved the bowl intact. It is Coptic red slip ware of the 4th or
5th century with a rim decorated with four fields of stripes. The diameter at the outer

4. Robinson 1979: 212 features ‘Ali’s drawing of the jar. The lid is pictured on p. 213.
5. C. Wilfred Griggs, who was present in Nag Hammadi with Robinson in the mid 1970s,

implies some doubt about the lid: ‘A ceramic dish was once displayed with a Nag Hammadi
exhibit and was claimed to be the lid of the jar in which the library was found, but the lid was
given to Robinson by a peasant and was not recovered through archaeological excavation at
the site’ (Griggs 1990: 217 n. 20; cf. 177, ‘Ali ‘had the presence of mind to save the lid, so the
story goes’). On Griggs’s doubts, see further note 17 below.

6. The precision of the measurements should perhaps be treated with caution given Robinson’s
later scepticism about Muhammad ‘Ali’s ability to count the number of codices in the jar. See
below, pp. 313-14.

7. Khalifah ‘Ali, Muhammad’s brother, alone with Muhammad in the 1977 version of the story;
see further below, pp. 307-308.

306 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

edge is 23.3–24.0 cm, with a diameter inside the bowl of 18.2–18.7 cm, adequate to
close a mouth large enough to admit the codices, whose broadest leaves, in Codex
VII, measure up to 17.5 cm. There are a few black tar like stains about 2.0 cm from
the outer edge on the under side of the rim, perhaps vestiges of a bitumen used to seal
the bowl into the jar. Thus, the jar probably could not be opened readily to investigate
its contents, which would explain why it was broken by its discoverers (Robinson
1979: 213-14).8

So it was ‘60 cm or more’ high, which is just under 2 ft. However, in The Gnostic
Gospels, Elaine Pagels says that the jar was ‘almost a meter high’ (Pagels 1979:
xiii), which is already a lot bigger than Robinson’s estimate. One meter is 3.28
ft. So the jar has grown from just under 2 ft to well over 3 ft.

Subsequently, the jar almost doubles in size. In several interviews and publi-
cations, Elaine Pagels states that it was a ‘six-foot jar’. The first example of this
is in The Gnostics TV series from 1987,9 which features a clip of Elaine Pagels
teaching a class at Princeton. She says that it was ‘a large earthenware jar, about
six feet high’, motioning with her hand to illustrate that the jar was higher than
her head (Segaller 1987). It is ‘six feet’ when she appears in the PBS documen-
tary From Jesus to Christ (Cran 1998). It features also in written interviews and
then again in her Beyond Belief (Pagels 2003: 97).

A six-foot jar would be enormous. This is unfeasibly large, three times the
size of the two-foot jar of the earliest accounts. The best guess about the ori-
gin of this measurement is that it occurred in Pagels’s oralization of the
Robinson story in the classroom, an inadvertent error, perhaps brought about
by misremembering the ‘60 cm’ figure from Robinson’s story. This kind of
corruption can happen easily in story-telling. An error is introduced inadvert-
ently, but it is then retold until it becomes embedded in the story and its origin
forgotten.10

However, the differences between the various versions of the story of the Nag
Hammadi finds are not limited just to the subsequent retellings, and the differing
versions do not emerge solely through writers’ recasting in their own words, add-
ing legendary embellishments and re-oralizing. There are some interesting dif-
ferences in the source materials themselves.

8. The detail about the bitumen varies in different retellings. Here it is ‘perhaps vestiges of a
bitumen used to seal the bowl into the jar’ (cf. Robinson 1981: 38); similarly, Robinson 1977:
21; 1988: 23: ‘whose lid may have been sealed on with bitumen’; later, there is more certainty,
e.g., Robinson 1997: 6: ‘Muhammad ‘Ali had at first feared to open the jar (sealed with a bowl
attached with bitumin [sic] to the mouth of the jar) lest it contain a jinn.’ On ‘a jinn’, see n. 46
below.

9. See further below, pp. 310-11.
10. I am grateful to Mike Grondin for drawing my attention to the extraordinary size of the six-

foot jar, so encouraging me to check the other recorded dimensions.

Goodacre 307

Different Versions of Robinson’s Narrative

Robinson’s accounts are based on extensive research in and around the Nag
Hammadi region, and many interviews on several occasions with the protago-
nists in the 1970s.11 His attempts to dig up the details of what had happened a
generation earlier and his success in writing so fascinating an account witness to
the industry and expertise of so influential and important a scholar. Nevertheless,
the scope of the research and the craft of the story-telling do not mask the inter-
esting fact that there are variant versions of the story.

