Nag Hammadi Library

Definition

The Nag Hammadi Library is a cache of Coptic manuscripts discovered near Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, in 1945, part of the “heretical” apocryphal literature the early church rejected from the New Testament canon.¹ Its best-known text, the Gospel of Thomas, is a mid-second-century, Gnostic-influenced sayings collection dependent on the four canonical Gospels rather than an early, independent witness to Jesus.¹ The discovery renewed interest in Walter Bauer’s argument that earliest Christianity had no real orthodoxy or heresy, only competing “Christianities,” and that the New Testament canon simply preserves the books of history’s eventual winners.²

Historical Development

Michael Kruger places the Nag Hammadi discovery within a wider pattern he traces across the twentieth century: “sensational discoveries of apocryphal materials” (the Gospel of Peter, a fragment called P.Oxy. 840, the Nag Hammadi codices including the Gospel of Thomas, P.Egerton 2, the Secret Gospel of Mark, and, more recently, the Gospel of Judas) each spurring popular books with titles like The Five Gospels, Lost Scriptures, and Forgotten Scriptures that “raise questions about the state of the canon.”³

A third factor, in Kruger’s account, has done still more to shape how these discoveries get read: the continuing influence of Walter Bauer’s 1934 book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Bauer argued “that early Christianity was originally very diverse and varied, with no clear orthodox or heretical camp,” so that what later came to be called orthodoxy was simply the theology of the faction that eventually won, and the New Testament canon reflects that faction’s own books rather than “original” Christianity.³ Kruger traces the thesis’s modern revival to how well it fits “postmodern worldviews that argue that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ version of any religious system,” under which Nag Hammadi’s Gnostic writings carry “just as much validity as any other Christian books.”³ Bart Ehrman is among the scholars Kruger names as extending Bauer’s critique, calling the canon an “invention” of Christianity’s dominant faction, designed to “suppress (or oppress) other factions of the church with different theological convictions.”³

Scholarly dating of the library’s own texts complicates that reading. The broad consensus places the Gospel of Thomas, the collection’s best-attested and most-studied text, in the middle of the second century: substantially later than the first-century canonical Gospels, and, in Kruger’s judgment, itself dependent on them.¹ Its pervasive Gnostic outlook is part of the evidence for that late date: Kruger approvingly quotes John Meier’s judgment that “a gnostic world view of this sort [in Thomas] was not employed to reinterpret Christianity in such a thoroughgoing way before sometime in the second century AD,” which rules out Thomas as “a reliable reflection of the historical Jesus or of the earliest sources of first-century Christianity.”¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as those “given by the inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life,” and states that writings outside that list are “no part of the canon or rule of the Scripture” and “of no authority to the church of God.”⁴ The confession does not mention the Nag Hammadi texts, or Gnostic writings generally, by name. Its governing principle is that inspiration, not age, popularity, or survival, is what makes a book canonical, the same principle Kruger applies to the library’s own texts when he traces their exclusion to demonstrable historical and theological grounds (a late date, dependence on the canonical Gospels, a Gnostic worldview) rather than to an arbitrary later decision.¹

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the discovery of “lost gospels” like those found at Nag Hammadi show that the New Testament canon was simply the arbitrary choice of history’s theological winners, with other, equally early Christianities suppressed along the way? Kruger’s dating argument answers this directly for the library’s best-known text: rather than an early, independent witness later suppressed, the Gospel of Thomas is a mid-second-century composition, dependent on and later than the canonical Gospels, whose Gnostic content is itself part of the evidence for that late date.¹

Kruger also questions the premise behind the wider Bauer/Ehrman argument, that the church’s reception of its Scriptures can be adequately explained as a purely human, contingent process. He argues this is assumed rather than demonstrated: showing that human decisions played some role in which books the church received is not the same as showing that human decisions were the only thing at work. “The fact that proximate, human decisions played a role in the development of the canon does not rule out the possibility that ultimate, divine activity also played a role. The two are not mutually exclusive.”²

Related Doctrines

• Gospel of Thomas
• Gospel of Philip
• Gnosticism
• Development of the Canon
• Apocrypha
• Historical Jesus

References

1. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩²

3. Kruger, Canon Revisited, “Introduction.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” paras. 2-3. ↩