The Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic Origins
History sometimes arranges its evidence with suspicious timing. In 1945, a farmer near Nag Hammadi in Egypt broke open a sealed jar of buried Gnostic scriptures. Within about two years, in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, Bedouin shepherds of the Ta’amireh tribe found the first cave of what became the Dead Sea Scrolls, another buried library, also in jars, also hidden from a hostile century. Two libraries, interred by two different communities, surfacing almost together after nearly two millennia underground. They document different movements, and reading them side by side transformed one of scholarship’s oldest questions, which is where Gnosticism actually came from. The answer the jars suggest is closer to home than anyone expected. ...