ABSTRACT

Less well known than the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC), yet seemingly related to them, stands the Tchacos Codex (CT), these two collections of ancient “Gnostic” works together making up as significant a set of post-War discoveries for Biblical and archaeological scholarship as the uncovering of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see ch. 2 ). CT has presented special challenges for readers of ancient Gnostic texts. Discovered at the Jabal Qarara, in the El Minya region of Middle Egypt in the mid-late 1970s and sometimes called the Qarara Codex, the original book manuscript was not strictly researched by experts for three decades whereas work on NHC started in earnest in 1955, closer to discovery. CT was instead frustratingly relocated four times, to Cairo (from 1980), Geneva (1983), Long Island (1984), and then to Celigny, Geneva, Switzerland (by 2000). CT as an archaeological item is also seriously damaged, possibly through bad storage, even by having some stake driven through it (!), unfortunate for a codex that is now carbon-dated to the 280s ce, well before NHC, the more famous cache now thought to be transcribed by Christian monks in Egypt in the fourth and fifth centuries (Lundhaug and Jenott 2015). The Maecenas Foundation eventually invited Rodolphe Kasser and Florence Darbre to examine the damaged CT. An initial analysis was presented at the Eighth International Congress of Coptic Studies (IACS) in 2004, with the first English book, focused on the Gospel of Judas, being published not long after (Kasser, Meyer, and Wurst 2006).