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Discovery of a Coptic Library At Nag Hamâdi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Our epoch, fertile in inventions in the most diverse fields, has in recent years seen several discoveries which hold extraordinary interest for history in general and for the history of religions in particular. Around 1930 seven volumes of Manichean writings were discovered at Fayum; in 1941, a few miles outside Cairo, near Tura, unpublished works of Origen and his disciple Didymus the Blind were found; the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls occurred around 1945, and in Egypt, at roughly this same time, an equally fortuitous find was made of a considerable body of Coptic manuscripts dating perhaps from the third century a.d. Although these last have not been entirely deciphered, they are considered by specialists to be prodigiously rich; such a find, says one, “does not merely enrich or renew our previous knowledge of the literature, the genealogy, or the history of Gnosticism : it revolutionizes this knowledge, and opens to research in the field a path absolutely distinct from all those which criticism has previously followed.”