Welcome to the Clovis Star Gnostic Library
The Clovis Star Gnostic Library is a growing digital archive of early Christian writings, gnostic and esoteric texts, apocrypha, church fathers, historical witnesses, and related works. It is presented here in a simple HTML format so that these sources remain open, portable, and easy to copy, share, and study.
Clovis Star is a project of Ryan Thompson, who has gathered material from many public and scholarly collections and organized it into a single, browsable library. The aim is not to promote one theology, but to put primary documents back into the hands of readers who want to see the evidence for themselves.
Why Preserve These Texts?
For much of history, access to non-canonical or challenging writings was limited by language, manuscript scarcity, and sometimes deliberate suppression. Church authorities, imperial politics, and later editors all shaped which books were copied, translated, and printed, and which were left to decay in desert caves or monastery storerooms. The result is a kind of censorship by survival: we inherit only the texts that made it through the filters of time and power.
This library takes the opposite approach. Wherever it is lawful to do so, we present controversial, marginal, and forgotten works alongside familiar ones. Gnostic gospels stand next to the New Testament; martyr acts and church orders stand beside Roman and Jewish historians; later compilations such as the Kolbrin Bible are clearly marked yet still available for inspection. The goal is transparency: to make it harder for important evidence to be concealed, misquoted, or quietly omitted from the conversation.
What You Will Find Here
The Clovis Star Library includes collections of New Testament writings, Jewish and Christian apocrypha, gnostic treatises and gospels from Nag Hammadi and related traditions, and selected works of the early Church Fathers. It also gathers historical sources such as Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, and Celsus, plus a large body of other early Christian writings: letters, apologies, homilies, martyrdoms, church orders, apocalyptic visions, and apocryphal Acts of the apostles. Additional sections include apocalyptic literature, fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls material, and later esoteric works like the Kolbrin Bible.
You can browse the holdings by collection on the Table of Contents page, or scan everything at once on the All Books index, where each title links to a dedicated reading page.
Related Tools and External Resources
Alongside this static library, Ryan Thompson has developed the Gnostic Bible Super Search plugin, which lets you search, compare, and cross-reference many of these texts inside WordPress or via a free API.
Many of the works here can also be found, in other editions or formats, at the following locations:
Looking Ahead
New manuscripts, translations, and related materials will continue to be added as they are located and prepared. Cross-references, parallel passages, and links to manuscript images will gradually deepen the connections between texts. For now, this site offers a stable, open doorway into a dense landscape of writings that once circulated at the edges of the biblical world.
This is only the beginning of this archive.