Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Why we might doubt the story of the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels. Guest post by Mark Goodacre. Read by John Paul Middlesworth. Intro by Bart Ehrman a few days ago, I posted about the discovery of the Nag Hamadi library, giving the remarkable story that scholars, for as long as I myself have been a scholar, have been telling about how it happened. I also mentioned that my New Testament colleague at Duke, Mark Goodacre, who is on this blog and who has an important blog of his own, has written an article calling this story into question.
[00:00:33] Years ago, when I was discussing this matter on the blog, I asked Mark if he would be willing to summarize his objections to the story as it is typically recited, and he did so. In the following post, he asked me to add a couple links at the end, in case you want to look more deeply into the matter.
[00:00:50] Five Reasons to question the Story of the Nag Hamadi Discovery I'm grateful to my friend and colleague Bart Ehrman for mentioning me in his blog in connection with the fascinating and compelling story of the Nag Hamadi discovery in 1945. I must admit that I have always found the stories of the discovery utterly gripping, and I have narrated them many times in the classroom. In fact, it was on one such occasion that I checked myself for a moment and just listened to what I was saying. Genies a six foot jar. The discoverer's mum burning the manuscripts to make her tea cannibalism and blood revenge.
[00:01:27] I realized that I was telling this story not because I knew it was good history, but because I loved its exotic details. It was a little bit of the Arabian Knights in a story that I could tell in class.
[00:01:38] So is it true? I have my doubts. Here are five reasons to question the popular account the Mystery of the Growing Jar like all good legends, the details get ever more impressive with repeated retellings. In the earliest version of the story, the jar in which the manuscripts were found is just under 2ft tall. In later versions, it grows to a remarkable 6ft in size.
[00:02:04] The people keep changing. In some versions of the story, two brothers, Muhammad Ali and Khalifa Ali, discovered the jar. In others, their brother, Abu al Maj, is the one to find it. Sometimes there are only two people present. Sometimes there are seven, sometimes eight.
[00:02:24] James Robinson is the scholar responsible for the detailed reporting of the find in several different versions over the years. But two of his closest collaborators, who were there with him in Egypt in the 1970s, were skeptical about his story. Buried deep in an abstruse footnote of an expensive volume of photographs of the noncommodi manuscripts, Rodolf Kossser and Martin Krause contested Robinson's story. They had, quote, serious reasons to put in doubt the objective value, unquote of points in his story, they said. In other words, they didn't believe a word of it.
[00:02:59] There are no recordings and no transcripts of the research conducted by Robinson in the 1970s. But a decade later, the alleged discoverer, Muhammad Ali al Saman, appeared on camera in a British TV documentary in which he narrated the story afresh. His version has still more anomalies, yet more contradictions with the earlier versions.
[00:03:22] There was actually a scholar present in Nag Hamadi not long after the discovery of the codices. He was the French scholar Jean Duress, an expert on Egyptian Christianity. There are pictures of him in the area from the late 1940s. He had the instinct for how to conduct field research. He got among the people there and did not ask leading questions. Unlike Robinson, he did not offer them whiskey or Egyptian pounds. He heard legends about blood feuds and burning manuscripts, but he attributed them to a kind of sensationalist tittle tatle. His story is more lean, less detailed and probably more historical. Several peasants no one knew who had found the manuscripts in a jar in that area a few years earlier. Sometimes history is little less interesting than legend.
[00:04:12] Two hyperlinks conclude the article in the online blog one, Mark's Fuller article on this topic. The second. The documentary featuring Muhammad Ali Al Saman, available on Mark's YouTube channel.
