[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.