There are several points of contact between the different versions. The core is
the same, and the major differences relate to length and detail. Nevertheless, at
the key point, when Robinson is narrating the discovery itself, there are striking
differences relating especially to the personnel involved. In the earliest published
version, in 1977,12 the introduction to the classic Nag Hammadi Library in
English, only two men are said to be present, the brothers ‘Muhammad and
Khalifah ‘Ali of the al-Samman clan’. The more detailed 1979 version, pub-
lished in Biblical Archaeologist, features seven people, three of whom were
brothers. The third brother is the youngster Abu al-Majd. In this version, Abu
al-Majd, previously unmentioned, is the one who ‘actually unearthed the jar’
before his older brother takes over.13 The next version, in 1981, adds an addi-
tional camel-driver, bringing the total number at the site to eight. The similarities
and differences are easiest to see in synopsis:

11. In 1979, Robinson reports that his visits on 3 March and 23 April 1966 produced ‘a few leads’
but that the major research took place ‘toward the end of November 1974, for visits of some
days in January and September 1975, and for about a month each of the next three winters’
(Robinson 1979: 207-208). This coheres with the fact that Robinson’s first publication on
the discoveries, a 1974 pamphlet, has none of the detail that emerges in the later accounts,
although it does feature the germ of the later, more detailed versions: ‘One report is to the
effect that the person who actually found the jar was a lad who had avenged the murder of
his father by killing the murderer and had then fled to the desert to avoid arrest’ (Robinson
1974: 4). It is also worth noting that if ‘the next three winters’ are 1975/6, 1976/7 and 1977/8,
the research continued after the publication of Nag Hammadi Library in English (Robinson
1977) and may account for some of the discrepancies between the 1977 and 1979 versions of
the story. If so, Robinson does not draw attention to any changes.

12. Though see also the undeveloped summary version from Robinson 1974.
13. Ehrman 2003: 52, and 264 n. 10, notes that ‘Ali’s younger brother first hit a skeleton rather

than a jar, citing a private conversation with New Testament scholar and archaeologist
Bastiaan van Elderen (1924–2004), who had himself dug at Nag Hammadi (van Elderen
1979). Robinson’s longer versions of the story also mention a skeleton: ‘Muhammad ‘Ali
maintained that a corpse with abnormally elongated fingers and teeth and legs lay on a bed of
something like charcoal beside the jar and that it was reburied there’ (Robinson 1979: 213;
1981: 35-36). Curiously, Abu al-Majd here denies the presence of a skeleton, ‘His younger
brother Abu al Majd denied that anything other than the jar was found’ (Robinson 1981: 36).

308 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

Robinson 1977: 2114 Robinson 1979: 21315 Robinson 1981: 37

Two brothers, Three of the sons of ‘Ali and Three of the sons of ‘Ali and
Muhammad and Khalifah ‘Umm-Ahmad—Muhammad, ‘Umm Ahmad, Muhammad (born
Ali of the al-Samman clan, Khalifah and Abu al-Majd—were 1919), Khalifah (died 1975) and
hobbled their camels on digging sabakh with four other Abu al-Majd (born 1930) were
the south side of the fallen camel drivers at the time the digging sabakh with five other
boulder and came upon discovery was made. Abu camel drivers at the time the
the jar as they were al-Majd actually unearthed discovery was made. Abu
digging around its base. the jar, but Muhammad, the al-Majd actually unearthed
oldest brother (he was 26; the jar, but Muhammad, who
Abu al-Majd was 15), had had assumed a role of paternal
assumed the role of paternal authority over him, took control.
authority over Abu.

The differing versions have not generated comments in previous scholar-
ship. No doubt this is in large part because scholars are unaware that there are
different versions.16 In so far as there is awareness of the issue, the different
versions are simply regarded as terse and summarizing or longer and detailed.
Perhaps, then, to focus on these differences would be to nit-pick. Though we
may scrutinize ancient texts with excitement where the details diverge, some
might argue that contemporary scholarly texts should be treated with more
patience. Two scholars involved in the publication of the Nag Hammadi codi-
ces would beg to differ.

Kasser’s and Krause’s Disclaimer

Although the compelling story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices is
frequently narrated, it is not widely known that two scholars questioned the story
and wished to distance themselves from it. Rodolphe Kasser and Martin Krause,
who worked with Robinson on the Nag Hammadi Library in the 1970s and early
1980s, expressed major reservations about Robinson’s story, so much so that
they asked him to publish the following remarkable disclaimer in The Facsimile
Edition on which they collaborated:

14. The account is unchanged in Robinson 1988: 22.
15. Cf. p. 211: ‘the seven involved who were not sons of ‘Ali’, which would bring the total num-

ber to ten. Similarly, Robinson mentions these ‘seven involved who were not sons of ‘Ali’ in
Robinson 1981: 34, which would also imply that ten were present. See also Robinson et al.
1984: 5, ‘There were in all eight camel-drivers who had come from Al Qasr’, which correlates
with the 1981 version.

16. A possible exception is a quotation from Rodolphe Kasser in Krosney 2006: 134. Kasser
says that the ‘numerous precise and detailed testimonies’ were ‘often contradictory, it is true,
but one knows how to distinguish the good wheat from the chaff’. See further on Krosney’s
quotation of Kasser below, pp. 314-15.

