A complete facsimile edition under UNESCO auspices was initiated in 1972, and a complete ET is planned by the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity of Claremont, California. To date, about half of the treatises have been printed.
Publication of the Cairo manuscripts was delayed by political vicissitudes, but has quickened since 1960. Its accessibility led to early publication of The Gospel of Truth, a Valentinian meditation known to Irenaeus.
The manuscripts reside in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, except for part of I-known as the Jung Codex because most of it was acquired in 1952 for the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich-which awaits return to Egypt. Thus we have forty-four completely new treatises, some of whose titles were recognized from patristic and other sources, and some identical with, or similar to, those of other extant Christian apocrypha. The collection includes doublets of The Letter of Eugnostos the Blessed (III, IV), The Egyptian Gospel (III, IV), an untitled treatise “On the Origin of the World” (II, XII), and The Gospel of Truth (I, fragments in XII). Till published in Texte und Untersuchungen 60 one (short) recension, which Nag Hammadi has duplicated (III) along with two texts of a longer version (II, IV). Three were already known: The Sophia of Jesus Christ, The Sentences of Sextus, and The Apocryphon of John. They contain in whole or part fifty-three works, most if not all translated from Greek originals. Palaeographic and other evidence suggests they were written c.330-50. Ten manuscripts are in Sahidic Coptic and three in a sub-Akmîmic dialect. The documents, probably interred in the later fourth century, perhaps when Pachomian monks were establishing Catholic orthodoxy in the area, consist of thirteen papyrus codices, one (XII) very fragmentary and another (XIII) now quite short, totaling over 1,100 pages.
The scene, so far uninvestigated archaeologically, is near the ancient sites of Chenoboskion, an important fourth-century center of Pachomian monasticism (which originated not far distant at Tabennisi), and the Roman regional capital of Diospolis Parva. A town in central Egypt on the western bank of the Nile about forty miles north of Luxor, which has given its name to a Coptic Gnostic library unearthed a few miles away in 1945-46 in a jar in a Greco-Roman cemetery.
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