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The secretive Gnostic stream of Christianity, which taught a radically different metaphysics and spiritual cosmology from "orthodox" doctrine in the first four hundred years of the church, was largely lost to history, until 1945, when a camel-herder in a remote part of Egypt stumbled upon an old ceremic jar with 13 massive books containing 52 ancient Gnostic texts. We consider what the so-called "Nag Hammadi LIbrary," which may have been hidden in the desert to protect it from destruction, reveals about the origins and importance of the Gnostics' secret teachings.

Image: A Nag Hammadi codex open to the beginning of the Apocryphon of John.

Suggested further reading: Jean Doresse, "The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Texts"; Elaine Pagels, "The Gnostic Gospels."

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