The Nag Hammadi Codices as Monastic Books (STAC 134; Mohr Siebeck) [2023] (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Monks of the Nag Hammadi Codices - Contextualising a Fourth-Century Monastic Community
2024
This work tells the story of a community of fourth-century monks living in Egypt. The letters they wrote and received were found within the covers of works that changed our understanding of early religious thought - the Nag Hammadi Codices. This book seeks to contextualise the letters and answer questions about monastic life. Significantly, new evidence is presented that links the letters directly to the authors and creators of the codices in which they were discovered.
Nag Hammadi Texts and the Coptic Literature
The study of the socalled Nag Hammadi (= NH) codices has always been directed, from one side, to each individual text, 1 and from the other, to the general significance of the collection for our knowledge of the religious doctrines and literary history of Late Antiquity. 2 So peculiar was even at a first glance the character of the texts, so unexpected was their discovery, that it was soon evident that at least part of the conventional wisdom on gnosticism and early Christianity had to be adjusted to cope with these new documents. This situation encouraged the vision of the codices, at least for certain purposes, as an homogeneous entity. In this paper I shall assume that this vision is reasonable, in spite of the otherwise right opinion, which is now generally accepted, that technically the codices, and consequently the texts that they contain, cannot be considered as homogeneous, and I shall explain the sense and motivation of this assumption. This presupposes that I briefly recapitulate the main issues at stake. Let me remind first, that James Robinson in his paper which introduced the celebration of the fifty years from the discovery 3 has indicated the three main novelties brought by the texts in the field of religious studies: the importance of the sect that can be called of " the Sethians " , and the possibility to understand its doctrinal character with sufficient precision; the renovated attention for the apocrypha, with the possibility to better investigate the intertestamental literature; the new perspectives introduced by the Gospel of Thomas in the study of the logia and the sources and formation of the canonical Gospels. To this it should be added the study of the linguistic features of the texts, carried on mainly by Nagel, Kasser, and Funk: it is well known how the landscape of the Coptic dialects and the opinions on the birth of the Coptic language have been radically changed 4 as a consequence of the new documents. In this regard some observations of Bentley Layton 5 on the sociolinguistic aspect of the question are possibly more important than the scarce reaction from other scholars might imply: " It is the kind of Coptic that might have been written by a speaker of A2 (Subachmimic) attempting to conform to the emergent 'neutral' or common dialect of the southern Nile Valley, Sahidic. " The intention by the authors to conform to certain social (in the broad sense) attitudes may have influenced the " natural " linguistic habits, which are the only ones generally taken into consideration. On the other hand, the question whether the NH codices may be taken as an individual collection, perhaps even as a library, or part of one library, rather than a fortuitous gathering of disparate entities, is still open. Alberto Camplani has recently written a lucid synthesis of the many stadies. 6 He explains the various elements brought into discussion: the evidence given by the cartonnage, the subsets recognized by means of palaeographic and codicological study, the colophons; and he lists the different hypotheses deduced from them, namely that the NH codices constituted a Sethian library, or an heresiological collection, or a monastic, or more specially a Pachomian library, etc. The best recent contributions on this subject are those by Clemens Scholten 7 (a monastic library; but his conclusions are not convincing) and Alexander Khosroyev, 8 who is totally sceptic of all the solutions, but does not propose a new one. In any case both contain a detailed list of the studies done so far.
Monastic origin of the Nag Hammadi Codices.pdf
The article aims to scrutinize the recently revivied theory of the monastic (and particularly Pachomian) origin of the Nag Hammadi as it was fully developed by H. Lundhaug and L. Jenott in The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices (2015)
Vigiliae Christianae, 2007
While the individual texts in the various codices found near Nag Hammadi have been studied and discussed, relatively little attention has been paid to the motives underlying their original selection and organisation. Codices I, XI and VII in particular have been shown on palaeographical and codicological grounds to make up a sub-collection within the larger Nag Hammadi collection. Despite their doctrinal diversity, the texts found in these three codices were intended by their compilers to be read in sequence. The purpose of this article is to examine the logic behind this choice and arrangement of texts, and to advance the hypothesis that this three volume collection is intended to progressively introduce the reader to a heterodox and esoteric doctrine of religious conflict and polemic, in which the reader is invited to identify him-or herself with an embattled minority group within the larger Christian community, a group who nonetheless see themselves as enlightened and as being of the "lineage of the Father."
