Two Egyptian Brothers Found 13 Gnostic Books in a Jar in 1945
They were digging for fertilizer near a cliff. The jar held texts the early church had spent centuries trying to erase.
In December 1945, Muhammad Ali al-Samman and his brother were collecting sabakh, a soft nitrate-rich earth used as crop fertilizer, at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif cliff in Upper Egypt. Their mattock struck a meter-tall sealed jar. Muhammad Ali later told the scholar James Robinson that he hesitated to break it — he feared a jinn — but the chance of gold won out.
Inside were 13 leather-bound papyrus codices, the oldest dating from the third or fourth century. The brothers carried them home in a turban. Their mother used some of the loose papyrus to start a fire. The remaining texts moved through Cairo's antiquities market over the next decade and a half, with one codex slipping out to Belgium and being bought back by C. G. Jung's foundation in Zurich.
What survived contained 52 separate works, mostly in Coptic translation from earlier Greek originals. Among them: the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, with no narrative; the Gospel of Philip, with its remark about Mary Magdalene as Jesus's companion; the Apocryphon of John, with its elaborate cosmology of a demiurge mistaking himself for the high god.
Until the find, almost everything known about Gnostic Christianity came from its enemies — Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius — quoting Gnostic teachings only to refute them. Nag Hammadi gave scholars the texts in their own voice. Elaine Pagels and others have used them to argue that the diversity of early Christianity was wider, and the path to orthodoxy more contingent, than the canonical New Testament suggests. The story of how Christianity became Christianity has not looked the same since.
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