In December 1945, two brothers looking for a place to rest found an urn full of papyruses in a cave in the region of Hamra Dom, in Upper Egypt. Instead of telling the local authorities – as the law demanded – they decided to sell them singly in the market for antiquities, thus avoiding attracting the government’s attention. The boys’ mother, fearing ‘negative energies’, burned several of the newly discovered papyruses.

The following year, for reasons history does not record, the brothers quarrelled. Attributing this quarrel to those supposed ‘negative energies’, the mother handed over the manuscripts to a priest, who sold them to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. There, the papyruses were given the name they still bear to this day: Manuscripts from Nag Hammadi (a reference to the town nearest to the caves where they were found). One of the museum’s experts, the religious historian Jean Doresse, realised the importance of the discovery and mentioned it for the first time in a publication dated 1948.

Other papyruses began to appear on the black market. The Egyptian government tried to prevent the manuscripts from leaving the country. After the 1952 revolution, most of the material was handed over to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and declared part of the national heritage. Only one text eluded them, and this had turned up in an antiquarian shop in Belgium. After vain attempts to sell it in New York and Paris, it was finally acquired by the Carl Jung Institute in 1951. On the death of the famous psychoanalyst, the papyrus, now known as Jung Codex, returned to Cairo, where the almost one thousand pages and fragments of the Manuscripts from Nag Hammadi are now to be found.

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The papyruses are Greek translations of texts written between the end of the first century BC and AD 180, and they constitute a body of work also known as the Apocryphal Gospels, because they are not included in the Bible as we know it today. Now why is that?

In AD 170, a group of bishops met to decide which texts would form part of the New Testament. The criterion was simple enough: anything that could be used to combat the heresies and doctrinal divisions of the age would be included. The four gospels we know today were chosen, as were the letters from the apostles and whatever else was judged to be, shall we say, ‘coherent’ with what the bishops believed to be the

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