The Sealed Jar That Rewrote Early Christianity

In December 1945, two brothers from the al-Samman clan were digging for sebakh, a natural fertiliser, at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif cliff on the right bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt. The older brother, Muhammed Ali, struck a large red-clay jar buried in the talus. He hesitated — he worried a jinn might be sealed inside — then decided gold was more likely, took a mattock, and broke it open.

There was no gold. There were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices, paleographically dated to the 3rd and 4th centuries. Muhammed wrapped them in his tunic and carried them home. His mother used part of one to start the kitchen fire while he tried to find a buyer.

What survived was 52 separate works — almost all in Coptic, translated from older Greek — including the Gospel of Thomas (a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, some matching the canonical gospels and some not), the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, and the Apocryphon of John. Many had been known by name through hostile quotations in early church writers like Irenaeus and Epiphanius, who had spent careers refuting them. None had been read in the original since at least the fourth century.

That timing is part of the story. In 367 A.D., Athanasius of Alexandria circulated a Festal Letter listing the 27 books that were to be considered authoritatively Christian — the New Testament canon as we have it now — and instructing monasteries to discard everything else. The leading theory is that monks at the nearby Pachomian monastery of Faw Qibli put the books they were no longer allowed to keep into a jar and buried them rather than burn them.

The codices now sit in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. They cost the field of early Christian studies about a generation to digest.