In December of 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, farmers digging at the foot of a cliff for the soft soil they used as fertilizer struck a sealed jar nearly a meter high. Inside were thirteen books bound in leather, written on papyrus in Coptic, the last form of the ancient Egyptian language. They had been buried, most scholars think, around the middle of the fourth century, perhaps by monks of a nearby monastery who had been ordered to purge their libraries of books not approved by the bishop, and who could not bring themselves to burn them.
Two years later, two hundred miles to the northeast, a shepherd found the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The fellowship has never ceased to marvel that two hidden libraries of the mystical stream came back into the world in the same decade.
What the Codices Contain
Some fifty texts in all, most of them Christian, many of them belonging to the wide and varied movement that scholars call gnostic, from the Greek word for knowledge. They are translations from Greek originals written mostly in the second and third centuries. They include gospels, apocalypses, prayers, treatises, and a fragment of Plato. Many were known before only from the refutations of the church fathers, who quoted them in order to condemn them. Now they could be read whole.
The fellowship does not teach the full gnostic cosmology, with its emanations and its ignorant creator and its drama of the fall of Wisdom. We find the mythology more elaborate than the heart requires. But we read these texts, several of them constantly, for the teaching that runs beneath the mythology: that the kingdom is within, that the one who knows himself knows the All, that the Light is in a person of light and lights the whole world.
The Gospel of Thomas
The text the fellowship reads most is the second tractate of the second codex, which announces itself as the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin wrote down. It has no story, no birth, no miracles, no passion. It has one hundred fourteen sayings, many of them close to sayings in the gospels of the New Testament, some of them found nowhere else. Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not taste death. The kingdom is inside you and outside you. Split a piece of wood and I am there; lift the stone and you will find me. Be passersby. When you make the two one, and the inside like the outside, and the above like the below, then you will enter the kingdom.
Scholars debate whether Thomas preserves early traditions independent of the four gospels or is a later reworking of them. The fellowship leaves the debate to the scholars. We read Thomas as the Essenes read the prophets: as a word addressed to the one reading it now. Its sayings are made for the Morning Watch, one at a time, held in silence until they open.
Other Texts the Fellowship Reads
The Gospel of Philip, a collection of reflections on the sacraments and on the bridal chamber as the image of union with God. The Gospel of Truth, a meditation on the Father's revelation that begins with joy and ends with rest. The Thunder, Perfect Mind, a hymn in the voice of a feminine divine power who is the first and the last, the honored and the scorned, the whore and the holy one. The Prayer of Thanksgiving, which the fellowship sometimes uses at the Evening Watch. The Teachings of Silvanus, a wisdom text that could almost be from the Hebrew tradition, urging the reader to light the lamp within and let the mind be the guide.
Egypt and the Desert
There is a thread from Qumran to Nag Hammadi, though it is thin. The philosopher of Alexandria who described the Essenes also described the Therapeutae, a contemplative community near a lake outside his city, who lived in solitary cells, studied the scriptures by allegory, sang hymns through the night, and ate bread and salt and hyssop. Two centuries later the Christian monks of Egypt went out to the same deserts to live almost the same life. The fellowship's article The Healers of the Lake follows the thread. The monks who buried the Nag Hammadi jar were heirs of the Therapeutae, who were cousins of the Essenes. The stream went underground and surfaced in a different country. It does that.