During the middle years of the twentieth century, two important collections of ancient religious texts were discovered in Palestine and Egypt: the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library (250 BC to 100 A.D.)

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a very large number of scrolls—poorly preserved, many found only in tiny scraps—discovered in eleven caves near Qumran and the Dead Sea around 1947. Over 800 separate texts are among this find. The scrolls date from about 250 BCE to 100 CE, sometime after the writing of the Old Testament in today’s Bible, but before the forming of Christianity and rabbinical Judaism.

The Nag Hammadi Library discovered in upper Egypt in 1945 consists of 13 ancient leather-bound books containing 55 texts. They were all hidden together inside a large, sealed jar. After spending 1,500 years buried in the Egyptian sands, they were discovered in unbelievably good condition. They date from the first two or three centuries of the Christian era, comprising of lost and unknown Christian sacred writings. These writings are described as “Gnostic.” Included among the texts was an edition of the Gospel of Thomas and is possibly older than the four known canonical gospels. Some scholars believe these scriptures were originally composed by the Apostle Thomas Philip the Evangelist and Valentine of Alexandria. They came to us translated from the original Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. An excerpt from The Dialogue Of The Savior, Nag Hammadi reads: “Judas said, ‘Tell me, Lord, what is the beginning of the Path.’ He [Jesus] said, ‘Love and Goodness.’”

2,000 years ago, most of the Middle East was inhabited by the Jews. Later, there were many sects in Judaism. One well-known sect at the time was the vegetarian group known as the Essenes. The historian, Josephus, describing the Essenes, said, “They are Jews by birth and are particularly attached to each other. They eschew pleasure-seeking as a vice and regard temperance and mastery of the passions a virtue...They possess no one city, but everywhere have large colonies.”

Sadly much of the Dead Sea Scrolls still remain locked up by government authorities and religious scholars. Authorities and scholars of all types think that the general public “is not competent enough to interpret” what is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, it might change Christianity as we know it if these documents were officially released as Christian teachings.

From the Nag Hammadi:

The Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin...

I am the barren one, and many are her sons...

I am the silence that is incomprehensible...

I am the utterance of my name

In their book The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (1996), Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook say about the Enoch Dead Sea Scrolls, “It is fair to say that the patriarch Enoch was as well known to the ancients as he is obscure to modern Bible readers. Besides giving his age (365 years), the book of Genesis says of him only that he ‘walked with God,’ and afterward ‘he was not, because God had taken him’” (Gen. 5:24). This exalted way of life and mysterious demise made Enoch into a figure of considerable fascination, and a cycle of legends grew up around him. “Many of the legends about Enoch were collected already in ancient times in several long anthologies. The most important of such anthology, and the oldest, is known simply as The Book of Enoch, comprising over one hundred chapters. It still survives in its entirety (although only in the Ethiopic language) and forms an important source for the thought of Judaism in the last few centuries B.C. Significantly, the remnants of several almost complete copies of The Book of Enoch in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it is clear that whoever collected the scrolls considered it a vitally important text.” All but one of the five major components of the Ethiopic anthology have turned up among the scrolls. The most important of these is The Book of Giants.

“Enoch lived before the Flood, during a time when the world, in ancient imagination, was very different. Human beings lived much longer, for one thing; Enoch’s son Methuselah, for instance, attained the age of 969 years. Another difference was that angels and humans interacted freely—so freely, in fact, that some of the angels begot children with human females. This fact is neutrally reported in Genesis (6:1-4), but other stories view this episode as the source of the corruption that made the punishing flood necessary. According to The Book of Enoch, the mingling of angel and human was actually the idea of Shernihaza, the leader of the evil angels, who lured 200 others to cohabit with women. The offspring of these unnatural unions were giants 450 feet high. The wicked angels and the giants began to oppress the human population and to teach them to do evil. For this reason God determined to imprison the angels until the final judgment and to destroy the earth with a flood. Enoch’s efforts to intercede with heaven for the fallen angels were unsuccessful.” (1 Enoch 6-16).

“The Book of Giants…elaborates on the exploits of the giants, especially the two children of Shemihaza, Ohya and Hahya…Its exact contents and their order remain a matter of guesswork. Most of the content of the present fragments concerns the giants’ ominous dreams and Enoch’s efforts to interpret them and to intercede with God on the giants’ behalf. Unfortunately, little remains of the independent adventures of the giants, but it is likely that these tales were at least partially derived from ancient Near Eastern mythology. Thus the name of one of the giants is Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero and subject of a great epic written in the third millennium B.C.