The Gospel of Philip is assumed to be one of the sources of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, about Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and their children. The Gospel is one of Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 and belongs to the same collection of Gnostic documents as the more famous Gospel of Thomas.
It has been suggested that the Gospel of Philip was written in the second century B.C. If so, it may be one of the earliest documents containing themes that would later be used in apocryphal literature.
A single manuscript of the Gospel of Philip, written in Coptic, was found in the Nag Hammadi library. The collection was a library of thirteen papyrus texts discovered near the town of Nag Hammadi in 1945 by a peasant boy. The writings in these codices comprised 52 documents, most of which are Gnostic in nature.
The codices were probably hidden by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius when the official Christian Church banned all Gnostic literature around the year 390 A.D
It is believed the original texts were written in Greek during the first or second centuries A.D. The copies contained in the discovered clay jar were written in Coptic in the third or fourth centuries A.D.
The Gospel Of Philip is a list of sayings focusing on man�s redemption and salvation as framed by Gnostic theology.
