The Gnostic Gospels (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)

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A few weeks later, as Muḥammad ‘Alī tells it, he and his brothers avenged their father’s death by murdering Ahmed Ismā‘īl. Their mother had warned her sons to keep their mattocks sharp: when they learned that their father’s enemy was nearby, the brothers seized the opportunity, “hacked off his limbs … ripped out his heart, and devoured it among them, as the ultimate act of blood revenge.”2

Fearing that the police investigating the murder would search his house and discover the books, Muḥammad ‘Alī asked the priest, al-Qummuṣ Bạsīlīyus Abd al-Masīḥ, to keep one or more for him. During the time that Muḥammad ‘Alī and his brothers were being interrogated for murder, Raghib, a local history teacher, had seen one of the books, and suspected that it had value. Having received one from al-Qummus Bāsīlīyūs, Rāghib sent it to a friend in Cairo to find out its worth.

Sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo, the manuscripts soon attracted the attention of officials of the Egyptian government. Through circumstances of high drama, as we shall see, they bought one and confiscated ten and a half of the thirteen leather-bound books, called codices, and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. But a large part of the thirteenth codex, containing five extraordinary texts, was smuggled out of Egypt and offered for sale in America. Word of this codex soon reached Professor Gilles Quispel, distinguished historian of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Excited by the discovery, Quispel urged the Jung Foundation in Zürich to buy the codex. But discovering, when he succeeded, that some pages were missing, he flew to Egypt in the spring of 1955 to try to find them in the Coptic Museum.

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