The Gnostic Gospels

In 1945, in the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, a peasant farmer named Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman was digging for a nitrogen-rich soil used as fertilizer when he discovered a buried jar containing 13 manuscripts.  Not knowing what they were, he brought them home, where his mother  burned some of them to provide a fire. Around the same time, Muhammad and his brothers killed a man they blamed for the death of their father. The brothers feared that the police who came to investigate the killing would discover and confiscate the manuscripts, so they left a few of them with a priest, who showed them to a local history teacher. From there, the manuscripts ended up in the black market of antiquities in Cairo. Most of the manuscripts were confiscated by the authorities and given to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Much of the 13th codex was sold in the United States and found by a professor of religion in the Netherlands, Professor Gilles Quispel. By 1952, 12 of the manuscripts and part of a 13th belonged to the Coptic Museum, while the rest of the 13th manuscript had been sold to the Jung Foundation in Zurich.

The discovered manuscripts included completely unknown writings about Jesus Christ or attributed to Jesus’s apostles and