An Aberrant Gnostic

 Roughly one week after the initial report by The Guardian , a second update was given by the newspaper regarding the Nag Hammadi Library .  Published on June 24, 1949, this article gives, what I can only imagine, a summation of what these works represent per the initial translations made by M. Dorresse at the time.  To quote the paper, the worldview of the Gnostics per the then newly translated Gnostic scriptures is that : [Gnostisicm and said scriptures] will turn out to be the product of provincial and rather humble intellectuals out of touch with the big cultural centres.  [The library] will cast light on the feelings and aspirations of educated men, small officials, merchants, and the like in the smaller towns of Egypt and the Near East during the first century BC and the first centuries AD. No mention of the documents giving hope of enlightenment or hinting at the true religion of the world...this article states that the ancient texts were simply the dreams and...

  One of the main reasons I wanted to start this blog was to document and "stack" newspaper articles regarding the Nag Hammadi Library that I've found on Newspapers.com.  The Nag Hammadi Library, or NHL , is the source material for most things 20th century and on Gnosticism.  So what it is?  Let's let an article from The Guardian , June 18, 1949, help us define such a thing. The article wastes no time in introducing us to a young French scholar, M.J. Doresse, and his presentation at The Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris, June 17, 1949.  The presentation focused on the preliminary findings and translations regarding a 1000-page set of scriptures found in Egypt.  The article mentions that the documents were found by a group of fellahin some thirty miles north of Luxor, along the east bank of the Nile.  The find was mentioned to have been made in early 1946. So, in case you might not know, what is so special about this set of papers k...