The Significance of Nag Hammadi

Ancient cultures believed that God/s revealed "secrets" to certain special people according to the whatever purpose the God/s had for the revelations. The nature of many of these "secrets" was that not everyone was ready to hear them and even fewer would be able to understand them correctly. Gnostics believed they had been given a secret "gnosis", or knowledge, about many of life's Ultimate Questions. Some of this information, according to many of the most well-known Gnostic teachers, would have been very dangerous to people who might not be able to handle the truth. So, many Gnostic teachers were very deliberate about how they shared these secrets with the uninitiated.

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), the Masons or the Scientologists -- you'd be right on! Most cults follow some form of the same organizational features. Well, at least the ones that succeed share many similarities.


Orthodox Christianity, of course, shares many of these same features. Sometimes, when studying early Christianity, it becomes difficult to determine who was influencing who when it came to how what we know call the "Orthodox" church operated and how the so-called "Gnostics" operated. It is important to note here that there were as many tribes of Christianity as their were charismatic and/or well-organized Christian teachers. So, this whole conversation of "Gnostic" versus "Orthodox" is simply a convenient way to talk about them.

The question I want to answer with today post is, "Why are we hearing so much about the Gnostics now when I don't remember hearing much about them until just a few years ago?

The simple answer to this question is, "Because of a place in Egypt called 'Nag Hammadi.'"

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant named ironically "Muhammed" was digging around in the sand and discovered a clay vase. Little did Muhammed know that inside that vase, Christian monks had hidden 12 leather bound papyrus codices containing several volumes of forbidden Gnostic teachings that had been banned by the leadership the Orthodox Christian church as heresy.

So, why didn't we hear anything about this in 1945?

Well, you would have if you'd been an antiquities scholar, an archaeologist or a theologian. Due to a complex drama that unfolded related to these documents, the Nag Hammadi Library wasn't made publicly available until 1975.

The Nag Hammadi Library is now considered to be one of a handful of the most significant archaeological finds in history and is rivaled only by the Dead Sea Scrolls for Biblical scholars and theologians.

Okay, but I don't remember hearing anything in 1975 either...

The popularization of the Nag Hammadi Library began with a single scholar with a penchant for being able to place the Nag Hammadi texts into an accessible form for laypersons. You know, dummies like us! That single scholar was Professor Elaine Pagels, a Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her seminal work, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), put forth the argument that at least one of these texts, The Gospel of Thomas, deserved to be considered as one of the earliest Christian "gospels". Orthodox scholars, of course, haven't been too keen on that suggestion.

To me, the most important achievement of Pagel's work has been to help create a renewed interest in trying to understand the origins of the many modern manifestations of Christianity, including the notion that early Christians were anything but unified in their beliefs about even most fundamental questions of what it was that Yeshua bin Joseph (Jesus) actually taught to his disciples.

In the last several years, Dan Brown's novels, particularly The Davinci Code, took many of the Gnostic controversies and turned them into a first class theological thriller.

The signficance of the Nag Hammadi, then, has been enormous because it has opened up a dialog about what it means to be a Christian today and if there is room in Christianity for a point-of-view that has re-emerged as powerfully as ever after being buried for over 1,500 years.

Nag Hammadi also plays a central role for the Neo-Gnostic seeker because it is from the Gnostics that the Neo-Gnostic has been granted permission to work out their own salvation without fear or trembling!