[norir]

Most of the early christian texts were suppressed and destroyed. In the 1940s some ancient texts that had been buried for nearly 2000 years were found in Egypt and not realizing their value, a family member used many of them for kindling. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, the existence of these materials was known from references in orthodox texts but they had been completely lost. Of course we have no idea of what was contained in the texts that were burned and we have no idea what else is out there so we don't even know what has been lost. Similarly, parmenides is considered by many philosophers to be the "father of logic" which he brought forth in a long poem. Unfortunately, we only have about 160 of the estimated 800 verses in the poem, so again we are lacking basic knowledge of the origins of our civilization that was written down at one time but has been lost.

Digital information seems especially likely to me to be lost over time because the recording nearly always requires an instrument to extract and these instruments do not have nearly the durability of books.

[wl]

The near loss of texts in the Nag Hammadi library and the fragmentary transmission of Parmenides (or Sappho, Thales, Manetho, and countless others, for that matter) is not about book burning. That's playing into ideologically-motivated narratives about knowledge vs. religion and ignores the reality of textual transmission prior to movable type printing making the production of books relatively inexpensive. We've lost most of the texts from the ancient world not because they've been suppressed or deliberately destroyed, but because tended to be written on organic materials that do not stand the test of time. In a few parts of the world like Egypt, the hot, dry climate preserves some of these ancient manuscripts to varying degrees. But for the most part, ancient texts survive because there was interest in those texts sufficient for scribes to expend considerable effort in making new copies by hand as older copies decayed or wore out. In the ancient world, texts died not from suppression, but from decay combined with lack of interest or neglect.

If you want to talk about early Christian texts, the Didache is instructive. It's orthodox and never was suppressed. It's earlier than much—if not all—of the canonical Greek scriptures. However, the canonical scriptures overshadowed it and it became obscure, to the point where the only known complete copy today is a single 11th century manuscript that was found behind a bookshelf in a monastery in the 19th century.

[norir]

> The near loss of texts in the Nag Hammadi library and the fragmentary transmission of Parmenides (or Sappho, Thales, Manetho, and countless others, for that matter) is not about book burning.

I can't speak to the reasons for the loss of Parmenides' poem, but scholars seem to think that the Nag Hammadi was indeed buried to prevent their destruction after Athanasius condemned non-canonical sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library.

Regardless, my point is that at least a written text has the chance of being discovered and understood in the future. The arctic code vault is actually interesting in this regard, but decoding it to find the jewels would likely be extremely challenging. There also is a lot of important technical information that isn't on github.

[wl]

Elaine Pagels straight up lied about the contents of Athanasius Letter 39, turning an admonition to only use certain canonical and apocryphal texts for teaching and a warning against similarly named heretical texts (like most of those found at Nag Hammadi) into a command to destroy everything except the canon and the apocrypha. Since she was one of the early scholars to work with the Nag Hammadi library, her hiding-to-avoid-destruction theory remained influential for a long time, despite it being based on a lie. More recent scholarship tends to theorize that these texts were a burial deposit—a practice that began long before Christianity in Egypt.

The point, though, is these texts were doomed when there ceased to be a scribal community that cared about them being copied. If you suppressed the heretics in antiquity, you suppressed the transmission of heretical texts except to the extent those texts were quoted in refutations that scribal communities did care about preserving. Actual destruction of manuscripts was unnecessary at that point, although it still sometimes happened like with the works of Arius and Nestorius. At least with Constantine's condemnation of Arius, it seemed to be more of a damnatio memoriae than an a practical act in furtherance of suppressing heresy.

[psunavy03]

> Most of the early Christian texts were suppressed and destroyed. In the 1940s some ancient texts that had been buried for nearly 2000 years were found in Egypt and not realizing their value, a family member used many of them for kindling.

But they didn't do that because they were trying to destroy heretical thought. They did it because they didn't realize what they had, they were poor, and needed kindling to stay warm or cook food. That's an important difference. Many ancient texts have been lost this way not out of malice, but just because that's what happens throughout the ages.