The Nag Hammadi Codices and Graeco-Egyptian Magical and Occult Literature

Lundhaug and Jenott reply that Emmel's hypothesis is unlikely.Rather, they argue,The Nag Hammadi texts were most likely translated into Coptic so that they could be read and understood by Coptic speakers who had inadequate knowledge of GreekIt is unlikely that people who belonged to the urban elite would have translated literary texts like these from Greek into Coptic, or that they would have chosen to read such texts in Coptic rather than in Greek if both were available.There is simply no indication that urban intellectuals would have read literary texts in Coptic. 3"There is simply no indication that urban intellectuals would have read literary texts in Coptic."I cannot contest this statement.The mysterious character of the origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices owes, as Khosroyev, Emmel, Lundhaug, and Jenott all recognize, to the fact that the books contain texts in Coptic.Moreover, even if we acknowledge the possibility of their manufacture in the fifth or even sixth centuries CE, 4 the Nag Hammadi Codices retain their position as some of the earliest Coptic literary manuscripts we possess.If we prefer the traditional, earlier dating of roughly mid-fourth century CE, the translation of their contents into Coptic and the subsequent production of the books stand next to the beginnings of Coptic literature itself.This is why Lundhaug and Jenott's move to contextualize the codices in fourth and fifth-Ewa Wipszycka, "A Monastic Origin of the Nag Hammadi Codices?" Adamantius 23 (2017): 446, 452.On Zosimus, see further below.The present approach to the question, however, is chiefly inspired by the phrasing of Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 170-71: "Both collections illustrate that interlocking of the technical and philosophical approaches ... The overall emphasis of the Thebes cache is technical, that of the Nag Hammadi codices philosophical and theological.But there is enough common ground to confirm that the view of Hermetism we find in Zosimus and Iamblichus reflected a broader consensus" (ibid., 172).The "Thebes cache" (or "Theban Magical Library") is an archive of third-fourth-century CE Greek and Demotic scrolls containing formularies of magical texts; it constitutes a vitally important part of the PGM (Greek Magical Papyri) discussed below, n. 5, but is not coterminous with it.On the discovery of the Theban Magical Library, see Korshi Dosoo, "A History of the Theban Magical Library," BASP 53 (2016): 251-74, followed by Jacco Dieleman, "The Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri," in Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic (ed.David Frankfurter; RGRW 189; Leiden: Brill, 2019), 292-93."These two papyrus collections are tangible products of Upper Egyptian milieux related to, though linguistically at least more native than, that of the Hermetica.The only other comparable source we have is the alchemist Zosimus" (Fowden, Egyptian Hermes, 173; followed by Michle Mertens, "Introduction historique," in Zosimus of Panopolis, Mmoires Authentiques [ed.and trans.

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