St mark coptic orthodox church harrisburg pa

Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices

nicola denzey lewis ndenzey@brown.edu

Brown University, Providence, RI 02912

justine ariel blount justineariel@icloud.com

1383 Pacific Street, Brooklyn, NY 11216

The famous find-story behind the Nag Hammadi codices, discovered in Egypt in 1945, has been one of the most cherished narratives in our field. Yet a close examination of its details reveals inconsistencies, ambiguities, implicitly colo- nialist attitudes, and assumptions that call for a thorough reevaluation. This article explores the problematic moments in the find-story narrative and chal- lenges the suggestions of James M. Robinson and others that the Nag Hammadi codices were intentionally buried for posterity, perhaps by Pachomian monks, in the wake of Athanasius’s thirty-ninth Festal Letter. We consider, rather, that the Nag Hammadi codices may have derived from private Greco-Egyptian citizens in late antiquity who commissioned the texts for personal use, depositing them as grave goods following a practice well attested in Egypt.

The Nag Hammadi codices, discovered in 1945, have perhaps the most com- pelling find-story of any ancient Egyptian book cache. When Mohamed Ali al- Samman, both the hero and the antihero of this story, discovers that his brother has found a jar while digging for fertilizer, he immediately takes control of the operation. Taking the jar into his hands, the moment is tense. Should he open it? He is a cautious, superstitious man, clearly pious and afraid of jinni; yet he also loves gold, and as in those old Arabian nights tales, his curiosity gets the better of him and he smashes the jar, only to find—is it gold?!—pieces of golden papyrus, flying through the air. Little does Mohamed Ali know, when he takes them home and tosses them into the little barn attached to his mother’s home, that he has discov- ered thirteen books of more than fifty “lost Gospels” representing a Gnostic library

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of heretical documents, carefully secreted away in the increasingly theologically oppressive atmosphere of late-fourth-century Egypt.1

But what if this famous story, which has become the canonical genesis for scholars of Gnosticism, is merely a fiction? Even the earliest and most direct versions of the story reveal unsettling inconsistencies. Elements are unstable, and the key witness, Mohamed Ali, himself recants and changes his account.2 While we may speculate on the reasons for these inconsistencies, it becomes difficult to believe Mohamed Ali at all, not to mention the orientalizing fantasy of his encounter with a papyrus-filled jar somewhere in the geese-grazing territories of Chenoboskion. Indeed, two prominent Coptologists, Rodolphe Kasser and Martin Krause, long ago went on record to distance themselves from the “official”—that is, much pub- licized and disseminated—find-story.3

We begin by reexamining different accounts of the find-story, noting the cen- tral instability of its narrative. We take this starting point because it matters whether this story is true: from it, scholars of Gnosticism have built up fifty years of work based on the assumption that back in the late fourth century, the codices were secreted away together in a jar in order to preserve them for “posterity.” We argue here that this was unlikely to have been the intention of those who buried the codices. Rather than parts of a Pachomian library that had been intentionally hid- den by monks to avoid persecution by the emerging Alexandrian orthodoxy, we suggest that the Nag Hammadi codices could just as plausibly have been private productions commissioned by late ancient Egyptian Christians with antiquarian interests. The books were later deposited in graves, following a late antique modi- fication of a custom known in Egypt for hundreds of years. Furthermore, we

1 The details here come from Marvin Meyer’s version of the story, which he credits to James M. Robinson in a chapter called “Fertilizer, Blood Vengeance, and Codices” in his book The Gnostic Discoveries: The Impact of the Nag Hammadi Library (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 13–32.

2 See James M. Robinson, “The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” BA 42 (1979): 208–13.

3 The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, vol. 1, Introduction (Published under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt. In conjuction with the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization; Leiden: Brill, 1972), 3 n. 1 offers a lengthy disclaimer: “Kasser and Krause and others who were involved do not consider as assured anything more than the core of the story (the general location and approximate date of the discovery), the rest not having for them more than the value of stories and fables that one can collect in popular Egyptian circles thirty years after an event whose exceptional significance the protagonists could not at the time understand. R.K. and M.K.” An English publication that also casts suspicions on the find-story is C. Wilfred Griggs, Early Egyptian Christianity: From Its Origins to 451 c.e. (Brill Scholars’ List; Leiden: Brill, 2000), 217: “The doubts and concerns expressed by this author are similar to those held by Rodolphe Kasser and Martin Krause.” Very recently, the veracity of the find-story has also been raised by Mark Goodacre, “How Reliable Is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” JSNT 35 (2013): 303–22. We thank Mark Goodacre for making this article available prior to its publication, and for our discussions on the topic.

