A Book Names Itself, in Its Own Closing Lines

Modern readers know this work as the Gospel of the Egyptians, but that title never appears inside the text itself. Its own Coptic colophon, the closing note a scribe adds at the end of a copied work, calls it The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit instead, and scholars only adopted the more familiar label as a convenient shorthand afterward. The choice matters for a second reason too: an older, different Greek text already carried the same conventional English title centuries earlier, quoted by early Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria, and it is not the same work as the one found at Nag Hammadi. The two share a label by accident of translation, not a shared origin.

The Cairo Coptic Museum's own catalog of the Nag Hammadi find records exactly where this copy sits: pages forty to sixty nine of Codex III, inventory number 4851, a fourth century papyrus book in Sahidic Coptic that also preserves the Apocryphon of John, Eugnostos the Blessed, the Wisdom of Jesus Christ and the Dialogue of the Savior in the same binding. A second, independent copy of the same work survives in Codex IV at the same museum, giving scholars two witnesses to compare against each other rather than relying on a single surviving text.