Goodacre 309

Rodolphe Kasser and Martin Krause wish to make it known here that they have serious
reasons to put in doubt the objective value of a number of important points of the
Introduction that follows. They contest especially the detailed history of the discovery
of the Coptic Gnostic manuscripts of Nag Hammadi resulting from the investigation
of James M. Robinson. Kasser and Krause and others who were involved do not
consider as assured anything more than the core of the story (the general location
and approximate date of the discovery), the rest not having for them more than the
value of stories and fables that one can collect in popular Egyptian circles thirty years
after an event whose exceptional significance the protagonists could not at the time
understand. R.K. and M.K. (Robinson et al. 1984: 3).

Although Robinson’s account has often been retold, Krause’s and Kasser’s
publicly stated objection to it is rarely repeated.17 This is probably simply because
of ignorance. This quotation is written in a tiny font in square brackets as the first
few lines in a two-page footnote in the preface to an expensive and highly techni-
cal volume. And by 1984, when the introductory volume to the Facsimile Edition
appeared, the discovery story had already been told and retold so many times
that the impact of any disclaimer was likely to be minimal.

Clearly stung by the criticisms of those like Krause and Kasser, Robinson
responded by suggesting that, like all good science, his research was open to
good, repeatable investigation. At the time of writing, the people involved were
still alive and they could be found and interviewed:

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 (Robinson et al.
1984: 4 n. 1).

The claim echoed something already in one of Robinson’s earlier accounts:

One important dimension of the status of the story of the Nag Hammadi codices
from the cliff to Cairo is the quality of the repeatability inherent in the scientific
experiment, in that the persons interviewed are still accessible for others who may
wish to repeat and advance the investigative process (Robinson 1981: 58).

Unfortunately, the time that has now passed since Robinson’s careful and detailed
investigations of the 1970s makes it impossible any longer to engage in the kind

17. The only example I am aware of is Griggs 1990: 217: ‘The doubts and concerns expressed by
this author are similar to those held by Rodolphe Kasser and Martin Krause’. Griggs himself
is dubious about the find story after having been involved with two excavations in 1975,
which yielded ‘no supporting evidence for any of the sites or the story in general’ (1990:
177). Griggs may be one of the ‘others who were involved’ alluded to in Krause and Kasser’s
disclaimer.

310 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

of re-investigation here suggested. And it seems that Robinson’s critics them-
selves 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.18

The Gnostics (1987)

Here, then, the story might have ended were it not for the fact that a television
crew followed in Robinson’s footsteps a decade later, for a Channel 4 (UK) doc-
umentary series that aired in 1987, The Gnostics, in which Muhammad ‘Ali him-
self appears on screen.19 The man behind the series was Tobias Churton, and as
he tells the story, his encounter with Muhammad ‘Ali was a case of good luck:

Just over forty years later [after the discovery], Border Television’s filmcrew were in
the neighbourhood with Gilles Quispel, Professor of New Testament studies at the
University of Utrecht, in order to film the location of the discovery. Our production
manager, Valerie Kaye, was walking down the main street of al-Qasr with a copy of
Biblical Archaeologist (Fall 1979) which featured a colour photograph of Muhammad
‘Ali al-Samman on its cover. A rather serene looking man, in his mid-sixties, walked
up to her and, seeing the picture, pointed to it and then himself.20

The documentary series itself is now difficult to find. It was broadcast only twice,
in 1987 and again in 1990, and it was never released on VHS or DVD. After a
long search, I was able to track down an anonymously made recording. It is a
fascinating series, featuring interviews with Elaine Pagels, Gilles Quispel, Hans
Jonas and James Robinson, interspersed with bizarre scenes in which a clean-
shaven, blond-haired Gnostic Jesus (played by Nigel Harrison) appears all in
white to recite sayings from the Gospel of Thomas in an ethereal manner. In a

18. Moreover, Martin Krause had already made his own investigations in the early 1960s
(Robinson 1979: 207).

19. The Gnostics was produced by Border Television for Channel 4; it was researched
and largely written by Tobias Churton, produced and directed by Stephen Segaller and
narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith. The four episodes of the series were broadcast from 7 to
28 November 1987, with a debate programme added on 5 December 1987 (British Film
Institute: Film and TV Database, http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/series/16939; accessed January
2012). The Gnostics was repeated on Channel 4 in 1990 but it was not released on video
(Maria King Correspondence, reproduced 25 September 2001, http://mudcat.org/thread.
cfm?threadid=38775&messages=10; accessed January 2012).

20. Churton 1987: 9. The programme itself presents the encounter slightly differently, with the
documentary fiction that Gilles Quispel himself had found Muhammad ‘Ali. Two earlier readers
of this paper asked if we could be sure that the man claiming to be ‘Ali in the documentary is
indeed the same man. It has to be said that there is indeed a strong resemblance between the
younger Muhammad ‘Ali as pictured in Biblical Archaeologist and the older Muhammad ‘Ali
as he appears in The Gnostics.

