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Nag Hammadi Library
The Nag Hammadi library (popularly known as The Gnostic Gospels) is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the town of Nag Hammâdi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali. The writings in these codices comprised fifty-two mostly Gnostic tractates (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, 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 of 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.

The Nag Hammadi codices are housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt.
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Metalogos
In December of 1945 two Muslim Egyptian farmers, Muhammad ‘Alí al-Sammán and his brother Khalífah ‘Alí, found over 1100 pages of ancient papyrus manuscripts buried by the east bluff of the upper Nile valley. The texts were translations from Greek originals into Coptic, the Hellenistic stage of the ancient Hamitic language of the Pharaohs (Gen 10:6). This dialect evolved after the invasion of Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and was subsequently replaced by Arabic as the Egyptian vernacular following the Muslim conquest of 640 AD. Coptic was thus the tongue of the primitive Egyptian Church, and remains its liturgical language unto the present day.

The site of this discovery, across the river from the modern town of Nag Hammadi, was already famous as the location called in antiquity (‘Goose-Pasture’), where in 320 AD Saint Pachomius founded the earliest Christian monastery. Less than a half-century later in 367 AD, the local monks copied some 45 diverse religious and philosophical writings— including the Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Truth, as well as part of Plato’s Republic (588A-589B)— into a dozen leather-bound codices. This entire library was carefully sealed in an urn and hidden nearby among the rocks, where it remained undetected for almost 1600 years. These papyri, first seen by scholars in March of 1946 (Jacques Schwarz & Charles Kuentz, Codex II, in a Cairo antiquities shop), have since 1952 been preserved in the Coptic Museum of Old Cairo. The earliest photographic edition of the manuscript of the preeminently important Codex II was edited by Dr Pahor Labib (Cairo: Government Antiquities Dept, 1956).

The author of the Gospel of Thomas is recorded as Thomas the Apostle, one of the Twelve. The text is a collection of over one hundred sayings and short dialogues of the Savior, without any connecting narrative. A few Christian authors in antiquity quoted one or another of its logia as Scripture— for example Sayings 2 22 27 37 by Clement of Alexandria (circa 150-211 AD) in his Stromata (Patches)— but without explicit attribution to Thomas.
From: Metalogos: The Gospels of Thomas, Phillip and Truth