The hunt for Christianity’s bogeyman
For decades, the Gnostic Gospels were widely believed to have been a library of ancient texts hidden away to protect their secrets. But what if the evidence for that is thinner than the papyrus the books were written on?
Welcome back to Stones & Bones, National Geographic’s paleontology and archaeology newsletter! I’m Candida Moss, a historian, author, and Nat Geo contributor. I’ll be your correspondent for all things archaeology.
For almost two millennia, Christianity had the perfect foil: a group of heretics known as the Gnostics. A secretive group accused not only of heresy but also of wife-swapping, cannibalism, and profane Eucharists in which they consumed bodily fluids, they appear in the writings of early church heresy hunters like Irenaeus and Epiphanius. In fact, until the 20th century, the Gnostics had been known only through the polemical writings of their orthodox opponents, who had denounced them as the intellectually and socially deviant archenemies of truth. If you’re reading this and wondering to yourself, "This is obvious slander—who were the Gnostics actually?" you’re not alone.
The answer came in 1945 when an Arab farmer digging for fertilizer at the base of a cliff near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt unearthed a cache of ancient books written in Coptic. For the first time, the world could know the Gnostics on their own terms. The story went that the Nag Hammadi Library had been hidden in the fourth century by Gnostic-leaning monks who feared persecution at the hands of powerful orthodox Christians.
By the time the library had been reassembled, deciphered, and translated, American society in the 1970s was in the throes of a cultural revolution that was eager to embrace antiestablishment underdogs. The story of the Nag Hammadi texts generated several bestsellers, animated the religious wing of the feminist movement, and provided ancient support for mainstream psychiatry, the New Age movement, and self-help literature. To social revolutionaries, the Gnostics were spiritual ancestors who focused on self-knowledge, the feminine, and an unmediated relationship with the divine.
Readers of these lost texts would discover numerous elaborate myths about creation in which a lesser malevolent deity split off from the true transcendent deity and made the material world in which we are now trapped. They would learn the names of the 74 angels responsible for ordering each individual body part, from the nose to the marrow, the right buttock, and the toenails. And, scandalously, they would find the Gospel of Philip, in which the disciples protest that Christ loves Mary Magdalene, his “companion,” more than the rest of them. Apparently, he regularly kissed her. Green-eyed disciples and make-out sessions? It’s easy to see why the Gnostic scriptures took the world by storm.
Our picture of ancient Gnostics, then, rests on two groups of evidence: orthodox slander and the discovery of their library in the Egyptian desert. Wild stories about sticky Eucharists have some obvious historical problems, but the discovery story also rests on shaky ground.
The French scholars who stumbled upon the books in Cairo shops and investigated their origins established that the find probably came from a burial spot somewhere at the base of the cliffs of Jabal al Tarif. But it wasn’t until three decades later that American scholar James Robinson tracked down Muhammad Ali, the man who discovered the texts.
According to Ali, he was digging with his brother, or possibly two brothers, at the base of a cliff when one of the group discovered a jar buried in the ground. He was initially concerned about the genie-like presence of a jinni, or spirit, but curiosity got the better of him, and he later smashed the jar open where it lay. He gathered up the books, returned home, and unceremoniously dumped the contents of his find on the straw piled next to his family’s oven. His mother would later admit that she burned some of the papyrus as kindling in the fire.
This is the basic story found in best-selling books, on podcasts, and in Wikipedia entries. The problem is that nearly every time Ali told the story, the details changed. The number of others present at the discovery varies between one and seven. In an early version told to a neighbor, he mentioned that he found the jar next to a staff and a rug; in a 1987 television interview, he said the jar lay next to a skeleton with unusually long fingers and teeth. Neither version was confirmed by his younger brother, who reported that nothing other than the jar was found.
Archaeology might have been able to confirm some details, but when Robinson took Ali—who was compensated for his time—back to Jabal al Tarif in the 1970s*, Ali identified two different locations for the discovery. Excavations to the bedrock of the first site and mesh sifting of surface debris at the second revealed no evidence of smashed pottery or papyrus fragments, much less a staff or vampire-like skeleton. While it is possible that looters had plundered the site in the intervening years, it is unlikely that they would have bothered to collect scraps of papyrus that were worthless on the black market.
In sum, we do not know where the books were found, by how many people, or in what circumstances. And, because ‘Ali no longer remembered where he had found them, we cannot look for corroborating evidence.
The lack of archaeological context matters. The traditional story is that codices were buried for safekeeping and protection. But if they were found in a grave, then they look more like grave goods owned by a single individual. If they weren’t found together in a single jar or a single grave, then we don’t know how, or if, they are connected to one another. At that point, we can’t really claim they are a library.
As Tony Burke, a leading expert on Christian Apocrypha, has put it, once we realize we know nothing about the archaeological context in which the texts were found, “we discover something even more astounding: There is no Nag Hammadi Library; indeed, there never was.”
This is even more consequential when it comes to the Gnostics. The Nag Hammadi Library was the physical evidence for a community, but you’d be hard-pressed to find individuals in antiquity who identified themselves as members of this special group. The word comes from the Greek gnosis, meaning “knowledge,” and refers to the special mystical knowledge that Gnostics claimed to possess. As a label, however, it’s untenably broad. Lots of Christians believed that they had special religious knowledge. The Gospel of John refers to gnosis, and (St.!) Clement of Alexandria regularly uses the term “Gnostic” in his writings to describe the ideal Christian. Neither author is thought to be heretical, meaning at least one key facet of Gnostic identity and belief was shared by lots of people.
To make matters even more confusing, those identified as Gnostics by others did not agree on key theological issues. Other than the possession of special knowledge, and a bare-bones myth about a transcendent deity, the only shared belief is the desire to return to the transcendent realm. But even these are not present in all so-called Gnostic texts. Some of the texts from Nag Hammadi are non-Christian; others, like the Gospel of Thomas, aren’t considered Gnostic at all. To thicken the plot, the material found in the bindings of one of the books from Nag Hammadi suggests that it was produced in an otherwise orthodox monastic community. None of this intimates that this is the secret literature of a clandestine group.
Many specialists, like Michael Williams and Karen King, now wonder if Gnostics ever existed outside of the scathing rhetoric of heresy hunters. Even those who do argue that there were Gnostics agree that they must have been a small sect that was far less influential than the widespread heresy described by Irenaeus. Most adherents would have blended into the diverse world of early Christianity at a moment when Christianity had yet to define what orthodoxy was. One second-century teacher accused of being Gnostic was the teacher Valentinus. He almost became bishop of Rome and, thus, pope. He was hardly on the esoteric fringe.
This is why the archaeology of the Nag Hammadi find matters. Without evidence, the story of a secret library buried under threat of destruction crumbles. And, far from being the bogeymen of orthodox imagination, the “Gnostics” emerge as more ordinary and better integrated into mainstream Christianity than the heresy hunters would have us believe.
*Why did it take so long for Muhammad Ali to be interviewed? The issue stemmed from a blood feud involving his family. At the time he and his brothers discovered the codices, they also avenged their father’s murder. The very same pickaxes allegedly wielded to shatter the jar of books were used to desecrate the man’s corpse. Ali claimed he ate the man’s heart. After that, he and his brothers could not return to Nag Hammadi for fear of retaliation.
READ MORE: These 2025 archaeological discoveries reshaped what we know about the Bible | What evidence is there of Jesus? | What archaeology can—and can’t—tell us about Jesus’ crucifixion
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Want to learn more?
If you want to learn more about the fantastic world of early Christian manuscript discoveries, check out Brent Nongbri’s God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts.
