Whether these echoes are circumstantial or not is up for debate, especially as these Gospels were presumed lost until their discovery among the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in the 20th Century.
In 1975-1976 he was part of a team doing excavations at the Nag Hammadi site in Egypt for UC Berkeley.
Parts of the Hermetica appeared in the 4th-century Gnostic library found in Nag Hammadi.
Throughout the novel, Christ utters the actual sayings (logia) of the Gnostic gospels found at Nag Hammadi Egypt.
Nag Hammadi library | Nag Hammadi | Nag Panchami | Qasim Abid Muhammad Hammadi al-Fahadawi | Nag Hammadi Library | Ichchhadhari Nag | Aluminium Nag Hammâdi |
With a summa cum laude thesis on the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Coptic Treatise on the Resurrection, which he presented in a critical edition in 1978, he has moved on to present critical editions of other texts: The Hypostasis of the Archons, Or, The Reality of the Rulers..., serialized in Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974) 351—425 and 69 (1976) 1—71, and others.
Meyer edited a collection of English translations of the Nag Hammadi texts for the HarperOne imprint, the most recently revised edition of which has been released as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures in 2007, including help from James M. Robinson who has edited an earlier publication of the library.