8 The French scholar Jacques Matter studied Gnosticism already before the discovery of the Coptic-gnostic source texts, using mainly patristic sources. His pioneering Histoire critique du gnosticisme (1828; rev. ed. 1843) was published with an interesting set of engravings, among them one of the Valentinian Pleroma. The Frenchman Jean Doresse was one of the first scholars to inspect the new finds from Nag Hammadi. He went to Egypt to study the manuscripts and published on them in his elaborate study Les livres secrets des gnostiques d'Égypte (1958) which soon after also appeared in English.

9 James McConkey Robinson played an important part as general editor of the Coptic Gnostic Library series published under the auspices of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California. Thus a team of gnostic scholars prepared the scholarly publication of the texts in the Nag Hammadi Library. The facsimile edition of the entire collection was completed in 1977, which year also saw the first edition of the authoritative integral English translation, The Nag Hammadi Library in English. By that time (from 1956 onwards) a number of facsimile editions and modern translations of separate texts from the Library had also appeared. Robinson published a number of articles detailing the history (discovery, marketing, translating and editing) of the codices until their final publication in these integral editions.

10 The editors based this integral Dutch translation of the Nag Hammadi Library on the scholarly editions and modern translations available to them at the time, taking the translator and gnostic scholar G.R.S. Mead as their model: '...the translating (of these texts) requires not only a good knowledge of Greek (and Coptic), but above all of gnosis...'. Elaborate introductions and commentaries accompany the thematically arranged texts.