Most people open the Nag Hammadi library at the wrong page. They’ve heard the Secret Book of John is the big one, the text with the whole myth in it, so they start there. Ten minutes later they’re reading about Barbelo and a parade of aeons with names nobody can pronounce, and they close the book and decide Gnosticism is for specialists.

It isn’t. Nobody would teach the Bible to a newcomer by starting with the genealogies in Chronicles, though, and the Gnostic texts need the same kind of sequencing.

What follows is the advice I’d give a friend who just bought the book and texted me a photo of it. Pick one text. Read it three times. Change what you’re doing on each pass.

Pick One Text and Ignore the Rest

The library is dozens of separate works by different authors, copied into a set of leather-bound books. You don’t owe it a front-to-back reading, and the edition I use most, Marvin Meyer’s The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, gives every text its own introduction so you can drop in anywhere.

For a first text I’d pick the Gospel of Thomas. It’s a list of sayings with almost no mythology, so you won’t need a glossary. Many of the sayings will sound half familiar if you grew up around the gospels, which gives you footing. And it announces how it wants to be read in its very first lines:

“These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin recorded. And he said, ‘Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.’”

That’s an invitation to work, and it’s a fair warning that the meaning won’t sit on the surface. I wrote a whole post on that first saying if you want to start even smaller.

Two other texts make decent first reads. The Gospel of Mary is short and has a clear story, though Meyer notes that its first six pages and four more from the middle are missing, so you’ll walk in mid-conversation. The Gospel of Truth is a sermon, which means it flows, and it’s one of the most beautiful things in the collection. I’ve written a walk-through of it that you could read afterward.

Save the Secret Book of John for your second or third text. You’ll enjoy it a lot more once the basic shape of the story is already in your head.

The First Pass: Straight Through, No Help

Read the text once, start to finish, in one sitting if you can. Don’t look at the footnotes. Don’t stop to search anything. If a word confuses you, keep going.

This feels wrong to anyone trained to study, and that’s the point of it. A first reading is for getting the whole thing into you at once, the way you’d hear a piece of music before trying to learn it.

You’re listening for tone. Is this text angry, tender, cryptic, funny? Thomas, for instance, turns out to be pretty funny in places, and you’ll miss that if you stop every three lines to check a note.

Keep a pencil in your hand and make one kind of mark only. Put a small tick in the margin wherever something catches. It might be a line that moved you or one that annoyed you, or simply one you didn’t understand at all. Don’t write any words yet.

What to Skip the First Time

A few things in a scholarly translation will slow you down if you let them. On the first pass you can let them go.

  • The footnotes. They’re good, and they’re for later.
  • The brackets. Meyer explains in his introduction that “Square brackets indicate a textual lacuna that has been restored.” A lacuna is a hole in the manuscript, usually where the papyrus crumbled. The words inside the brackets are the translators’ best guess at what stood there. Read through them on the first pass and just notice how many there are.
  • The dots. An ellipsis marks a gap nobody could restore. Some texts are full of them. Don’t try to fill them in with your imagination.
  • The section headings. These are worth knowing about. According to Meyer, the subheadings in the translations “are not in the texts themselves” and were added by the translators. They’re helpful signposts, but they’re somebody’s interpretation, and the ancient reader never saw them.
  • Long lists of names. If you’ve wandered into one of the mythological texts anyway, skim the catalogs of powers and angels. They matter to the system, but they don’t matter to you yet.

The Second Pass: Slow, With Notes

Wait a few days, then read it again. This time go slowly and let yourself use everything you skipped.

Go back to each tick mark. Read the footnote for that line, if there is one. Look up the unfamiliar word. Now’s the time to read the translator’s introduction properly too, since you’ve got your own impressions to test it against.

Here’s where to keep notes. I use one notebook per text, and I’d suggest a cheap one so you won’t feel precious about it.

Give each tick mark its own short entry. Copy the line, then write one sentence about why it caught you. That sentence is the most useful thing you’ll produce, because a month from now it’ll show you what you were actually looking for when you opened the book.

You’ll also find that some of your ticks were confusion that the notes clear up in seconds. Cross those off. What’s left after the second pass is a much shorter list, and it’s yours.

The Third Pass: Aloud, and Only a Little

The third reading is the one most people skip, and it’s where the texts start to work the way their authors meant them to.

Pick the one passage from your short list that you keep coming back to. Read it aloud, slowly, a few times over a week. You’re done studying it, so don’t analyze it. Just say it and see what it does.

A collection like Thomas has the feel of something passed along by memory and spoken out loud. (I made the case for memorizing a handful of sayings in an earlier post.) Reading aloud slows you down to the pace those sayings were built for. Christians later formalized something like this as lectio divina, the slow monastic reading of a short passage until it starts reading you back.

Expect to Be Bothered

Somewhere in the second or third pass, many readers hit a line that upsets them. Maybe it contradicts something they were raised on, or seems to say something harsh about the body or the world. The temptation is to decide the whole text is wrong, or to decide you’ve misread it and move on.

Thomas has a saying for exactly this moment. It’s the second one in the collection:

“Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one will marvel and will reign over all.”

Notice the order. Being troubled comes after finding, and before marveling. The text treats your discomfort as a sign you’ve reached something, which is the opposite of how most of us read it.

So when a line bothers you, give it its own page in the notebook and leave it unresolved for a while. Some of the sayings I’ve argued with longest are the ones I value most now.

A Week With One Text

Here’s the whole plan on one screen:

  • Day one. Read the whole text straight through. Ticks only, no notes.
  • Day three or four. Second pass with the footnotes and the introduction. One notebook entry per tick, then cross off what got cleared up.
  • The rest of the week. One passage, read aloud each day. No analysis.
  • Afterward. Go back to the reading list and choose the next text by whatever your notebook says you were hungry for.

That last step is the real reason for the notebook. Your one-sentence notes tell you whether you want more sayings, more story, or the full mythology, and they tell you more honestly than any recommendation could. If your friend texts you the photo of the book, send them this plan and tell them to start with Thomas.

The Gospel of Thomas (NHC II,2) is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). The notes on square brackets, ellipses, subheadings, and the missing pages of the Gospel of Mary come from Meyer’s general introduction and his introduction to the Gospel of Mary in the same volume.