In December 1945, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman, digging for fertilizer near the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif in Upper Egypt, struck a sealed earthenware jar buried in the soil. The jar contained thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices — what would come to be called the Nag Hammadi Library, the most important Christian manuscript discovery of the 20th century alongside the roughly contemporaneous Dead Sea Scrolls.
The codices were written in Coptic and copied in the fourth century CE, but they translate underlying Greek works that mostly date from the second through fourth centuries. Together they contain more than fifty texts. The best known is the Gospel of Thomas — not a narrative gospel but a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, some paralleling the canonical Gospels and some unique to this text. Other significant works include the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Apocryphon of John, and the Pistis Sophia.
The collection’s center of gravity is Gnostic — the broad and various family of second- and third-century Christian movements that the emerging orthodox Church identified as heretical. Gnostic teaching generally distinguished a lesser creator-deity from a higher unknowable God, treated material existence with suspicion, and offered salvation through esoteric knowledge (gnosis) rather than through faith and the sacraments. The Nag Hammadi texts are the primary surviving sources for what these movements actually taught; before 1945 they were known almost entirely through the polemical descriptions of their opponents (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus).
For Latter-day Saint readers the find is significant background to the Restoration’s account of an early apostasy. The diversity and contention of second- and third-century Christianity that the Nag Hammadi texts make vividly visible is part of the historical landscape in which the faithful Christian tradition struggled to preserve apostolic teaching — and the eventual closing of that struggle, on the Latter-day Saint view, called for the Restoration that began with Joseph Smith. The texts themselves are not scripture; their theological frameworks differ substantially from both Christian and Latter-day Saint orthodoxies.