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contend that their eventual placement in graves may not have been coincidental; the arrangement of certain volumes reflects eschatological as well as antiquarian interests, meaning that at least some volumes may have been intentionally crafted as funerary deposits, Christian “Books of the Dead” that only made sense in the context of late antique Egypt.

I. Find-Stories and Suspicions

A full thirty years after the initial appearance of the Nag Hammadi codices on the Cairo antiquities market, James M. Robinson traveled to Egypt to survey the area and to see if he might track down the person who initially made the discovery.4 Robinson’s efforts yielded a vastly entertaining account of the codices’ discovery and brief sojourn in a “modern” Upper Egyptian village; riveting details included the burning of an unspecified number of papyrus leaves by Mohamed Ali’s mother (horrors! how could they not have known their value?) and his family’s acts of murder and cannibalism. In this modern, Western recounting of 1940s fellaheen life, we have not come far from W. Robertson Smith’s 1889 Religion of the Semites (where the “birth” of Judaism comes from a primordial act of sacrifice and collec- tive consumption of a tribe’s totem animal in the desert),5 a text much beloved by Freud, who transmuted Smith’s postulated sacrifice and consumption of the totem animal into a communal act of parricide in his Totem and Taboo (1913).6 Like Smith’s account of primordial religion and Freud’s revisioning of it with an Oedipal cast, the Nag Hammadi find-story is one more appropriate for fantastic literature, with parts surely lost in translation, other parts surely fabricated.7

4 Robinson, head of the UNESCO-funded project to generate critical editions and trans- lations of the Nag Hammadi codices, published numerous accounts of the find-story: see James M. Robinson, “From the Cliff to Cairo: The Study of the Discoverers and Middlemen of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” in Colloque international sur les textes de Nag Hammadi (Québec, 22–25 août 1978) (ed. Bernard Barc; Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi, “Etudes” 1; Québec: Les presses de l’Université Laval, 1981), 21–58; idem, “The Coptic Gnostic Library Today,” NTS 14 (1968): 356–401; and idem, “Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” 206–24.

5 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: First Series, Fundamental Institutions (London: A. & C. Black, 1889); 2nd ed. [posthumous], edited by J. S. Black (1894), repr., New York: Meridian, 1956; 3rd ed., introduced by S. A. Cook (1927); later edition with introduction by James Muilenburg (New York: Ktav 1969).

6 Freud, Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker (Leipzig: H. Heller, 1913); published in English as Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (trans. James Strachey; New York: Norton, 1952).

7 The sole scholar to have manifestly criticized the overtly colonialist and orientalizing aspects of the Nag Hammadi find-story is Maia Kotrosits, “Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi,” Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012): 39–52.

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When we press at its contours, this famous and oft-recounted find-story of the Nag Hammadi codices becomes vexing because of its revisionist nature. It turns out, to begin with, to have been rather late in coming; the very first account of the codices’ discovery came from the French scholar Jean Doresse, who, five years after the appearance of the codices in Cairo, traveled to the hamlet of Hamra Dum, close to Nag Hammadi and the actual location of the codices’ provenance.8 Local villag- ers directed him to the southern part of an ancient cemetery at Qasr es-Sayyad. It was there, in the cemetery, that some had found the codices, secreted in a jar. Doresse writes,

Was it in one of these tombs that the papyri were found? Certainly, one cannot, even if one searches very far around, see any other place—any ruin or sepulcher —from which they could have come. The peasants who accompanied us … showed us a row of shapeless cavities. Not long since, they said, some peasants of Hamra-Dûm and of Dabba, in search of manure, found here a great zir—which means jar—filled with leaves of papyrus; and these were bound like books. The vase was broken and nothing remains of it; the manuscripts were taken to Cairo and no one knows what then became of them. As to the exact location of the find, opinion differed by some few dozen yards, but everyone was sure that it was just about here. And from the ground itself we shall learn nothing more; it yields nothing but broken bones, fragments of cloth without interest and some potsherds.9

