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Photo courtesy Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, CA

Two Egyptian farmers looking for fertilizer stumbled across a large, sealed earthen jar containing 13 leather-bound books (shown here), which would come to be known as the Nag Hammadi codices. The books contained sacred writings of a gnostic Christian sect, who believed the material world was the creation of an evil demiurge and that a fully divine Jesus revealed the way to goodness.