Classical philology aims to retrieve the earliest possible original text from different versions of that text, since variety in wording often is understood as a corruption of the original. ‘New’ philology, however, aims to study texts when the scribe wrote down the texts. With Nag Hammadi Codex III as a case study we will analyse (1) how the scribe worked when producing this papyrus book and (2) if he planned to make his own ‘Secret Book’ of the five Christian apocryphal texts present in this 4th or 5th cent. codex.