A Gnostic interpretation of Matthew 2:27-28

[Armozel]

Greetings to the Community,
I'd like to introduce myself as a Gnostic Christian Buddhist.
After struggling to understand the Nag Hammadi Library many years ago, I turned my attention to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and was amazed to learn how deeply they had influenced the writers of the New Testament. I was immediately struck by the synchronicity; the Nag Hammadi Library having been discovered in December of 1945, the Dead Sea Scrolls the following winter. Could this be something other than mere coincidence?
Taken together, these two entirely miraculous discoveries reveal to us the sectarian cradle of Christianity, and the long suppressed Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus. There may even have been a direct link between the Sethians of Nag Hammadi and the Essenes of Qumran. The Sethians may have formed as a splinter movement led by John the Baptist, with a new ritual, the Baptism of the Five Seals, resembling the jar consecrations of an early Buddhist tantra.
Please consider a spiritual interpretation of the synchronicity of Nag Hammadi and Qumran, based Matthew 24:27-28, offered on this website:
https://secondcoming1945.com


Second Coming 1945
secondcoming1945.com
This website interpretes Matthew 24:27-28 to show that Jesus was able to foresee the apocalyptic events in Japan of 1945, and his spirit guided men to the discoveries of the Nag Hammadi Library, in December 1945, and the Dead Sea Scrolls a year later, to reveal his Gnostic teaching, and the sectarian roots of Christianity and Sethian Gnosticism.

I would be very interested in any comments you may have.
Best Regards,
Armozel

 

[Rakovsky]

Wikipedia relates the December 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts this way:

The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 has been described as 'as exciting as the contents of the find itself'.[3] In December of that year, two Egyptian brothers found several papyri in a large earthenware vessel while digging for fertilizer around the Jabal al-Ṭārif caves near present-day Hamra Dom in Upper Egypt. Neither originally reported the find, as they sought to make money from the manuscripts by selling them individually at intervals.

In 1946, the brothers became involved in a feud, and left the manuscripts with a Coptic priest. In October that year, their brother-in-law sold a codex to the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo (this tract is today numbered Codex III in the collection). The resident Coptologist and religious historian Jean Doresse, realizing the significance of the artifact, published the first reference to it in 1948.

Nag Hammadi library - Wikipedia

The Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in late 1946-1947:

The initial discovery by Bedouin shepherd Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum'a Muhammed, and Khalil Musa, took place between November 1946 and February 1947.[14][15] The shepherds discovered seven scrolls (See Scrolls and fragments) housed in jars in a cave near what is now known as the Qumran site. John C. Trever reconstructed the story of the scrolls from several interviews with the Bedouin. Edh-Dhib's cousin noticed the caves, but edh-Dhib himself was the first to actually fall into one (the cave now called Cave 1). He retrieved a handful of scrolls, which Trever identifies as the Isaiah Scroll, Habakkuk Commentary, and the Community Rule, and took them back to the camp to show to his family. None of the scrolls were destroyed in this process.[16] The Bedouin kept the scrolls hanging on a tent pole while they figured out what to do with them, periodically taking them out to show to their people. At some point during this time, the Community Rule was split in two. The Bedouin first took the scrolls to a dealer named Ibrahim 'Ijha in Bethlehem. 'Ijha returned them, saying they were worthless, after being warned that they might have been stolen from a synagogue. Undaunted, the Bedouin went to a nearby market, where a Syrian Christian offered to buy them.

Dead Sea Scrolls - Wikipedia

I guess that a skeptic about the coincidence of the find could theorize that the British were very interested in archaeology (like their research on the pyramids), the British controlled Egypt and Palestine at the time, wanted the texts to get published, and the local populace in both places was encouraged to look for old manuscripts and either some Western researchers planted these ancient authentic texts and made up a story about the finding, or else the discoverers were encouraged to search for such texts and then did so. In the latter instance, the Bedouin might not have really accidentally fallen into the cave as claimed in the Wikipedia article, but might instead have been searching inside the cave for such materials. Or even the Bedouins might have had an oral tradition about the jars' location that they handed down for a hundred years or more, and then they went looking for the jars when the British came because the British were interested in such discoveries.

