According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, these early heretical Christians were called Gnostics from "gnosis," Greek for "knowledge." Broadly speaking, many Gnostics believed that spiritual knowledge had to come from within one's self, rather than from the church. They would have been buried near Nag Hammadi because church authorities were already suppressing work they deemed unfit by the second century.
The texts uncovered by Muhammad 'Alí al-Sammán were actually translations of even older works that were about 1,500 years old. Another, the Gospel of Philip, reads like an extended edition of the sayings of Jesus.
The first line he deciphered shockingly referred to Jesus' "twin," Judas Thomas. Professor Gilles Quispel traveled to Cairo's Coptic Museum, where he began to translate the fragile papyri. Ultimately, some of the documents made it to Cairo, where researchers soon began to investigate the texts. Certainly, Brown's claim that the history of Christianity is more complex and divisive than many people realize is very true indeed. Sure, oftentimes you'll need to approach some of its claims sideways to find a hint of reality, but that genuine history is there nonetheless. Yet, as much as it's been derided, The Da Vinci Code occasionally gets things right. In the years since, however, few of the claims between the covers of The Da Vinci Code have been definitively verified. In a 2003 interview with CNN, he even claimed that "99 percent of it is true," including the novel's lurid tales of secret societies like the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei. Much of the story is entirely fictional, though Brown repeatedly claimed that he drew upon genuine fact. While readers were eating it up, historians cringed. Dan Brown's novel contains a dramatic story in which professor Robert Langdon gets caught up in an ancient conspiracy, concealed beneath many layers of mystery, that claims Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene produced a "holy bloodline" that lives to this very day. When it was first published in 2003, The Da Vinci Code was an immediate hit.