There's a revealing interview with Marvin Meyer, the Gnostic gospels scholar, on Sacramento's
Capital Public Radio "Sound Advice" show. It begins with the usual ho-hum clearing away of popular misconceptions about the literature that failed to make it into the canon, but then Meyer provides a little news-teaser: more ancient documents relating to the earliest years of Christianity are being readied for release by European scholars.
Well, if anybody is in the loop it would be Marvin Meyer, but during the interview he was being coy about details, only disclosing that they're not in the gospel genre (like the
Gospel of Judas released a few years back by National Geographic.)
Interesting times ahead.
I hope he's not talking about the lead tablets...
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell the program went to air May 12 (Thursday), so I doubt it ;-)
ReplyDeleteHe might be talking about the 70 or so manuscripts that were recently "discovered" (I don't know much about these since they were shoveled under the rug with the lead codices, but they are a separate find apparently and unrelated).
ReplyDeleteWasn't there a big to-do about the Gospel of Judas? There was something like three different translations, all of them suited to each translator's personal agenda? IIRC, it was also dated to quite late, in the canonical history.
ReplyDeleteI dabbled a bit with Gnosticism, but the religious sect of Gnostics are basically Catholics, and some of the gnostic (note, small g) texts are misinterpreted in that light. The early Church (sorry, our early Church) did refer to both the Gospel of Barnabas, and the Didache, but I don't recall them ever being preached from the pulpit. (Barnabas, maybe, but that's a hazy memory and might not be reliable.)
Meyer's "Gnostic Bible" is quite interesting, for a different take on early Christianity; surprisingly more of it agrees with the WCG teachings, than you would think. (Although the larger portion of it does not, of course.) The Gospel of Thomas, particularly, always struck me as being very close, in spirit to the teachings of WCG. Maybe time to revisit that on my reading list again....