 

[Rakovsky]

I believe that the common story about the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in late 1946 is made up. Nicola Lewis, of Claremont College which has photos of the pages of the codices online, has an article directed at debunking that story, and instead suggesting that the codices had been on the black market for antiquities without the original official story being the correct one. Lewish writes:

I argued in my publication that the elaborate find-story was a sort of “cover” for the reality of illegal antiquities dealing in mid-twentieth-century Egypt, even as it played to our own Western, Orientalizing fantasies of “saving” antiquities from a native audience who could scarcely understand or appreciate their value to world history. Playing into our own prejudices, the find-story neatly sidestepped suspicions that the codices were illegally obtained from clandestine excavations. The stories allowed scholars, in effect, to feel good about basing academic work on looted antiquities. “After all,” the logic goes, “they were just there, sitting in a jar in the open desert, waiting to be discovered and their ancient wisdom disseminated through serendipity and the expertise of Western scholars, changing everything we thought we knew about early Christianity.”

In previous publications I criticized Robinson for sensationalizing the Nag Hammadi discoveries, for changing details, and perhaps even for intentionally crafting a narrative that obscured a distasteful reality: that these books were obtained illegally or illegitimately, robbed out from some lost Egyptian site. At this point, five years after my initial research, I am less inclined to say that Robinson himself invented this story. Instead, I think he believed a story that came together from a well-organized ring of dealers and suppliers active in Egypt, masters of presenting illegally-obtained material in attractive and “safe” ways for Western scholars eager to buy into their fictions.
...
We also come across one particular name: Phokion Tano. Tano was a third-generation antiquities dealer whose family hailed originally from Cyprus. He was the great-nephew of a famous dealer, Marious Panayiotis Tano(s), who set up a Cairene business in 1870 and supplied antiquities to many European museums, including the Louvre. Tano’s nephew Nicolas took over his uncle’s business, supplying many precious artifacts to museums in the west, including the Ashmolean, the British Museum, Chicago’s Oriental Institute, and the University of Michigan. The Tanos dealt easily in the back shadows and back rooms of Cairo, and many of their antiquities were entirely unprovenanced. The sellers who retracted sale of the Nag Hammadi codices after preliminary offers had already been made (apparently) took the books to Phokion Tano, who purchased the lot.
...
In the final analysis, it is unclear to me how authentic any of these chains of provenance actually are. They all derive from Robinson’s reconstruction, which began a full thirty years after the fact, and after the deaths of virtually all the figures concerned. Robinson worked tirelessly to find and verify the books’ provenance, making multiple trips to the area around Daba, and even carrying out extensive excavations at the Jabal that produced, embarrassingly, absolutely nothing. Still, when – thirty years later – Robinson arrived at a small town by the Jabal al-Tarif, it is unsurprising that his earnest entreaties, well supported with bribes, produced someone willing to take on the role of the manuscripts’ discoverer.

“Property of a gentleman”: The market of ancient manuscripts and the problem of provenance

Lewish concludes:

And I suspect that Tano was simply the end of a well-established chain of dealers and suppliers who worked the margins of the antiquities trade in mid-twentieth-century Egypt. So where, ultimately, did the so-called Nag Hammadi codices come from? We can only guess. The general area of the find is known; the area contains monastic ruins but also ancient and widespread cemeterial grounds.

So we really can't say that the Nag Hammadi books were discovered in 1946 about the same time as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Nag Hammadi works could have been already kept for a long time by private collectors and traders and then released at an opportune time soon after WWII due perhaps to a special interest in such ancient texts as well as a change in Western attitudes, greater oppenness to or tolerance toward allowing heretical books that 400 years earlier might have been simply discarded in the West.