How Many Gnostic Gospels Are There?

Why every article gives a different number

Because “gnostic gospel” smuggles in two decisions: what counts as a gospel (a title? a genre?) and what counts as gnostic (a myth? a vibe? anything buried at Nag Hammadi?). Choose different definitions and you get 4, 6, 13, or 52 — all defensible, all counting different shelves. The numbers below are the three honest ones.

Count 1: texts titled “gospel” (4 + 2)

The manuscripts themselves title four Nag Hammadi works “gospel” — and two more recoveries complete the famous six:

Count 2: gospels by genre (about 13)

Broaden “gospel” to its working sense — a book presenting Jesus' teaching or story — and the recovered library adds the dialogue gospels and revelation discourses: the Secret Book of James, the Dialogue of the Savior, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Apocryphon of John, and others. Most counts on this definition land near thirteen, which is why “the thirteen gnostic gospels” circulates online. It is a genre count, not a manuscript title count — fine, as long as you say so.

Count 3: the 52-tractate library

The biggest number is the whole jar: thirteen codices, 52 tractates, about 46 distinct works once duplicates are merged. But the library is a mixed shelf — Sethian apocalypses beside Hermetic treatises, wisdom maxims, liturgies, and a Coptic excerpt of Plato's Republic. Calling all of it “52 gnostic gospels” is the internet's favorite counting error. The full inventory, codex by codex, is on our complete list — the fastest way to see what the find actually contains.

Which are actually “gnostic”?

Text by text, the label wobbles. Judas and the Apocryphon of John are gnostic by any definition — full Sethian myth. Philip and Truth are Valentinian. But Thomas has no gnostic myth at all, Mary's is thin, and the Egyptians is ritual Sethian literature rather than a Jesus story. Scholars like Michael Williams and Karen King have argued the category itself blurs more than it clarifies. Popular usage will keep saying “the gnostic gospels” — Elaine Pagels's bestseller fixed the phrase permanently in 1979 — and this library keeps the phrase as its doorway while telling you, on every text page, exactly what school (if any) the text belongs to.

Read them all

Five of the six famous gospels are already complete on this site, with the sixth on the public roadmap — alongside the infancy gospels, the passion fragments, and the wisdom texts that traveled with them. Start anywhere on the shelf; every page names its manuscript, its translator, and its gaps.