The full library · read it yourself

The Nag Hammadi Library

In 367 AD a bishop ordered every book outside the new canon destroyed. Someone near the monasteries of upper Egypt would not burn them — they sealed thirteen books in a clay jar and buried them at the foot of a cliff. A farmer digging for fertilizer found the jar in 1945, after sixteen centuries. Here are the gospels he found. Read them yourself.

These are the "buried gospels" — Coptic copies of far older Greek writings, the library of Christians whose way of reading Jesus lost the argument and was ordered erased. When Bishop Athanasius sent out his festal letter in 367 fixing the canon and calling for the rest to be destroyed, these books were instead wrapped, sealed, and hidden. They are sayings, visions, and poems — some tender, some strange — and they survived because someone loved them enough to hide them rather than obey.

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you." — The Gospel of Thomas, saying 70

The texts

The Gospel of Thomas — Read the text →One hundred and fourteen sayings of Jesus, with no story around them. "Split the wood, I am there." The kingdom is inside you, and outside you. The Gospel of Mary — Read the text →Mary Magdalene carries a teaching the other disciples never received, and guides the soul past the seven powers of wrath. Peter doubts her; Levi defends her. The Apocryphon of John — Read the text →The fullest Gnostic account of how the world was made, and by whom — with its catalogue of three hundred and sixty-five powers assigned to the parts of the body. The body as prison. The Gospel of Philip — Read the text →On names as a weapon of deception, on the sacrament of the bridal chamber, and on Mary Magdalene as the companion whom Jesus loved. "Light and darkness are brothers of one another." The Gospel of Truth — Read the text →A meditation, likely by Valentinus, on ignorance as a terror that becomes fog, the world as a bad dream, and gnosis as the dawn that ends the nightmare. Thunder, Perfect Mind — Read the text →A divine feminine voice speaking only in paradox — "I am the first and the last… the whore and the holy one." Pure polarity, from beyond the rulers of the world. The Hypostasis of the Archons — Read the text →"The reality of the rulers" — how the archons hold power, and the line of Sophia and Norea who resist them. "The deep sleep is Ignorance." Trimorphic Protennoia — Read the text →The divine First Thought descending three times into the world to wake those who sleep in the body-prison, ending in the ritual of the Five Seals. "Those who sleep, I awaken."
The Broadcast

What the buried gospels mean — read aloud

The short voiced reading: the bishop's order, the sealed jar, the farmer, and what these gospels were actually saying that someone wanted gone. In a real voice.

Hear it →

Follow the thread

The Gnostic Gospels →Thomas, Mary, Philip, Judas — what they are, and why they were buried Other Suppressed Texts →Judas, Pistis Sophia, the Hermetica, and the Mandaean Ginza — with sources