Goodacre 311

remarkable scene in the documentary, Gilles Quispel meets Muhammad ‘Ali and
pays him homage. When they interview ‘Ali about what he remembers of the
discovery, this is how he responds, speaking through an interpreter:21

‘I was digging for sabakh, for fertilizer, with my pick-axe and carrying it back to the
fields on the camel. Then I came across this big earthenware pot which was buried
in the sand. I had a feeling that there might be something inside … I came back later
the same day and I smashed the pot open. I broke it open exactly where I had found
it. I thought there might be an evil spirit inside, a jinni. I had never seen anything like
it before. I smashed the pot on my own and inside I found these old books. Then I
brought the others over to see. They said, “We don’t want anything to do with these
books. They belong to the Christians, the Copts.” They said, “It’s nothing to do with
us.” … It was all just rubbish to us. Yes, my mother did burn some in the bread
oven.22… One of the people from the village of Hamra Dum killed my father so it was
decided that I should kill his murderer, in revenge. I did kill him and with my knife I
cut out his heart and ate it. I was in jail because of the killing and when I got out of jail
I found that my mother had burned a lot of those old papers. Later on I sold one book.
All the others had gone. I got eleven Egyptian pounds for it.’

Professor Quispel’s interpreter asked Muhammad ‘Ali if he had any regrets about
what happened when he found the books. ‘No, I don’t care. I don’t give a damn about
them. It doesn’t even enter my head to think about it.’23

21. This is my transcript taken from the film. The ellipses occur where ‘Ali’s testimony is
interrupted by narration or interviews with Robinson or both.

22. At this point, ‘Ali is depicted looking through the 1979 issue of Biblical Archaeologist and
drawing attention to pictures of himself, his mother and the place of discovery.

23. The testimony is also given in Churton 1987: 9, but with major differences: ‘I found it at the
Hamra Dūm mountain in the December of 1945. By 6 o’clock in the morning when I started
my work … all of a sudden I found this pot. And after I found it I had the feeling that there
was something inside it. So I kept it, and because it was cold this morning … I decided that I
would leave it and would come back again for it to find out what’s inside. I came back in the
same day in fact, and I broke this pot. But I was afraid at the beginning because there might
be something inside it—a jinn, a bad spirit. I was by myself when I broke the pot. I wanted my
friends to be with me. After I broke it I found that it was a story book. I decided to bring my
friends to tell them about the story. We were seven and we realized immediately that this has
something to do with the Christian people. And we said that we don’t really need it at all—it
was just useless to us. So I took it to the ministry over here and he told me, well we really
don’t need it. It was just rubbish for us. So I took it back home. Some of them were burned
and I tried to sell some of them.’ It is possible that Churton has assimilated the testimony more
closely to Robinson’s account, e.g. by adding reference to December 1945 (cf. Robinson
1979: 209). It is puzzling, in this version, that ‘Ali should now apparently remember the
date when earlier Robinson had had to work it out on the basis of several clues. Churton
also narrates the version of the story in which Abu unearths the jar, presumably derived from
Robinson, but without drawing attention to the differences between the two versions.

312 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

There are points of contact between this version of the story and the earlier ones
told to Robinson: digging for sabakh, the fear of breaking the pot because of the
jinni and the mother’s burning of the papers.24 The points of divergence, though,
are striking. In this testimony, the discovery of the pot and the breaking of it are
narrated as separate incidents, and ‘Ali is alone at both points and is responsible
for both. He is insistent on the point—‘I smashed the pot on my own’. There are
‘others’ subsequently present, but there is a contrast here with all the versions
narrated by Robinson, in which the other(s) are present at the point of discovery
and breaking of the pot.

This version of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices is today unknown
in the guild, in spite of the fact that it is the only extant footage of Muhammad
‘Ali al-Samman himself. Television documentaries are quickly forgotten,25 all
the more so in the days before the widespread distribution and endless repeats
that mark contemporary documentary making for cable networks in the USA.26
Not surprisingly, it does not appear in any of the scholarly literature that deals
with the topic. And Tobias Churton’s book based on the series has been neglected
because of its popular-level presentation.27

A Bottle of Whiskey and a Ten-Pound Note

How reliable, then, is the story of the Nag Hammadi discovery? Can we continue
to trust it in our classroom presentations and introductory texts? The question
itself conceals the difficulty. There is no single story of the Nag Hammadi dis-
covery but several different versions. It is true that there are major points of

24. Robinson 1979: 213. In the same documentary, Robinson narrates the story in an eight-person
version, though with a little caution, ‘He and about seven other camel-riders were at the
foot of the cliff, digging for fertilizer and lit upon this jar … When he broke it, he took the
books out, claims he divided it, them among the camel-drivers, which is one reason that some
got ripped apart; you can’t divide thirteen books into eight parts very readily.’ Television
interviews naturally require more terse narration than is possible in scholarly writing, but in
the written versions, ‘Ali only attempts to divide the books up among those present.

