The codices came to public and scholarly attention through
a complex series of transactions. Muhammad Ali’s mother seems
to have burned some of them as kindling; how many is not known
for sure, but twelve more or less complete codices and some
sheets from another survive. By the end of 1946 one codex had
come into the possession of the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Another
made its way onto the antiquities black market and was offered
for sale in New York and Paris before it was purchased by the
Jung Foundation in Zurich in 1952 and given to the institution’s
founder, the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, as a present. It too
was later installed in Cairo’s Coptic Museum, albeit after much
legal wrangling. By 1975 the Museum was in possession of all
thirteen of the extant Nag Hammadi codices. Publication of
the library’s contents was a protracted business too for various
reasons, including the jealous rivalries to which academics
are sometimes given and the upheavals in Egypt following
Nasser’s nationalist revolution in 1953. It took the intervention of
UNESCO to guarantee a full photographic edition of the codices,
a task only completed in 1996 (King 2003: 150–1).
It is probably safe to say that the contents of the Nag
Hammadi library have revolutionized the study of early Chris-
tianity. The codices contained dozens of texts written in Coptic- the ancient Egyptian language written in an adapted Greek
alphabet that is still used by Egypt’s native Christian community.
But they were no ordinary texts. The first codex that came to light
in Cairo in 1946, and which is numbered as Codex III in the stan-
dard reference system for the Nag Hammadi library, contained a
text called the Apocryphon [Secret Book] of John. Scholars had
known of this work earlier, from another Coptic manuscript held
in Berlin that had been published at the end of the nineteenth
century (King 2003: 80). Codex III from Nag Hammadi, however,
contained a slightly different version of the text. Moreover, it
also contained similar works: a Gospel of the Egyptians, two
works on the existence of a supercelestial realm beyond the visible
world, and The Dialogue of the Saviour, a collection of sayings
attributed to Jesus. The codex bought by the Jung Foundation,
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