Category:Nag Hammadi (subject)

The Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. The twelve leather-bound papyrus codices are currently housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt.

Overview

The codices were found, buried in a sealed jar, near the Upper Egypt village of Nag Hammadi by some local farmers in 1945. The find went unreported. The intention was to make money from the manuscripts by selling them individually at intervals. In the process some of the manuscripts were dispersed or lost. Only in 1948 Coptologist and religious historian Jean Doresse published the first reference to the discovery.

While most of the manuscripts remained in Egypt and ultimately ended up at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, one manuscript, sold in Cairo to a Belgian antique dealer, was acquired by the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich in 1951. The '"Jung Codex", intended as a birthday present to the famous psychologist, was the first to be published, starting from 1956. After the death of Jung in 1961, the codex was ultimately returned to the Coptic Museum in Cairo in 1975.

The publication of the codices in facsimile was completed between 1972 and 1977, with additions in 1979 and 1984. English translations appeared in 1977 (by James Robinson) and in 1987 (by Bentley Layton). Collections of Nag Hammadi texts were then published also in German (2001) and Spanish.