Religious Tradition, Textual Transmission, and the Nag Hammadi Codices [1997] (original) (raw)

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.'