25. Compare the story of the spy ‘Rose’ who died in 2010, ‘A Spy Called “Rose”’, Today
programme, BBC Radio 4, 29 October 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/
newsid_9138000/9138591.stm: ‘Amongst files released today at the National Archives, is the
personal file of former SOE agent Eileen Nearne whose death triggered hundreds to gather
at her funeral. It was said that she never spoke about her past, which was not strictly true as
the Today programme has unearthed a Timewatch documentary from 1997 where she was
interviewed at length under her pseudonym – Rose.’ It is worth noting that the archaeological
metaphor of unearthing is used for something as recent as 1997, demonstrating how quickly
radio and television is forgotten.

26. See note 19 above; the documentary was not released on VHS.
27. I have not been able to find any reviews of Churton’s book in any of the academic journals.

Outside of academic circles, the book was quite successful. It was translated into Spanish as
Los gnósticos (Madrid: Edaf, 1988).

Goodacre 313

contact between the different versions, but there are also significant differences,
differences that are sufficient to place a question mark over the reliability of
Muhammad ‘Ali’s testimony, all the more so given the doubts raised by Krause
and Kasser, and the obvious differences in ‘Ali’s later, on-screen account. To
continue to tell the tale of the Nag Hammadi finds in an uncritical way would be
akin to treating the Synoptic Gospels in a harmonizing fashion, ignoring differ-
ences and suspending the kind of healthy scepticism that is so important in the
armoury of the scholar of early Christianity.

A degree of scepticism about the find stories, though, inevitably raises ques-
tions about the nature of the research that led to them. One of the difficulties is
that the kind of careful ethnographic research that is now common in universities
was in its infancy in the 1970s. Detailed guidelines about how to conduct inter-
views, how to record interviews and how to investigate without contaminating
the field were not available at the time. Robinson did not tape-record his inter-
views and he did not publish his notes. This is not to say that his work was
shoddy. His narratives are strong in scope and precise in detail and there is no
question about the initiative, the energy and the time that went into researching
them. However, there are question marks over elements that may have emerged
from the imagination of the protagonists rather than their memory of the events,
from providing the researchers with what they wanted to hear rather than accu-
rate recollection.

The difficulty is illustrated in Robinson’s most recent discussion of the Nag
Hammadi find story. In The Secrets of Judas, Robinson is attempting to set the
record straight about the provenance of the Gospel of Judas, and he wishes to
make it clear that it did not come from Nag Hammadi (Robinson 2007: 39). He
produces a lengthy quotation from one of his articles on the discovery28 in an
attempt to clarify the number of codices that were found, but then he adds the
following revealing commentary:

Muhammad ‘Ali had heard me and others talk of thirteen codices, and so he would
quite naturally speak of thirteen, not recalling what he had counted at the time (if he
had counted at all—he was illiterate). In all probability, he was just playing back what
he had learned was the ‘correct’ number.29

28. Robinson 2007: 39, quoting Robinson 1979: 214. The piece is a curious over-reaction to
a post on Stephen Carlson’s blog (2005), which comments briefly on the possibility of a
missing codex at Nag Hammadi, itself quoting an article by Roger Pearse (Pearse nd), which
conflates two of Robinson’s different find stories, 1979 and 1988).

29. Robinson 2007: 40. Contrast Robinson’s earlier reflections: ‘Although one cannot exclude
the hypothetical possibility that such a report could have been contaminated by input from the
interviewers, further considerations suggest that the figure may well be an independent and in
one sense a correct report’ (Robinson 1984: 20).

314 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

Aside from the surprising note that illiteracy might imply inability to count, the
comments are striking in demonstrating that the witness’s testimony was con-
taminated. Although in 1979, ‘Ali is cited as maintaining that there were thirteen
codices in the jar,30 it now appears that this may have been no more than the
repetition of a detail ‘Ali had heard from those questioning him.31

Still more seriously, there are questions over Muhammad ‘Ali’s trustworthi-
ness. If the nasty but implausible tale of modern-day cannibalism, eating a man’s
heart raw, were not enough to raise suspicion, it is clear that Robinson himself
sometimes had trouble with ‘Ali’s honesty. He refers to ‘instances of not impec-
cable veracity on his part’ (Robinson 1979: 213) and notes that on at least one
occasion a ‘financial consideration’ was necessary to overcome ‘Ali’s unwilling-
ness to explore the possible location of the find (Robinson 1979: 212). Herb
Krosney suggests that such incentives were a major element in the research:

Robinson made inquiries with the Egyptian fellahin in the area of Nag Hammadi.
He found witnesses who would often tell him to come back in a short time and they
would reveal the story to him. Robinson would return as requested, ready with the
proper incentives. ‘Whenever I went down, I would bring the villagers a bottle of
whiskey and a ten-pound note. That was big money at the time. That was my chore in
tracking it down. I am not a field archaeologist. I went from rumor to rumor, village
to village’ (Krosney 2006: 132).32

The same note is confirmed in Krosney’s report of Rodolphe Kasser’s scornful
comment on Robinson’s research:

Robinson went down [to the area of Nag Hammadi] in full force, accompanied by
Egyptian notables, promising compensation to his informants. For them [the Egyptian
fellahin], the windfall was beautiful.33

Krosney’s account of Kasser’s scepticism sheds light also on the disclaimer that
appeared in the Facsmilie Edition in 1984:34

30. Robinson 1979: 214. Cf. also the discussion of the number in Robinson et al. 1984: 20,
concluding with the statement ‘But when pressed as to whether the number were not actually
twelve, he insisted that it was thirteen.’ See further Robinson et al. 1984: 20-24.

