When was the NHL buried?
Who preserved the NHL prior to its burial and who buried it?
What exactly is the NHL?
How does Pachomius fit in to their history if at all?
These questions and other related questions are open for discussion.
Some initial articles and references ....
Introduction to "Gnosticism": Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds
Paperback – 2012
by Nicola Denzey Lewis (Author)
AMAZON LINK: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Gnos ... 0199755310
Some comments from the reviewers ....
- At one place she suggests that we can think of the Gnostics as the "assimilationists" (her word) of those early centuries of Christianity itself, those who would "go along to get along" with the Romans, at least partly. But they may also be compared with their rigidly orthodox brethren, those who would insist that to be identified as Christian, one must be prepared to volunteer for martyrdom in the name of Christ. This is a refreshing injection of rational thinking into the history of Christianity.
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It explains that the "Gnostics" were various, some of them clearly "Christian" rather than "heretical," and its analyses of individual works shows what an untidy mix of Hebrew, Greek (mainly Platonic) and even Egyptian influences were afloat trying to reconcile themselves to each other and to the rising new cult called Christianity.
The real reason the Nag Hammadi library was buried
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-rea ... was-buried
- The story of the burying of the so-called Gnostic texts known as the Nag Hammadi library has become almost a legend—often a romantic rallying cry for alternative religions. But new scholarship paints a much different picture, and possibly far more intriguing (and occult) than the mainstream assumption.
The accepted version goes like this: In 367 AD, the powerful bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, issued a decree known as the “Festal Letter,” where he condemned the use of heterodox Christian documents, as well as delineated an accepted canon; in reaction to this, brave monks from the monastery of St Pachomius in Upper Egypt smuggled out a group of codices, eventually burying them in the sands. These 52 texts were found in 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi, in an account that is almost as sensationalistic.
But in her book, “Gnositicism” Ancient Voices, Christians World, Nicola Denzey Lewis offers a more sober yet essentially more mystic explanation. After all, as Lewis commented on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, there are no other known instances of monks hiding banned works from a rising Christian church, anywhere in that region of the world. In her book, Lewis indicates that the composition of the Nag Hammadi library “probably came from a typical Egyptian town dump rather than from a monastery, suggesting that the covers of the books, if not the whole books themselves, were produced in an urban environment in the middle of the fourth century.”
So if rebelling friars didn’t hide the so-called Gnostic texts, then who did?
That is where it gets more occult (and certainly more mystic). Denzey notes that there is a more prevalent theme coursing through the Nag Hammadi library than Gnostic theology. And that is death and the otherworld. Although there are no cases of monks hiding outlawed writings during that epoch, there are many occasions of books being buried to accompany the recently-diseased. It’s not clear who buried them, but it’s apparent why they were buried.
Simply put, the Nag Hammadi library is a funerary text, very much in line with the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Pyramid Texts (though with a more middleclass sensibility). And again, these were not uncommon in Egypt of old, even during the Christian era. Or as Denzey states:
“They were simply deposited in graves as a sort of “grave good”; it was not an unusual instance in late ancient Egypt to bury a book in a tomb, since books were luxury items that might demonstrate the prestige and wealth of their owner. Some even speculate that there was a connection between the writings in NH books and a preoccupation about the nature of the afterlife; this is a major theme in many of the individual tractates in the Nag Hammadi collection.”
This certainly changes much of the context of these “forbidden gospels,” as they are known, and certainly makes them more compelling. The Nag Hammadi library is less about the views of ancient heretics and more about the universal preoccupation of death and the voyage into eternity. Something any monk, bishop, or seeker of higher truths can relate to, now and then.
Above is an outline of the mainstream theory to the question of the OP: Orthodoxy (via Athanasius' "Festal Letter") was establishing the Only True Canon and the Non Canonical ("Heretical") books had to be jettisoned. They were "hot political objects". Get them out of the monastery!
It also incorporates an alternative theory by Lewis. The books of the NHL represented "funerary texts" and as such were "grave goods".
So why was the Nag Hammadi library buried?
The OP must also include related questions such as when was the NHL buried. Who preserved the NHL prior to its burial and who buried it?
What exactly is the NHL?
From Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians
- Nag Hammadi Archive
• p.414: Nag Hammadi Library - in Upper Egypt, near Nile
12 books (codices) with leaves from a 13th in jar (1945)
Consistent of 57 Coptic tracts; "spurious gospels".
But "none of the "gnostic christians" wrote/read Coptic."
• "The collection is not a single library, not uniformly heretical, nor even entirely christian."
includes a poor trans of Plato's republic, and a pagan letter of "Eugnostos the Blessed"
the letter was then given a christian preface and a conclusion and represented in another copy
as the "wisdom" which Jesus revealed to his Apostles after his death.
http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manus ... ammadi.htm
- NOTES:
Note that the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians is not related to the apocryphal text of that name referred to by the fathers. The Sentences of Sextus was already known in Latin, Syriac, Armenian an Georgian translations, plus two Mss. in the original Greek. The Coptic text stands closer to the modern critical text than any other version.
The opening section of the Gospel of Mary relies on an exegesis of Romans 7. The original Greek was written some time in the second century. The earliest text is a single leaf from the early 3rd century (P. Rylands III 463) containing 22:16,1-19,4. The longer text in BG contains only 8 pages of the original 18. The text of the Greek fragment varies considerably from the Coptic text, which includes the same passage.
How does Pachomius fit in to the history of the NHL, if at all?
This is an extremely important question in political history and a number of scholars have posited a relationship between the NHL and the Pachomian monastic settlement which was geographically close to the presumed location of discovery. Analysis if the cartonage for the books in the NHL has found that this may have been prepared using papyri material from the monastery.
So how much did Pachomius know about the NHL? Was he in fact the behind-the-scenes editor of the NHL? Was the NHL part of some greater library?
In conclusion it may be also very important to be aware that Pachomius died c.348 CE. The burial of the NHL may therefore have something to do with the passing of Pachomius.
Opinions and reference articles welcomed.
LC