When Robinson returned to Hamra Dum twenty-five years later to pick up the trail, his persistence yielded more satisfying results. He came up with names and a more specific (and in fact, quite different) find-spot: Mohamed Ali al-Samman was out that day in December of 1945 on the Gebel al-Tarif, looking for sabakh, a natural fertilizer. He dug, according to Robinson, along a talus—a slope of debris along the cliff face and just beyond the area of Nile cultivation. There he found the jar. So let us start here with this puzzling detail. If the jar were embedded in alluvial soil at the base of a cliff, it is highly unlikely that a papyrus codex would have survived for sixteen centuries of Nile inundations and shifting soil at the base of the cliffs. And yet, if the jar had actually been found up higher, inside a cave along the Gebel al- Tarif, this is hardly the place to dig for sabakh. In fact, it is even debatable whether the base of the Gebel al-Tarif would have produced this sabakh, as the areas of cultivation around the Nile end abruptly and turn very quickly to desert, where nothing exists but sand. Whatever Mohamed Ali was doing that day, it is safe to say

8 Doresse visited Upper Egypt three times in the lead-up to his 1950 investigations—in 1947, 1948, and 1949. See Jean Doresse, “Sur les traces des papyrus gnostiques: Recherches à Cheno- boskion,” Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, 5th series 36 (1950): 432–39.

9 Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics: An Introduction to the Gnostic Coptic Manuscripts Discovered at Chenoboskion (trans. Philip Mairet; New York: Viking, 1960), 133.

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that he was not digging for fertilizer. It is entirely reasonable to suspect that he was searching for illegal antiquities: tomb robbing. The jar—one of the only details on which Doresse and Robinson agree—is equally mysterious; as the NT scholar Mark Goodacre noted recently, it grows in size from 20 cm to 3–4 ft in height, depending on who is telling the story.10 At any rate, the jar no longer exists.11

A quick cross-referencing of various versions of the story reveals many such shifting details. In one account, a “party” of sabakh gatherers find the jar at the foot of a cliff sheltered by a large boulder.12 The number in this party appears to change; sometimes it is Mohamed Ali and his brother Khalifah Ali and/or another brother Abu al-Magid;13 sometimes Mohamed Ali is alone;14 sometimes more are present.15 Sometimes Mohamed Ali finds the jar; sometimes it is Abu al-Magid. Bart Ehrman retains the detail that Abu al-Magid (unnamed in his account) digs and finds a skeleton first, then a “large earthenware jar”;16 curiously, most modern versions of the story omit the detail of the corpse found alongside.17 However, if we are search- ing for a “smoking gun” to prove that the Nag Hammadi codices were deposited

10 Goodacre, “How Reliable Is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” 305–6. According to Robinson (“Discovery,” 214), the jar was 60 cm tall, with an opening of some 20 cm. He includes Ali’s discovery of the jar on p. 212.

11 Robinson reports that, although the jar was smashed, Mohamed Ali’s brother, Khalifah Ali, kept the small bowl that he says sealed the mouth of the jar, affixed with bitumen (Robinson, “Discovery,” 218). A photograph of it remains in Claremont’s archives. It is a fairly standard piece of fourth- or fifth-century pottery of the sort that litters the Thebaid, fully intact, and we remain skeptical that the artifact in Khalifah’s possession once sealed the jar.

12 J. W. B. Barns, G. M. Browne, and J. C. Shelton, eds., Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and Coptic Papyri from the Cartonnage of the Covers (Coptic Gnostic Library; NHS 16; Leiden: Brill, 1981), 1.

13 Mohamed Ali and one brother: James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 21.

14 See, for instance, the Border Television documentary produced in 1987 entitled The Gnostics, in which Gilles Quispel interviews Mohamed Ali, who reports that he was all alone when he found the jar, later returning alone to break it open, and finally returning with six others. “So I took it to the ministry over here and he told me, well we really don’t need it.” The antecedent of “it” is unclear. The Gnostics was written by Tobias Churton and produced and directed by Stephen Segaller. It was aired on UK’s Channel 4 in November 1987. For a “transcript” of the interview (which, strangely, varies from the videotape version), see Tobias Churton, The Gnostics (New York: Barns & Noble, 1999), 9.

15 Bart Ehrman (Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 52) says that seven people were present, following Robinson (“Discovery,” 213), which lists three brothers and four camel drivers. The Facsimile Edition (p. 5) lists eight camel drivers. Robinson (“From the Cliff to Cairo,” 37) mentions that ten people were present (three brothers and seven camel drivers).

