In 1896, the Coptic Berlin Codex (aka. the Akhmim Codex), given the accession number 8502, (Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502) was unearthed in Egypt. It was a papyrus bound book (a codex), dating to the 5th century, found in the desert and taken to Berlin, where it was finally completely translated in the 1950s. Few people paid attention to it until the 1970's, when it suddenly became very interesting to a new generation of scholars of early Christianity in the wake of the more famous group of early Gnostic Christian documents that was found at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

The "Berlin Codex" is a single-quire (a quire is a set of leaves which are stitched together - for more information see bookbinding) Coptic codex bound with wooden boards covered with a leather that neither resembles tanned leather, nor does it resemble parchment or alum_tawed skin (i.e. skin that has been dressed with alum to soften and bleach it) .

Bound together among the texts in the Berlin Codex are two sections of a fragmentary Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, and the Act of Peter. These texts are often discussed together with the earlier Nag Hammadi texts.

External link

• Contents of the berlin Codex (http://www.ftsr.ulaval.ca/bcnh/traites.asp?lng=ang_) appended to an analyis of the Nag Hammadi "library"