The Nag Hammadi Story

James M. Robinson's The Nag Hammadi Story, published by Brill in 2014, is the definitive scholarly account of the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in Egypt and the decades long, often fraught process by which the Gnostic texts they contained reached publication, written by the scholar who personally led the international committee that oversaw the codices' translation. Its strength is Robinson's own direct involvement, giving the account firsthand knowledge of the antiquities market dealings, academic disputes and delays that shaped when and how the world actually saw these texts, detail no outside historian could reconstruct as completely. Its limit is exactly that closeness, Robinson was an active participant in the events and disputes he narrates, including disagreements with other scholars over access and credit, so a claim resting on a contested point of the story's own telling benefits from checking it against other participants' independent accounts of the same events.