Editorial
Sources & Standards
Ancient texts deserve the same honesty you'd demand of a museum label. These are the rules every page on this site — and every screen in our apps — follows, without exception.
The five rules
1. No invented scripture
Every line of ancient text we publish traces to a named source: a Nag Hammadi codex, the Berlin Codex, Codex Tchacos, the Akhmîm fragment, a named papyrus. Where a text has no manuscript, its page says so on its face: the Gospel of Q is a scholarly reconstruction from the material Matthew and Luke share, and we label it as one. Where we publish our own renderings, they are labeled as renderings — a living voice, not a literal translation — and the manuscript citation sits beside them.
2. Gaps shown as gaps
The manuscripts are damaged. Pages are missing from the Gospel of Mary; lines are gone from the Gospel of Judas; the Gospel of Peter starts and stops mid-sentence. We print brackets and gap notices exactly where the losses fall. We never smooth a lacuna into continuous prose, and we never adopt another edition's conjecture without marking it as one.
Every gap in a text is followed by an asterisk, and a note under the passage says what it means: the ancient copy is damaged, lost or unreadable at that point, and nothing has been left out by us. The asterisk is ours, added for readers; the brackets and the words are the source's own.
3. Rights-clean translations, credited
We publish only: translations explicitly released into the public domain (Mark M. Mattison's and Samuel Zinner's translations at gospels.net); translations in the public domain by age (G.R.S. Mead, M.R. James); and our own renderings. Every text page carries its translator's name and the source of its public domain status. We do not reproduce copyrighted translations.
4. Named manuscripts, named scholars
Claims about dates, discoveries, and interpretation cite the manuscripts (NHC II,2; BG 8502; Codex Tchacos; P.Oxy. 1, 654, 655) and name the scholars whose work we summarize — Pagels, King, Layton, Brakke, DeConick, and others. Where scholarship genuinely disagrees, we say so instead of picking a winner quietly.
5. Dates maintained honestly
Every article shows its published and updated dates. When we revise a page, the date changes; when we haven't, it doesn't pretend otherwise. The sitemap carries those same dates rather than stamping every URL with the moment of the last deploy, which is the internet's most common small lie.
The corpus, by the numbers
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Texts served | 19 |
| Words of primary source | 83,705 |
| Named translators | 4 (plus our own labeled renderings) |
| Texts in the public domain by release or by age | 18 of 19 |
| Texts served as our own rendering, labeled as such | 1 |
| Copyrighted translations reproduced | Zero |
Counts are generated from the corpus itself at build time, so this table cannot drift from what the site actually serves.
Our translators
Four names carry this library. Naming them is not a courtesy — it is the difference between a text you can check and a text you have to trust. Each translator below is credited on every page that uses their work, alongside the manuscript it came from.
- Mark M. Mattison — the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, Judas, Philip, Truth, and Peter, the Secret Book of James, the Egerton Gospel, both Infancy Gospels, and the reconstructed Q. Translated from the Coptic and Greek and released into the public domain by the translator at gospels.net.
- Samuel Zinner — the Secret Gospel of Mark (the Mar Saba letter, labeled disputed on its page because its authenticity is genuinely unsettled), from gospels.net, released into the public domain; proofread by Mark M. Mattison.
- G.R.S. Mead (1863–1933) — the Hymn of the Pearl (from The Hymn of the Robe of Glory, 1908), Pistis Sophia (1921), and Poimandres, the first tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum. Public domain by publication date.
- M.R. James (1862–1936) — the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Apocalypse of Peter, from The Apocryphal New Testament (1924). Public domain by publication date.
- The Gnostic Library renderings — currently Thunder, Perfect Mind, made from the Coptic of Nag Hammadi Codex VI,2 and labeled on its page as a rendering rather than a translation. It covers the whole poem, all nine manuscript pages (NHC VI 13,1 to 21,32); where the tops of pages 17 to 21 are damaged, the page shows the loss rather than smoothing it over.
Corrections
If you find an error — a wrong date, a misattributed line, a gap we failed to mark — write to us and we'll fix it and stamp the update date. The first scholar to open this library should find nothing to correct; when they do anyway, we'd rather know.
Who makes this
The Gnostic Library is built by Aquarius Mobile Studios, the maker of The Gospel of Thomas Daily. The site and the apps share one corpus, one set of standards, and one promise: no ads, no tracking, no invented scripture.