Nag Hammadi Library: by James M. Robinson, Richard Smith.

The official blurb gives reasons to read this book, more than that, reasons why anyone caring about history and truth thereof would probably find this worth a read. -

"This revised, expanded, and updated edition of The Nag Hammadi Library is the only complete, one-volume, modern language version of the renowned library of fourth-century manuscripts discovered in Egypt in 1945. First published in 1978, The Nag Hammadi Library launched modern Gnostic studies and exposed a movement whose teachings are in many ways as relevant today as they were sixteen centuries ago. James M. Robinson's updated introduction reflects ten years of additional research and editorial and critical work. An afterword by Richard Smith discusses the modern relevance of Gnosticism and its influence on such writers as Voltaire, Blake, Melville, Yeats, Kerouac, and Philip K. Dick. Acclaimed by scholars and general readers alike, The Nag Hammadi Library is a work of major importance to everyone interested in the evolution of Christianity, the Bible, archaeology, and the story of Western civilization."

Gnosticism obviously was not all dead these sixteen centuries - shouldn't that be at least twenty, sixteen being the number of centuries it went underground while twenty being probably the real age of the documents in this? - For Yeats, Voltaire and co, not to mention others before them (Da Vinci?) were aware of the thought if not of the labels and of the Nag Hammadi location.

Indeed, while the libraries in Alexandria, Egypt and Spain were burned by inquisition and their predecessors of official Roman authorities wiping out all traces of thought and evidence and facts Rome had decided to banish for convenience, there had been scholars, Jewish and Arabic, who had kept various documents alive, which eventually found their way into establishing Paris as a centre of quest for knowledge and learning by passing Rome and authority in the interest of knowledge pure - and hence grew the university and science.

But on the other hand Rome did have and was granted monopoly of a sort over theology, in west at any rate, albeit by power of Rome over matters of politics as well as other realms, power abrogated by Rome to oneself, and this stranglehold of power of Rome could only break with discoveries of Nag Hammadi documents that not only were often new - whole gospels - but were contradictory to those authorised by Rome while the rest were presumed carefully obliterated, although this discovery fortunately proved the obliteration was not successful, fortunately for the quest for truth.

This being the volume that gives those of the discovered documents that were in Nag Hammadi, a major source, is probably worth a read.

Unless it is one of those regular efforts by authorities after all to obfuscate the truth again, as often shown on television information channels, with soothing voices and pooh-poohing of anything not authorised these last sixteen centuries.