The New Testament and Gnosis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Biblical Studies) by Alastair Logan (PDF)

Description

Important essays on Gnosis and Gnosticism. Contributors include Rudolph, Pagels, Grant, and Barrett.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author …

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Gnosticism was controversial in 1983, when this book was published, and it still is. The controversy shows itself in and impacts on religion as well as on historical scholarship. Religiously, some strands in liberal, feminist, and post-Constantinian Christianity have seen Gnosticism as a potential source of new, or recovered, insights, lost to mainstream Christianity since the fourth century. Whether they are right to view Gnosticism in this way, as a suppressed alternative to orthodoxy, valuing the contribution of women, opposed to religious hierarchies, and promoting a self-affirming spirituality in place of the oppressive sin-and-redemption structure of mainstream Christian thought – all that is a matter of opinion and, when Gnostic texts are read carefully, it is not always obvious that they present a consistently positive religious message. But it is certainly true that Gnostic texts such as the Gospels of Mary, Philip, and Thomas have things to tell us about early Christian women, and perhaps about Jesus, from a perspective different from the Gospels of the New Testament; and that some Gnostic writings (or, perhaps one should say, writings sometimes considered Gnostic, since there is no agreement about how the concept should be defined or what should be included in it) such as the Gospel of Truth (in fact a theological treatise or homily) do contain profound and in some ways attractive theological ideas.With the general climate of interest in Gnosticism in mind, to turn to the essays in this volume will perhaps be a bit of a culture-shock, but naturally in a volume like this one expects a focus on the original texts and their context rather than their contemporary religious significance. Unfortunately, some readers may feel that the approach of a few of the authors in this collection obscures rather than reveals what they seek to clarify. There are some very difficult essays, especially in the first part, ‘Gnosis, Gnosticism and the New Testament: Definition and Nature’ – and too much focus on the over-contested definition of ‘Gnosis’ or of ‘Gnosticism’, including some polemic (from Kurt Rudolph, for example) which seems a bit too much like axe-grinding or special pleading. The contributors agree, of course, with the well established view that Gnosticism has its roots in Jewish mysticism, not just in ‘contamination’ of Christian thought by Platonism, as some older scholars thought.Part two includes some more focused and (to my mind) clearer essays on particular New Testament-related topics. Walter Schmithals argues for the view (which goes back to Bultmann) that Paul’s opponents in Galatians, and the opponents in several of the deutero-Pauline letters, were gnostics or ‘enthusiasts’, not Judaizers. This may be too tidy a picture, and Schmithals himself shows that it can be applied to Colossians only with the aid of a theory of interpolation to distinguish anti-Gnostic from anti-Jewish strands of argument; but it is good statement of the thesis. C. K. Barrett discusses the connections between Gnosticism and the Book of Revelation. Elaine Pagels contributes an essay in two parts, one (the better) on New Testament and Gnostic views of marriage (and the response of orthodox writers such as Irenaeus and Clement), the second (which is heavy going) on the Valentinian myth of creation and redemption as an interpretation of the idea of spiritual marriage or union with Christ, of which earthly marriage is a symbol. Frederik Wisse contributes another methodological essay (which might have been more at home in part one) which, by getting away from an attempt to define Gnosticism too closely, opens up the vista to a wider understanding of the variegated nature of early Christian teaching and schools of thought.The third and final part contains essays on some of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic writings specifically. The subjects include the parables of the Gospel of Thomas and the sacraments in the Gospel of Philip, and there are some interesting observations on the literary origins of some other texts. As is well known, not all of the Nag Hammadi writings are considered by scholars to be Christian – some represent a purely Jewish, or Jewish-influenced Gnosticism – and so there are questions to be asked about to what extent and in what way the texts have been revised and rewritten, removing or introducing clear Christian elements such as the figure of Jesus.This volume was a retirement Festschrift for Professor R. McL. Wilson, a well-known Scottish scholar of Gnosticism, who continued to be active as a scholar long after his retirement, and died in his 90s in 2011. A list of Wilson’s publications from 1952 to 1981 completes the volume.Much has been written on Gnosticism since 1983, and the issues that are referred to in the first paragraph of this review have become more prominent. However, the essays in this book, particularly the more specific treatments of texts, are still of relevance to scholars, if not perhaps to the general reader.

⭐

⭐

⭐

Keywords

Free Download The New Testament and Gnosis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Biblical Studies) in PDF format
The New Testament and Gnosis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Biblical Studies) PDF Free Download
Download The New Testament and Gnosis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Biblical Studies) 2015 PDF Free
The New Testament and Gnosis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Biblical Studies) 2015 PDF Free Download
Download The New Testament and Gnosis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Biblical Studies) PDF
Free Download Ebook The New Testament and Gnosis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: Biblical Studies)