The texts found at Nag Hammadi had been translated into Coptic from the original Greek. Scholars say the translations were not always elegant, and the scribes who did the translating and copying certainly missed subtle nuance and profundity. As Christianity took hold and flourished, it brought an end to the use of other Egyptian scripts and gave rise to the Coptic. Some experts say that the Christians did not want to use the ancient hieroglyphs and other scripts of the Egyptian civilization, in order to avoid any connection to Egypt's pagan past. The Coptic script took twenty-four letters from the Greek and added six new characters for sounds required that did not exist in Greek.

The texts found at Nag Hammadi were translations into Coptic made some 1,500 years earlier. Those copies were made from originals that were much older and written in Greek. Scholars and scientists can date the manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi through their Coptic script and the papyri on which they are written, but the dates of the originals provoke sharp disagreement.