The Nag Hammadi Discovery
How the Gospel of Thomas was found: the sealed jar unearthed near Nag Hammadi in December 1945, the thirteen codices inside it, and the decades it took to reach print.
In December 1945, near the village of al-Qasr by the Jabal al-Tarif cliffs in Upper Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for sabakh, the soft nitrate-rich earth used as fertiliser. Under a boulder he struck a sealed earthenware jar roughly a metre tall. He hesitated — jars like that were said to hold jinn — and then broke it open in the hope of gold.
Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. They had been buried, most historians think, some time in the second half of the fourth century.
What survived and what did not
The books went home with him and part of at least one codex was burned as kindling. The rest passed through local dealers and eventually into the hands of the Coptic Museum in Cairo, though not before Codex I was smuggled out of Egypt and bought in 1952 by the Jung Institute in Zurich — which is why it is still known as the Jung Codex.
What survives is a library of fifty-two tractates in Coptic, most of them translations from Greek originals, and most previously known only as titles quoted by hostile church writers. The Gospel of Thomas is the second tractate in Codex II, sitting between the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Philip.
The fragments that were already known
The Gospel of Thomas had in fact been in European hands for half a century before anyone recognised it. Between 1897 and 1904, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, an ancient Egyptian town roughly 160 kilometres south of Cairo, and recovered three Greek papyrus fragments containing sayings of Jesus. Published as P.Oxy. 1, 654 and 655, they were dated to around 200 CE and catalogued simply as “sayings of Jesus” — nobody could say what work they came from.
When the Coptic text of Thomas was finally read, the fragments matched. They correspond to the prologue and sayings 1–7, 24, 26–33, 36–39 and 77. This gave the text something rare among Nag Hammadi works: two independent witnesses, in two languages, roughly a century and a half apart. The Greek is frequently longer than the Coptic — saying 36 is the clearest case — which tells us the text was still being edited between the two copies.
Why it took so long to publish
Access to the codices was tightly controlled through the 1950s and 1960s, complicated by Egyptian politics, the Suez crisis and academic territorialism. A complete critical edition of the Gospel of Thomas appeared in 1959, and its first English translation was published shortly after. The full Nag Hammadi library did not appear in English until 1977, when James M. Robinson’s edition finally put every tractate in front of the general reader — more than thirty years after Muhammad Ali broke the jar.
Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels followed in 1979 and turned a specialist find into a public one. Everything written about Thomas for a general audience since then stands on those two publications.
Why the books were buried
The likeliest explanation is defensive. In 367 CE Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, issued his thirty-ninth Festal Letter, listing the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as canonical and instructing that other writings be rejected. The great Pachomian monastery at Chenoboskion stood only a few kilometres from where the jar was found. A monk or a group of monks, unwilling to destroy books they valued, may well have hidden them in the cliffs instead — an act of preservation that worked rather better than they can have expected.