16 Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 52. 17 The skeleton is mentioned in Barns et al., Nag Hammadi Codices, 2, where it is dismissed

as “modern.”

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with a burial, here indeed is one, with Mohamed Ali’s insistence that the jar was next to a corpse with oddly elongated fingers and teeth.18

The “afterlife” story of the codices’ discovery, trapped as they were in a sort of fugue state that was neither the protective dry soils of Egypt nor a proper museum conservatorship, points to a Western collector’s mentality that perdured in the field of Egyptian archaeology. The reported incident of Mohamed Ali’s mother tossing some of the ancient papyrus folios into the fire proved to Western minds that peasants—native Egyptians—could not be trusted with their own antiquities; only enlightened Europeans knew their true value. The story has a remarkable parallel in Constantin von Tischendorf ’s “rescuing” of the Codex Sinaiticus from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai in 1845. Tischendorf reports that the monks charged with caring for the precious manuscript tossed papyri leaves into the fire for warmth.19 The message was clear: native Egyptians could not be trusted to care for their own antiquities, which required “rescuing” by scholars and collectors in the West. A similar colonialist meme emerges in the story circulated at the end of the nineteenth century concerning the Cureton manuscript, a fifth-century biblical manuscript discovered by Western travelers in a monastery in Nitria: apparently William Cureton found ancient papyrus folios being used as coverings for the monk’s butter jars.20 Concerning the Scottish explorer Agnes Lewis’s 1892 discov- ery of a precious Syriac NT manuscript at St. Catherine’s in Sinai, the rumor also emerged that it was (mis)used to cover butter dishes at the monastery, although Lewis herself notes that in fact the manuscript there was safely under lock and key.21

But let us return to the Nag Hammadi find-story. Its details—particularly salacious moments such as the blood vengeance scene and the ostensible tossing of the codices into the fire—dissemble; they deflect our attention from key ques- tions: What were these texts doing together? Who could have put them there? What was the relationship of the books to the corpse lying nearby?22 Egypt has a rich

18 Robinson, “Discovery,” 213. Robinson writes that Mohamed Ali’s brother denied the existence of a corpse, which makes some sense: Mohamed Ali’s insistence that the jar and corpse were found together on what looked like a “bed of charcoal” certainly looks like grave robbing. Either the assemblage had been sitting out in the open at the base of a cliff when the brothers found it, or they were exploring a burial cave. They could not have dug down to the level of a jar buried in rubble and also noted what material it (and the skeleton) were sitting on unless they carried out some fairly sophisticated archaeological investigation to reach the ground level of the jar.

19 David C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible (London: British Library, 2010), 128–31.

20 “The Current,” 1, no. 1 (Dec. 22, 1883): 348. 21 Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo

Geniza (New York: Schocken, 2011), 5. 22 The corpse is a troubling detail, since tomb robbing has always been a serious problem in

Egypt; see Pascal Vernus, Affairs and Scandals in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). In addition, the likelihood of the body being identified as Christian would have

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history of books and corpses found together, and indeed all our other so-called Gnostic manuscripts—the Berlin Codex, the Askew Codex, and the Codex Tchacos —came from, or most probably came from, burial sites. Yet, for the Nag Hammadi codices, it is asserted that they were hidden for posterity by Pachomian monks, the result of Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367.23 This story is repeated again and again, as if it were not scholarly conjecture but rather a “believed” fact of early Christian history: as if it were hand in hand with the Donatist controversy, for instance, with letters, trials, and creeds to go alongside it. There are no letters or trials for our “controversy,” and so we must rely on what we can safely piece together from Pacho- mian monastic resources. The role of these monks and the presumed monastic Sitz im Leben for these texts deserve more attention.

II. The Nag Hammadi Codices and Monasticism: Rethinking the Links

Jean Doresse’s initial suggestion that what had been discovered near Nag Hammadi was a secret library of Egyptian Sethian Gnostics was fairly quickly aban- doned. Torgny Säve-Söderbergh suggested an intriguing alternative: perhaps the Nag Hammadi “library” constituted a heresiological compilation of primary “Gnostic” sources from which heresiologists could draw their ammunition.24 By

caused additional problems in the environs of Nag Hammadi, where tensions between Copts and Muslims historically run high.

