HISPANOMAGNO

Translation of a Fraction of Papyri Found in Nag Hammadi

In the year that our lord Augustus conquered the Island beyond the Weastern Seas, for the glory of the people of Rome, a messanger from our province of Palestine , came before me Tulio Galliuos Africanus, asking to be heard and been a roman subject, was allowed to be presented to before us.

When he came before us, with grave and very serious demeanor delivered a document about a certain extraordinary events that had taken place in Palestine a year before. This document presented to us contained when studied later, a story about a child borne in our province of Palestine to whom a multitude of peoples from our other provinces in the East came to visit and adore him as if he was some kind of deity or royal person.

The roman backed King Herodes, is very interested in the whereabouts of this child; not because he wants to appeared before him and adore him, but because he fears some disturbance in the populace that could harm the stability of his kingdom and that of Rome.
This office has sent an emissary to Palestine to investigate these facts before send report to the Emperor chancellery and on to Ceasar. Before then, nothing will be done about this scandalous and ridiculous message.

.IN THE LOCAL PAPERS

Among the documents disinterred in Nag Hammadi-Egipt back in 1945.the Biblical scholars, had a number of codices or papyri that were unable to open let alone decipher or read them by the translators inasmuch, even touching them, they would tend to disintegrate. For the past 65 years, they were left aside in a certain chamber where preserving gases were applied to harden them and made them available.

The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman. The writings in these codices comprised fifty-two mostly Gnostic treatises, but they also include three works belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation/alteration of Plato's Republic. In his "Introduction" to The Nag Hammadi Library in English, James Robinson suggests that these codices may have belonged to a nearby Pachomian monastery, and were buried after Bishop Athanasius condemned the uncritical use of non-canonical books in his Festal Letter of 367 AD.

The contents of the codices were written in Coptic language, though the works were probably all translations from Greek. The best-known of these works is probably the Gospel of Thomas, of which the Nag Hammadi codices contain the only complete text. After the discovery it was recognized that fragments of these sayings attributed to Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1898, and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources. Subsequently, a 1st or 2nd century date of composition circa 80 AD for the lost Greek originals of the Gospel of Thomas has been proposed, though this is disputed by many if not the majority of biblical matter researchers. The once buried manuscripts themselves date from the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Coptic was used from its Christian beginnings in the late second century AD. till the time of the Great persecution of Diocletian in the early 4th century AD. predominantly as a translational tool from Greek to Egyptian. After the persecution, the monastic movement picked up tremendous steam. It was for the Copts the only way they can express their great love for God, that they earlier expressed with the willing sacrifice of their most precious possession, their earthly lives. These monastic communities were large and mostly Egyptian. This generated the need for the abbots of these communities to write their rules in their own language, i.e. Coptic. Also the Fathers of the Coptic Church, who usually wrote in Greek, addressed some of their works to the Egyptian monks in Coptic.