Coptic Books of Light Introduction

The Coptic Books of Light

An orientation to the Nag Hammadi and related Coptic witnesses

In 1945, near Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, a jar was found containing a collection of Coptic books: more than fifty writings, copied in the fourth century, many of them translations of older Greek works. To these are joined the texts of the Berlin Codex and the Bruce Codex, and the great work called Pistis Sophia. Together they are the chief surviving witnesses to the teaching of the schools often called Gnostic, and to a Christian and Hermetic mysticism of light, knowledge, and the ascent of the soul.

These writings are not Scripture, and many of them teach things far removed from the plain message of the prophets and the apostles. They are preserved here as ancient witnesses — to be read with discernment, understood on their own terms, and weighed honestly.

How the Coptic witnesses are filed in this project

Texts already filed under the early gospel wisdom, the apocalyptic, or the New Testament apocrypha sections are not repeated here. Under the Coptic Books of Light are gathered the remaining Nag Hammadi and related Coptic writings — the treatises of creation and the soul, the apocalypses and steles, the sacramental pieces, the Hermetic discourses, the Books of Jeu, and Pistis Sophia — together with a discernment guide, a bridge document on the ascent of the soul, and a fragmentary index.