23 See Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library in English, 19; idem, in Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 12:20; Meyer, Gnostic Discoveries, 30; Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 120–21; Charles Hedrick, “Gnostic Proclivities in the Greek Life of Pachomius and the Sitz im Leben of the Nag Hammadi Library,” NovT 22 (1980): 93. The notion of the texts buried “for posterity” trickles down into popular literature: see, e.g., Lewis Keizer, The Kabbalistic Words of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas (Kindle Book; Amazon Digital Services, 2009), 17; Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xi (Kripal also mentions the detail of the skeleton: “was the skeleton a monk?”); Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., This Tragic Gospel: How John Corrupted the Heart of Christianity (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2008), 132: Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much about the Bible: Everything You Need To Know about the Good Book But Never Learned (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), 344.

24 Torgny Säve-Söderbergh, “Gnostic and Canonical Gospel Traditions (with Special Refer- ence to the Gospel of Thomas),” in Le origini dello gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina 13–18 Aprile 1966. Testi e discussioni (ed. Ugo Bianchi; SHR 12; Leiden: Brill, 1970), 552–53; and, more developed, idem, “Holy Scriptures or Apologetic Documentations? The Sitz im Leben of the Nag Hammadi Library,” in Les Textes de Nag Hammadi: Colloque du Centre d’histoire des religions, Strasbourg, 23–25 octobre 1974 (ed. Jacques-É. Ménard; NHS 7; Leiden: Brill, 1975), 9–17. Here Säve-Söderbergh argues persuasively that Pachomians had no reason to house the Nag Hammadi documents based on what we know about Pachomian attitudes toward heresy; therefore, if in fact Pachomians kept them, they must have been kept out of circulation and thus “to study them in

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far the most popular theory, however, is that the codices found their home in a monastic setting, perhaps that of Pachomian monks whose sense of the orthodox/ heretical divide may have been less well entrenched than elsewhere in Egypt or than it came to be after the middle of the fourth century.25 The Pachomian theory emerges as early as Robinson’s 1975 Preliminary Report on the excavation, which in fact establishes it as self-evident truth:

... since it is hardly conceivable that there would have been more than one ortho- dox monastic organization simultaneously operating in the same place, we should be justified in concluding, even without further evidence, that the Nag Hammadi material came from a Pachomian monastery.26

The arguments for the Nag Hammadi codices having been housed in, if not created by and for, a Pachomian monastery are founded on two main circumstantial facts. The first is simply physical proximity of the find-spot to known Pachomian centers: Pabau was 8 km away; Tabennesi, 12 km; and Chenoboskion, 9 km.27 At the same time, the physical environs of Hamra Dum and El Bousa and the tomb caves of the Gebel al-Tarif are better suited to the life of anchorites than coenobites.28 They are also far closer; the grave site of the Sixth Dynasty Pharaoh Thauti is a mere 750 m

order to be able to refute them” (p. 12). If, however, the purpose of the Nag Hammadi codices were to serve as a compendium of heretical works, their arrangement in codices—including duplications of individual writings and organization across established sectarian lines—makes little sense; see Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 247.

25 See, notably, F. Wisse, “The Nag Hammadi Library and the Heresiologists,” VC 25 (1971): 220–21; see also his “Language Mysticism in the Nag Hammadi Texts and in Early Coptic Monasticism, I: Cryptography,” Enchoria 9 (1979): 101–19. Compare James E. Goehring, “New Frontiers in Pachomian Studies,” in idem, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (SAC; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1999), 185–86; and idem, “Some Reflections on the Nag Hammadi Codices and the Study of Early Egyptian Monasticism,” Meddelanden fran Collegium Patristicum Lundense 25 (2011): 61–70. In a later article, Wisse appears to reverse his view somewhat, claiming that the books were in the hands of a variety of individuals: F. Wisse, “Gnosticism and Early Monasticism in Egypt,” in Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas (ed. Barbara Aland; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 438. A different, “closed stacks” theory is that the texts came from a Pachomian monastery where they were gathered for posterity but kept away from the monks; see Clemens Scholten, “Die Nag- Hammadi-Texte als Buchbesitz,” JAC 31 (1988): 145–49.

26 Robinson, Preliminary Report on the Excavation, 12–13 (emphasis added). See further Goehring, who, while admitting that the evidence for the Pachomian provenance of the Nag Hammadi codices is “purely circumstantial,” nevertheless feels that the amount of evidence is mounting (Ascetics, Society, and the Desert, 180). For more on the excavation, see Bastiaan Van Elderen, “The Nag Hammadi Excavation,” BA 42 (1979): 225–31.

