Bible Books

The Nag Hammadi library in English

James M. Robinson, General Editor Richard Smith, Managing Editor (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 3rd completely rev. ed., 1988) 549 pp., $24.95

In 1945, Egyptian peasants looking for fertilizer near the town of Nag Hammadi discovered a cache of papyrus documents, written in Coptic, the language of the early Egyptian Christians. These ancient books, dated to the middle of the fourth century on the basis of business documents found in their leather bindings, promised to reveal new information about heretical early Christians known to the early Church fathers as Gnostics.

Twenty years later most of the Nag Hammadi documents were still unpublished and thus unavailable to scholars. Professor James M. Robinson, in 1966, organized a team of scholars operating out of Claremont, California, to translate the documents and to make them generally available for study. Robinson’s devotion to rapid publication stands as a shining example to scholars. The results of this translation team’s efforts are still emerging.