31. This is corroborated further by the vagueness with which ‘Ali speaks about the discovery in
1987: ‘these old books … these books … those old papers’ (above, pp. 308-309).

32. The source of Krosney’s quotation of Robinson is unclear, though it would appear to be from
an interview conducted by Krosney.

33. Krosney 2006: 134. The source of Krosney’s quotations of Kasser is also unclear, but again,
it appears to be Krosney’s own interviews, no doubt conducted during his research for this
book, published in 2006.

34. See above, xx.

Goodacre 315

Krause and I, who knew Egypt well, and the fabricating capabilities of the Egyptian
fellahin lured by the prospect of gain, disapproved, asking Robinson to restrict
himself to the minimum kind of presentation foreseen by our committee back in 1970
(Krosney 2006: 135).

For Kasser, the testimonies gathered were simply unreliable. According to
Krosney, Kasser wondered ‘whether a small event of minimal importance for the
local population could be remembered in such detail so many years after the fact’
(Krosney 2006: 135).35 The time gap between the discovery in the mid-1940s
and the interviews in the mid-1970s is certainly a concern in research of this
nature, and it encourages some reflection on how it is that Robinson is able to
discover so much detail in the 1970s when Jean Doresse had failed to find the
same kind of detail in the 1940s.36

The Original Story of the Find: Jean Doresse

One of the many curiosities of this story is the difference between what Jean
Doresse was able to discover in his investigations in the late 1940s, within years
of the discovery, and what James Robinson was able to discover in the mid
1970s, three decades after the discovery. Doresse found out ‘rather vague’ infor-
mation in his visits to Upper Egypt in 1947, 1948 and 1949 (Doresse 1960:
128)37 and followed this up with a fact-finding mission in January 1950 (Doresse
1950b). Doresse describes the site of the discovery in some detail (Doresse 1960:
128-33), and he captions his photograph with a note that it was at the ‘south-east
flank of the Gebel et-Tarif’, where there are ‘entrances to the tombs of the princes
of the sixth dynasty’ (Doresse 1960: ii). Doresse writes:

Was it in one of these tombs that the papyri were found? Certainly, one cannot, even
if one searches very far around, see any other place—any ruin or sepulchre—from
which they could have come. The peasants who accompanied us and who did not
know the real object of our search (we had come here on the pretext of visiting

35. Krosney suggests that there is bad blood between Kasser and Robinson. He goes on to quote
Robinson: ‘I know that Kasser hates my guts because of the article on the Jung Codex’ (2006:
136). See further Robinson 2007: 95-96 et passim.

36. See North 1962: ‘In two visits to Qaçr Sayyâd and Dabba (Hamrâ-Dûm, hamlet of the
finders), I found no townsfolk able (or willing!) to clarify the circumstances of the discovery’
(155 n. 6).

37. ‘Whence, precisely, did these documents come, and in what circumstances were they found?
… [T]he information we collected in one way and another led us to believe that they were
dug up near Hamra Dûm, in the vicinity of Naga Hamadi, some sixty-odd miles from Luxor.
They had been found buried in an earthenware pot near the site of the ancient townlet of
Chenoboskion, at the foot of the mountain called Gebel et-Tarif. The discovery had taken
place about 1945.’

316 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

the pharaonic tombs) guided us, of their own initiative, to the southern part of the
cemetery and showed us a row of shapeless cavities. Not long since, they said, some
peasants of Hamra-Dûm and of Dabba, in search of manure, found here a great zir—
which means jar—filled with leaves of papyrus; and these were bound like books. The
vase was broken and nothing remains of it; the manuscripts were taken to Cairo and
no one knows what then became of them. As to the exact location of the find, opinion
differed by some few dozen yards; but everyone was sure that it was just about here.
And from the ground itself we shall learn nothing more; it yields nothing but broken
bones, fragments of cloth without interest and some potsherds (Doresse 1960: 133).

One of the values of Doresse’s research is that he does not appear to have asked
leading questions, and he avoids the danger of contaminating the field. He writes:

Given as they were, quite spontaneously, I am sure that these testimonies related to
our library: they agreed perfectly with the details we had been able to collect through
different channels (Doresse 1960: 134).

