The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices by Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott (review)

According to the authors, the purpose of their study is to demonstrate that “available evidence concerning the provenance of the NHC is best explained by a Christian monastic origin in Upper Egypt” (1). As it is clear from this formulation, the evidence is examined in order to defend a thesis according to which the NHC were produced by, destined to, and owned by Christian monks.

Entitled “The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics,” Chapter One is devoted to a brief history of the question and the dating of the codices. The authors adopt the post quem terminus of 348 c.e. provided by a fragment of papyrus recycled in the cartonnage of codex VII. They argue that it may have been many years before these papyri were recycled for use in binding the codex.

Chapter Two is devoted to the monastic diversity in Upper Egypt in the time period of the Nag Hammadi codices as it is attested by literary evidence (travelogues, hagiographies, Shenoute), archaeological evidence, and documentary evidence (mainly Meletian or from the Nag Hammadi covers). In conclusion, the authors believe that the Pachomian hypothesis “still has much to recommend” (55).

Chapter Three (“Gnostics?”) successively reviews three questions: “Sethian Gnostics?,” “Gnostics in Fourth- and Fifth-Century Egypt?,” and “Gnostics in Egyptian Monasteries?” The authors conclude that “we do not find ‘gnosticism’ or ‘Gnostic’ to be helpful categories for theorizing about the origins of the Nag Hammadi codices and their owners” (73).

Entitled “Contrasting Mentalities,” Chapter Four is devoted to the alleged gap between the contents of the Nag Hammadi codices and the monastic mentality as it is mainly described by Khosroyev, as well as to a refutation of his hypothesis of “urban literati” shared with Emmel. Again, this chapter leads to the conclusion that “the theory that the books were produced and read by Christian monks accounts well for all the textual, paratextual and artefactual evidence concerning the provenance of the Nag Hammadi Codices” (103).

Chapter Five, the longest of the book, is devoted to the cartonnage of the covers. Again, the conclusion of the chapter is that “the monastic community witnessed in many of the cartonnage documents, most prominently from the cover of codex VII, but showing traces here and there in other covers too, would be the most likely setting in which the Nag Hammadi Codices themselves were produced and read” (144).

Chapter Six is devoted to the well-attested circulation of apocryphal books in Egyptian monasteries, especially within the Pachomian federation, as it is attested in the fifth century by Dioscorus and Shenoute. In the conclusion, it is stated that this circulation of apocryphal texts provides “a model for understanding the monastic community that read the Nag Hammadi Codices” (177), this single “monastic community” being taken for granted.

Chapters Seven and Eight are devoted respectively to the colophons and to the codices. The general conclusion is that “the scribes of the Nag Hammadi Codices belonged to the communities who used them” (206). It is interesting to note that in the conclusion of Chapter Six, there was one monastic community, while here, there are a number of “monastic communities.” In the conclusion to Chapter Eight, the authors state that the classification of the NHC into subgroups does not rule out the possibility that they were “produced in a monastery or in a network of monasteries” (231).

Chapter Nine is devoted to different categories of monks: Meletian, Origenist, and Pachomian. Once again, the conclusion is that the Pachomian monks who lived close to the Jabal al-Tarif are “the most likely people to have owned the Nag Hammadi Codices” (256).

Chapter Ten works as a general summary and conclusion, and the last paragraph is noteworthy: “In the final analysis, it seems the only way we can hope to understand the Nag Hammadi codices in their proper historical context is by acknowledging a much higher degree of...