Jung's death in 1961 resulted in a quarrel over the ownership of the Jung Codex the pages were not given to the Coptic Museum in Cairo until 1975, after a first edition of the text had been published. It was intended as a birthday present for Jung for this reason, this codex is typically known as the Jung Codex, being Codex I in the collection. After an attempt was made to sell the codex in both New York City and Paris, it was acquired by the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich in 1951, through the mediation of Gilles Quispel. Meanwhile, a single codex had been sold in Cairo to a Belgian antiques dealer. Pahor Labib, the director of the Coptic Museum at that time, was keen to keep the manuscripts in their country of origin. After the revolution in 1952, the texts were handed to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and declared national property. Tanos, a Cypriot antiques dealer in Cairo, and they were thereafter being retained by the Department of Antiquities, for fear that they would be sold out of the country. Slowly, most of the tracts came into the hands of Phokion J. The blood feud, however, is well attested by multiple sources. Instead, Lewis & Blount (2014) have proposed that the Nag Hammadi codices had been privately commissioned by a wealthy non-monastic individual, and that the books had been buried with him as funerary prestige items. Burials of books were common in Egypt in the early centuries AD, but if the library was a funerary deposit, it conflicts with Robinson's belief that the manuscripts were purposely hidden out of fear of persecution. It is suggested that the library was initially a simple grave robbing, and the more fanciful aspects of the story were concocted as a cover story. Later scholarship has drawn attention to al-Samman's mention of a corpse and a "bed of charcoal" at the site, aspects of the story that were vehemently denied by al-Samman's brother. Jean Doresse's account contains none of these elements. Robinson gave multiple accounts of this interview, with the number of people present at the discovery ranging from two to eight. His mother claimed that she burned some of the manuscripts Robinson identified these with Codex XII. Al-Samman told Robinson a complex story involving a blood feud, cannibalism, digging for fresh soil for agricultural use, and superstitions about a jinn. In the 1970s, James Robinson sought out the local farmer in question, identifying him as Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman. Making careful inquiries from 1947–1950, Jean Doresse discovered that a local farmer (boy) dug up the texts from a graveyard in the desert, located near tombs from the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt. Scholars first became aware of the Nag Hammadi library in 1946. The site of discovery, Nag Hammadi in map of Egypt The Nag Hammadi codices are currently housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt. The buried manuscripts date from the 3rd and 4th centuries. The written text of the Gospel of Thomas is dated to the second century by most interpreters, but based on much earlier sources. 1), and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources. After the discovery, scholars recognized that fragments of these sayings attributed to Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1898 ( P. The best-known of these works is probably the Gospel of Thomas, of which the Nag Hammadi codices contain the only complete text. The contents of the codices were written in the Coptic language. The discovery of these texts significantly influenced modern scholarship's pursuit and knowledge of early Christianity and Gnosticism. In his introduction to The Nag Hammadi Library in English, James Robinson suggests that these codices may have belonged to a nearby Pachomian monastery and were buried after Saint Athanasius condemned the use of non-canonical books in his Festal Letter of 367 A.D. The writings in these codices comprise 52 mostly Gnostic treatises, but they also include three works belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation/alteration of Plato's Republic. Thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local farmer named Muhammed al-Samman. The Nag Hammadi library (also known as the " Chenoboskion Manuscripts" and the "Gnostic Gospels" ) is a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.
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