Essential Gnostic Scriptures
Author: Meyer, Marvin
ISBN: 9781590309254
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 15 Jan 2012
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback / softback
Poetic, accessible new translations of the most essential gnostic texts--a brilliant collaboration by a world-renowned poet and a prominent scholar of early Christianity.
The people we've come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the centuries with remarkable power and beauty-beginning with texts from the earliest years of Christianity-including material from the Nag Hammadi library-and continuing all the way up to expressions of gnostic wisdom found within Islam and in the Cathar movement of the Middle Ages. The twenty-one texts included here serve as a compact introduction to Gnosticism and its principal ideas-and they also provide an entree to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.
ISBN: 9781590309254
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 15 Jan 2012
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback / softback
Poetic, accessible new translations of the most essential gnostic texts--a brilliant collaboration by a world-renowned poet and a prominent scholar of early Christianity.
The people we've come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the centuries with remarkable power and beauty-beginning with texts from the earliest years of Christianity-including material from the Nag Hammadi library-and continuing all the way up to expressions of gnostic wisdom found within Islam and in the Cathar movement of the Middle Ages. The twenty-one texts included here serve as a compact introduction to Gnosticism and its principal ideas-and they also provide an entree to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.