Religious Tradition, Textual Transmission, and the Nag Hammadi Codices [1997]
In: The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration, edited by John D. Turner and Anne McGuire, 34–43. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies, vol. 44. Leiden etc.: E. J. Brill, 1997.
Our knowledge of religrous traditions in the ancient world is largely dependent on te\tual transmission-not just on tefts, but on the transmission of tex1s, an activity that was itself a sl.'rnptom of vital religrous traditrons. ln the case of the Nag Hammadi Codices (as well as mary other ancient manuscripts, of course), the complexity oftheir te\tual history has a sigmficant impact on our ability to interpret the texts, and so to understand the religous traditions that transmitted them ultimately to us The Nag Hammadi Codices, as archeologrcal artifacts, provide us with historical data tlat reach from the time of the codices' burial back through the circumstances of their manufacture, farther back through the circunrstances rurder which tle ind-rvidual works in the codices were translated tnto and transmitted in Coptic, tlrough the prior transmission history of tiese works in Greek, and finally back to the circumstances of their ongrnal composition (whatever that might mean in any grven case) and the qrcumstances by which they came to be in Eg1pt. All along that long way, wllch in at least one case leads as far back as foufth century BCE Athms. we assume that the ter-tual transmission coincided wth social and religious realities, which it has been the goal of much Nag Hammadi research to try to reconstruct and describe. As we all knoq what I am calling the "historical data" with which the codices provide us for this work of reconstruction and description are not the kinds of data that most historians would prefer to have, and hence e$reme mahodological clarity is needed both regrrding investigation of the different stages in the history of the Nag Hammadi texts as such, and especially r€arding the religrous rraditions that stand behind them.'
The Nag Hammadi Codices and Graeco-Egyptian Magical and Occult Literature
The Nag Hammadi Codices as Monastic Books, edited by Hugo Lundhaug and Christian Bull (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 279–316., 2023
Overview of intertexts between the works preserved in the Nag Hammadi Codices and Graeco-Egyptian magical and occult (alchemical, astrological) literature, focused on the question of the monastic provenance of the NHC. In short, the many intertexts shared between the Nag Hammadi and magical texts remind us of the close proximity between the production of these Coptic manuscripts and the world of magic in Roman Egypt.
Antony’s Letters and Nag Hammadi Codex I: Sources of Religious Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt
Journal of Early Christian Studies 18.4 (2010): 557–589, 2010
Scholars have explored Athanasius’s conflict with other Christian teachers in Egypt who practiced “open-canon” readings and exegetical discussions on “the deeper parts of Scripture,” and who encouraged their students to seek knowledge and heavenly visions apart from the parish clergy. Recent research has shown that many of these groups were not only urban study circles in Alexandria but also various monastic organizations throughout Egypt that admired the Alexandrian theological legacy associated with Origen and the teaching of such revered spiritual guides as St. Antony. By analyzing the tractates of Nag Hammadi Codex I as a fourth-century collection of Christian writings, and comparing its content with themes found in the letters of Antony, we find that the fourth-century reader of this codex, far from encountering teachings typically regarded as “gnostic” (dualism, docetism, a “world-hating spirit”) would have found a number of themes strikingly compatible with Antony’s letters. Finally, we discuss what appeal both collections would have had to monastic readers during the period of religious controversy that characterizes fourth-century Christianity in Egypt.
Finding Early Christian Books at Nag Hammadi and Beyond
This piece is a response to two recent articles on the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices (Goodacre 2013 and Denzey Lewis & Blount 2014). I try to pinpoint more precisely what exactly has been said about the alleged find-spot of the codices and to suggest we should be suspicious of reports that Christian books were found buried with bodies in Egypt.