Nag Hammadi, and a Library in Translation

The find that made Sahidic known outside Coptic studies was made in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, where a jar was opened containing thirteen leather bound codices holding some fifty texts, almost all of them previously unknown and nearly all in Sahidic. They include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Truth.

Almost every one of them is a translation from Greek, so the codices preserve in Coptic a body of second and third century Christian and Gnostic literature that does not survive in its original language. Before 1945 the systems described in those texts were known chiefly from the writings of the bishops who attacked them, which is the same problem the atlas records for Canaanite religion and for a dozen other traditions. The library allowed those movements to be read in their own words for the first time.

Why the codices were buried is not known. That they were found near a Pachomian monastic settlement, and that some of the bindings were stiffened with waste papyrus including monastery documents, has produced a long argument about whether monks owned them and whether they were concealed after a ruling on which books were acceptable. The atlas records that question as open.