27 So W. C. van Unnik, Evangelien aus dem Nilsand (Frankfurt: Scheffler, 1960); Robinson’s estimations in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (p. 21) are slightly different (Pbow, 5.3 km and Chenoboskion, 8.7 km).

28 So Hedrick, “Gnostic Proclivities,” 78.

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from the jar’s ostensible find-spot29 and the tombs of two more Sixth Dynasty pharaohs, Pepi I and II (2332–2184 b.c.e.) perched just above the talus where the jar was ostensibly uncovered.30 Indeed, anchorites came to inhabit these burial caves, which were still decorated with painted red crosses and inscribed lines from the psalms in Coptic.31 They prayed in them; they also were buried in them.

The second piece of circumstantial evidence for a Pachomian provenance is the cartonnage of the codices. The first to have made this claim, papyrologist John W. B. Barns, died suddenly before all the cartonnage was fully analyzed. The team of papyrologists assigned to complete the task concluded, against Barns, that they could not think of a satisfactory single source for the wide range of documents contained in the cartonnage other than a “town rubbish heap.”32 The conclusion of the team was unequivocal: there is no evidence that the codices were created in a Pachomian monastery.33 Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the connections between the Nag Hammadi codices and Pachomian monasticism are still virtually assumed by a wide range of scholars, no doubt because of the surety with which an early generation of Nag Hammadi scholars asserted them in the first place.

III. The Curious Case of the Dishna Papers

The Nag Hammadi codices were not the only set of late antique Egyptian writ- ings discovered in Upper Egypt. The Dishna papers, also known as the Bodmer papyri after their purchase by the Swiss banker Martin Bodmer, appear to have been found in 1952 (seven years after the Nag Hammadi discovery) in the Thebaid 7.5 miles from Nag Hammadi and a mere 5 km from the major Pachomian site of Pbow.34 Now dispersed from Barcelona to Oslo with a substantial number in

29 Facsimile Edition, 15:5; see also Robinson, “Discovery,” 212. 30 Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library in English, 21. 31 Ibid., 22. 32 Barns et al., Nag Hammadi Codices, 11. 33 Ibid., 2. See also Ewa Wipszycka, “The Nag Hammadi Library and the Monks: A

Papyrologist’s Point of View,” JJP 30 (2000): 179–91, who similarly demolishes the Pachomian provenance theory. More agnostic is Goehring in his unpublished paper “Some Reflections on the Nag Hammadi Codices and the Study of Early Egyptian Monasticism”; he maintains the same cautious refusal to reject the Pachomian theory in virtually all his publications. See Goehring, “The Provenance of the Nag Hammadi Codices Once More,” in Ascetica, Gnostica, Liturgica, Orientalia: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 1999 (ed. M. F. Miles and E. J. Yarnold; StPatr 35; Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 234–53; and idem, “Monastic Diversity and Ideological Boundaries in Fourth-Century Christian Egypt,” JECS 5 (1997): 61–84.

34 The original circumstances of the find are hazy, since the seller of the hoard did not want to reveal his sources; thus, indeed, the story of the provenance of the Dishna papers seems to us to be as potentially suspicious as that of the Nag Hammadi codices. At any rate, they are curiously

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Dublin at the Chester Beatty library, the original cache consisted of nine Greek papyrus rolls, twenty-two papyrus codices, and seven parchment documents, dat- ing from approximately 100 to 699 c.e. The languages of the hoard show that its audience was multilingual, moving not just between Greek and Coptic but also between Greek and Latin. All told, we have in the Dishna papers an astonishing range of materials: nine classical texts, including parts of Homer plus its scholia, Menander, Achilles Tatius, Thucydides, and Cicero,35 twelve papyri with writings from the Hebrew Bible; six with writings from the NT; three that include both. We also find a few apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts, plus a great deal of liturgi- cal and homiletic material.

Robinson, fascinated with the points of contact between the Nag Hammadi codices and the Dishna papers—both were found in jars in the same vicinity— hypothesized that the Dishna papers were buried for safekeeping following the imposition of Chalcedonian orthodoxy.36 In effect, the case of the Dishna papers appeared to raise the likelihood that Pachomian monks, around 387 c.e., had engaged in a dramatic purge of their libraries, at the same time ridding themselves of their clearly heretical Nag Hammadi books.

