King Jesus!

This year marks a remarkable anniversary in the study of Christian history. Seventy years ago, in late 1945, some Egyptian peasants discovered a trove of early Christian texts including several alternative gospels, all probably buried in the 380s. When they became available in translation in the 1970s, these so-called Nag Hammadi texts caused enormous excitement, suggesting as they did that the earliest Christianity was far more diverse in tone than we might expect from the canonical New Testament, much more mystical and speculative. This was for instance the view presented in Elaine Pagels’s accessible and vastly popular 1979 work The Gnostic Gospels. Such ideas have been reinforced by a series of subsequent finds, such as the Gospel of Judas.