Although much shorter and more basic, the story Doresse tells is, in fact, similar
to the one told by Robinson, but the precise, colourful details are missing: the
brothers, the jinn, burning leaves in the oven, the blood vengeance.38 Curiously,
Doresse does appear to have been aware of versions of the story more akin to
those told by Robinson, but he treats these details with scepticism:

Rumour added—as we have said—that two of these volumes had been used by the
fellahs as fuel for making their tea, and that the rest had been sold for a trifling sum to
the dealers who had taken them to Cairo (Doresse 1960: 128).39

Doresse may be right to treat the motif of the burning of valuable ancient texts as
mere rumour since it is a trope that also appears in other stories of westerners
rescuing documents from those who do not understand their value, seen in
the legends surrounding both Codex Sinaiticus40 and the Dishna Papers.41 The

38. Robinson’s comments on Doresse’s investigations are generally disparaging, but he adds,
‘What is new is not so much the story in its broad outlines as the pedantry with which it has
been tracked down, fleshed out, pinpointed and, to the extent possible, verified or rectified’
(Robinson 1981: 28).

39. See also Doresse 1950a: 69-70 and Puech 1950: 94. According to Robinson 1981: 31,
Doresse had also heard the murder story but he was sceptical about it—‘Tano reported on 20
December 1971 that the discoverer had avenged his father’s death, and Doresse has reported
that, though he had not accorded enough credence to this report to publish it, he had in fact
heard it.’

40. See Parker 2010: 128-31 for scepticism over Tischendorf’s claim to have rescued the Codex
Sinaiticus from being burnt.

41. Robinson’s story of the discovery of the Dishna Papers bears a striking resemblance to the
stories of the Nag Hammadi finds: ‘Then he pulled out the books from the jar and put them in

Goodacre 317

difficulty for the researcher is the possibility that motifs like this find their way
into the retellings of the story through hearsay, rumour and the creative
imagination.

The Ramifications

What does this strange story teach us? Is there a moral? I would like to suggest
that there are several. First, it reminds us of the importance of applying a healthy
scepticism to our work, and to ask questions even—or especially—about the
things we think we know. The appeal of the Nag Hammadi find story is con-
nected with its pedagogical appeal. We like to tell the story in the classroom42
because it has some blood, some mystery, some intrigue.43 It comes from a world
totally different from ours and features characters quite different from us. In its
orientalizing representation of illiterate, ignorant, blood-thirsty peasants, it ena-
bles academics to celebrate their literacy, civilization and wealth. It is a story of
the rescue of valuable documents from the hands of superstitious murderers who
would have thrown them all on the fire if they had not wanted to make a quick
buck.

But pedagogical usefulness is not a barometer of truth, and there are dangers
in suspending our scepticism in order to tell a good tale. Moreover, when it
comes to the Gospel of Thomas, there is an alternative discovery story that is
usually relegated to second place if it is discussed at all, namely Bernard Pyne
Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt’s unearthing of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, the
first of which, P.Oxy.1 (Grenfell and Hunt 1897) caused a minor sensation in the
1890s (Grenfell 1897). The difficulty with this story is that it features people a
little bit like us, academics with an interest in antiquity, and it has nothing like
the same classroom appeal. And yet the prioritizing of Robinson’s Nag Hammadi
story in introductions to the Gospel of Thomas functions subtly to downplay the
importance of the earlier textual evidence in Greek and so to increase the dis-
tance between the Gospel of Thomas and the Synoptics.44

the skirt of his jallabīyah. Some that were torn and in very bad condition were burned on the
spot’ (Robinson 2011: 109). I am grateful to Nicola Denzey Lewis for drawing my attention
to this.

42. The Gnostics, for example, features footage of Elaine Pagels telling the story in a 1980s
classroom at Princeton. Moreover, the key literature on the Nag Hammadi codices begins
with a version of Robinson’s tale, e.g. Meyer and Pagels 2007: 3-4.

43. Cf. Krosney 2006: 133, ‘The narrative Robinson put together was detailed. It was also
colorful, full of action and bursting with passion and deception—in short, the stuff of a
Hollywood thriller.’

44. See further Goodacre 2012: 27-29. One of the difficulties with studies on Thomas is the
‘Coptic Priority Fallacy’, which inflates the importance of the Coptic witness at the expense
of the Greek witnesses (Goodacre 2012: 29, 31, 68).

318 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

A second, related point is the reminder to be as ethical in our dealings with
secondary sources as we encourage our students to be. The multiple retellings of
Robinson’s story in the secondary literature often sail perilously close to plagia-
rism. Every scholar who tells the tale is of necessity dependent on James
Robinson. The debt is clear in passages like this one, where Werner Kelber retells
certain details of the story, his debt to Robinson clear from the tell-tale phrase
‘the ultimate act of blood revenge’, a phrase that only occurs in the literature
where authors are dependent on Robinson:45

James Robinson (1979: 209) Werner Kelber (1983: 42)

The date of the discovery of the Nag
Hammadi codices
can be established by two murders—
not altogether uncommon happenings
in the blood feuds still found in rural
Egypt! …
They fell upon Ahmad Isma’il pitilessly.
Abu ai-Majd, then a teenager, brags that
he struck the first blow straight to the
head. After having hacked Ahmad Isma’il
to pieces limb by limb, they cut out his
heart and consumed it among them—
the ultimate act of blood revenge.

