The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (IAC) was founded in 1967 as an “interdisciplinary center for basic research into the origins of Western Civilization,” particularly relating to the development of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. From 1971 until its closure in 2008, the IAC was located in what is now Claremont Graduate University’s Arts and Humanities building. The Board of Directors drew up a formal agreement with the school in 1981 to confirm the Institute’s role and use of the facility. The scholars of the IAC advanced the Institute’s mission through research projects, publications, conferences, public lectures and collaboration with international institutes.

At its founding the IAC initially consisted of six research projects, with that number eventually rising to seventeen. Perhaps the most famous of these projects concerned the Nag Hammadi codices, papyri manuscripts discovered in Egypt in 1945 which contain religious writings in Coptic that were previously believed destroyed. In the 1970s the IAC’s Coptic Gnostic Library Project, directed by James Robinson, undertook the translation and study of the codices, publishing The Nag Hammadi Library: In English in 1977. The Institute would also receive funding for a series of archeological expeditions to Nag Hammadi from 1968 and 1980. Though the IAC closed in 2008, its reference library is still available to the students, faculty, and staff of the Claremont Colleges and the Claremont School of Theology.

THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY: IN ENGLISH Translated by Members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, James M. Robinson, Director and General Editor. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977. “Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (1967 – 2008).” SOR: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. http://cgu.edu/pages/4998.asp “About the IAC.” Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont Graduate University. http://iac.cgu.edu/abouttheiac.html