My Girl Syndrome

The greatest strength of the Nag Hammadi library is also its greatest weakness: the 47 generations that passed between its time and ours. They had no part in handing it down to us.

It is like going back in time and seeing what was really there. But because it did not pass down through all those generations, what we are looking might really be just as mad as it seems. There is no quality control, as they say.

Two movies that I saw not too long ago were both set in about the same time: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was set in 1971 and made in 1971. The other was My Girl, which is set in 1972 but made almost twenty years later in 1991. Willy Wonka shows us the early 1970’s as it was, My Girl as it is remembered. So while the children in Willy Wonka have on clothes that were in fashion then, even if they look dreadful now, the clothes that appear in My Girl are only those that were in fashion then and are still acceptable now.

And that is how history works.

Say you want to find out about the fourth century. If you read books written now about it, it will be the fourth century as viewed from our time. Unless it is very good, it will be about unjust wars and the battle between the sexes. It will be about bad government and religion out of control. Because that is what we see in our time. We read the present back into the past. It is more about our time than theirs.

Better would be to read what the fourth century wrote. We might know some things about the fourth century that were not generally known back then, like about the lead in the water pipes. But by and large it is hard to beat a report from the field, however imperfect. Even its errors and point of view are revealing.

But we would still not have a true picture. Most of the books we have passed through those 47 generations. Not all of them made it. So by and large only what speaks to all times and not just to the fourth century have made it down to us – like the Confessions of Augustine.

Both Euripides and Sophocles wrote their plays in the fifth century before Christ, yet we have more plays of Euripides than Sophocles. Why? Not because Euripides wrote more plays, but because a century later Euripides was in, Sophocles was out. (Likewise the future of twentieth century letters rests on us).

And just the same sort of thing happened to the fourth century. It will happen to ours.

And that is what makes the Nag Hammadi library so valuable – and everything else that has made it down to us through the wonderfully dry sands of Egypt.

– Abagond, 2006.

See also:

• Nag-Hammadi Library
• Reading old books
• Reading old newspapers