The general area of the discovery is deeply rural and
virtually untouched by urban, Egyptian culture. Peasants
in this part of the world live in a preliterate society,
forever involved in blood feuds among each other and
against neighboring villages, and not averse to taking
the law into their own hands. Members of the family
who made the discovery were before and afterwards
victims of brutal murders. They were hacked to pieces
limb by limb, their hearts cut out and consumed by the
murderers—the ultimate act of blood revenge. It is now
admitted that considerable damage and losses occurred
as the manuscripts were divided up by the Islamic
natives who did not recognize their true significance …

It is easy to understand the problem. I once tried to write an introduction to the
story and I continually found myself inadvertently drifting into the all too famil-
iar words from Robinson. I used to love the Arabian Nights as a child and I
desperately wanted to talk about Muhammad ‘Ali’s fear that the jar might con-
tain ‘a jinn’,46 but that his lust for treasure overcame his fear.47 Robinson’s
accounts are the only detailed sources for the story and they are so compelling
that the temptation to something approaching plagiarism has proved irresistible

45. Kelber’s redaction of Robinson has introduced some errors into his version in a way analogous
to Matthew’s redaction of Mark and Thomas’s redaction of the Synoptics; e.g., the members
of the family who made the discovery were not just ‘victims of brutal murders’ but also
murderers themselves. See further Goodacre 2012: 47-48.

46. Although Robinson and those following him (e.g., Pagels 1979: xiii) speak about ‘a jinn’,
jinn is in fact the collective plural in Arabic. The singular is jinnī. Robinson also constructs
the erroneous plural ‘jinns’, e.g., in Robinson 1988: 23, ‘Out swirled gold-like particles that
disappeared into the sky—neither jinns nor gold but perhaps papyrus fragments!’

47. See Pinault (1992) for an exploration of the tales of the Arabian Nights. Pinault draws a
parallel between the story of the Fisherman and the Genie and Robinson’s account: ‘This
Arabian Nights reference to genii confined in bottles finds an echo in an actual twentieth
century occurrence, the 1945 discovery in Egypt of a collection of ancient Coptic Gnostic
manuscripts’ (1992: 37 n. 17).

Goodacre 319

to some.48 Given the seriousness with which plagiarism is treated in our universi-
ties, though, it is a temptation that should be avoided.

There is also some value for the study of the Nag Hammadi codices in trying
to get the story right. It is important to know whether any valuable texts were lost
in an oven in Hamra Dûm. How complete is the collection? Should we continue
to speak about ‘thirteen codices’ when it is clear that only twelve complete codi-
ces have survived?49 Is it true that massive damage was done at the site of the
discovery? Did the fellahin attempt to rip up the codices and divide them among
themselves? If there were only two present, how could this have happened? If
there were seven or eight present, could the division of the library indeed go back
to its discovery? And were the discoverers really just farmers out looking for
sabakh or were they grave-robbers who found the jar in an ancient cemetery? If
so, what might that tell us about those who buried them back in the fourth
century?50 These questions are now, of course, difficult to answer, but the uncriti-
cal acceptance of one version of the find story may run the risk of throwing us off
the scent.

Finally, the discussion of the Nag Hammadi discovery story provides some
enjoyable analogies for the exploration of Christian origins. There is a dark, oral
period for several decades during which knowledge of the find is limited, and
only Doresse can help, just as knowledge of the Jesus movement in the early
decades is limited largely to Paul. James Robinson in the 1970s, like Mark in the
70s, provides a compelling new written account that then forms the basis for
several subsequent accounts. Elaine Pagels produces so strong a new version,
embellished with legendary details, that it becomes as famous as Robinson’s,
just as Matthew writes a new version of Mark, likewise embellished with legend-
ary details. But Robinson is also like Luke, who tells the same story on different
occasions with different details, most famously the story of Paul’s conversion
(Acts 9, 22, 26). Perhaps too, the story reminds us of the caution necessary in
conducting research on early Christianity. Sometimes, admitting our ignorance is
a virtue.51

48. Some have attempted to steer clear by moving to quotation when they get to the most
compelling parts of the story, e.g., Pagels 1979: xiv; Foster 2009: 28-29.

49. The so-called thirteenth is actually one tractate tucked into Codex VI (Robinson 1988: 10;
1979: 214).

50. For a fascinating related investigation, see Denzey Lewis 2011 and Denzey Lewis and Blount
forthcoming.

51. Earlier versions of this article were presented in the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism section
of the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting, London, July 2011 and at the
Christianity in Antiquity discussion group at UNC Chapel Hill in February 2012. I am
grateful to the audiences on both occasions for helpful feedback. I also shared this research
with Nicola Denzey Lewis, and I am grateful for her helpful comments.

320 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4)

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