And yet we should not make the mistake of assuming that the two book caches had the same audiences or were deposited for the same reason. Regardless of whether the Dishna papers were from the first Pachomian library at Pbow, they are far different from the Nag Hammadi codices in content. For example, the Sahidic Coptic Crosby-Shøyen Codex (ca. 250 c.e.) consists of fifty-two leaves written in a large bold Coptic uncial and contains three biblical texts (Jonah, 2 Macc 5:27–7:41, 1 Peter) plus two other texts for liturgical use: Melito of Sardis’s Peri Pascha and an unidentified paschal sermon.37 Another codex, now disassembled and scattered to various modern libraries, once contained the Nativity of Mary, apocryphal corre- spondence between Paul and the Corinthians, the eleventh Ode of Solomon, Jude, Melito’s Homily on the Passion, a fragment of a liturgical hymn, the Apology of Phileas, Pss 33:2–34:16 from the LXX, and 1–2 Peter.38 The Dishna papers and the

parallel. Furthermore, both accounts trace back to the research of Robinson. On the Dishna find, see James M. Robinson, The Pachomian Monastic Library at the Chester Beatty Library and the Bibliothèque Bodmer (Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Occasional Papers 19; Claremont, CA: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, 1990).

35 On Dishna’s classical sources, see Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 173; Juan Gil, Hadrianvs: P. Monts. Roca III, 29 (Orientalia Montserratensia; Montserrat: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat y CSIC, 2010).

36 Robinson, Pachomian Monastic Library, 28. 37 R. Pintaudi, “Proprietà imperiali e tasse in un papiro della Collezione Schoyen,” ZPE 130

(2000): 197–200; James E. Goehring, The Crosby-Schøyen Codex MS 193 in the Schøyen Collection (CSCO 521, Subsidia 85; Louvain: Peeters, 1990).

38 Tommy Wasserman, “Papyrus 72 and the Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex,” NTS 51 (2005): 140.

Lewis and Blount: The Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices 409

Nag Hammadi codices share no common texts. We will return presently to the significance of this point.

The assignation of a Pachomian provenance to the Nag Hammadi collection lies in part with its similarity to the Dishna papers. Yet this argument is largely circumstantial, based on (1) the physical proximity of the Dishna papers to the Nag Hammadi codices, on the one hand, and of both to Pbow, on the other; and (2) the circumstances of their deposition.39 Papyrologists have argued, however, that the Dishna papers were apparently hidden in a jar during the Arabic conquest—long after Athanasius’s Festal Letter. But we can also note some significant differences in the contents of the two collections. There are no overlaps across the collections; thus even the canons of apocryphal or pseudepigraphic writings on which the two sets of scribes drew appear to have been significantly different, with the Dishna collection being much closer to what we might tentatively call a “standard” list of apocrypha set apart from canonical writings but nevertheless in wide circulation. To put this differently, there are among the Dishna papers no so-called Gnostic writings. This is indeed remarkable, if one considers that a few of the Nag Hammadi writings do in fact appear in other ancient codices. The Apocryphon of John, in dif- ferent recensions, can be found in Codices II, III, and IV but is also in the Berlin Codex (BG 8502). The Sophia of Jesus Christ is in the Berlin Codex as well as in Codex III; we also have this text in a complete Greek copy from Oxyrhynchus, P.Oxy. 8.1081.40 The Gospel of Thomas of Codex II also appears in Greek fragments discovered at Oxyrhynchus. If, then, the Dishna hoard is a highly eclectic collection from a Pachomian library, the fact that it shares not a single tractate with the Nag Hammadi is curious. Conversely, the Nag Hammadi codices contain not a single fragment of Scripture or any monastic correspondence. In short, while the two collections appear to have shared a general provenance (and this is speculative rather than factual), this is all that the two collections share, and this ultimately reveals little about whether the Nag Hammadi library was truly Pachomian.

It should be said, finally, that not all scholars accept the Pachomian prove- nance of the Dishna papers. The case against it includes the high number of docu- mentary and school texts preserved, including exercises in grammar, lexicography, and mathematics in three different languages including several dialects of Coptic.41 There is also a Greek–Latin lexicon for deciphering Paul’s letters.42 Raffaella Cribiore argues that the collection derived from a “Christian school of advanced learning,”43