Marvin Meyer – författare

A collection of Gnostic texts spanning centuries, geographical locations, and cultural traditions—“a wonderful achievement” (Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels) Gnosticism was a wide-ranging religious movement of the first millennium CE—with earlier antecedents and later flourishings—whose adherents sought salvation through knowledge and personal religious experience. Gnostic writings offer striking perspectives on both early Christian and non-Christian thought. For example, some gnostic texts suggest that god should be celebrated as both mother and father, and that self-knowledge is the supreme path to the divine. Only in the past fifty years has it become clear how far the gnostic influence spread in ancient and medieval religions—and what a marvelous body of scriptures it produced.The selections gathered here in poetic, readable translation represent Jewish, Christian, Hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, Islamic, and Cathar expressions of gnostic spirituality. Their regions of origin include Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, China, and France. Also included are introductions, notes, an extensive glossary, and a wealth of suggestions for further reading.

A new English translation, including the original Coptic text and commentary by the preeminent critic, Harold Bloom, shows a different Jesus than the canonical Gospels--one with much in common with the Greek sophists and the Eastern mystics. $15,000 ad/promo.

An analysis of the significance of Mary Magdalene in the origins of Christianity presents a new translation of the Gospel of Mary and key portions of other religious writings, contending that the Church suppressed her story and that she was among Jesus's closest followers and confidantes. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

This volume contains a series of provocative essays that explore expressions of magic and ritual power in the ancient world. The essays are authored by leading scholars in the fields of Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern studies, the Hebrew Bible, Judaica, classical Greek and Roman studies, early Christianity and patristics, and Coptology.Throughout the book the essays examine the terms employed in descriptions of ancient magic. From this examination comes a clarification of magic as a polemical term of exclusion but also an understanding of the classical Egyptian and early Greek conceptions of magic as a more neutral category of inclusion.This book should prove to be foundational for future scholarly studies of ancient magic and ritual power.This publication has also been published in hardback (no longer available).

Marvin Meyer is one of the leading experts on the secret gospels-Gospel of Thomas, Secret Gospel of Mark, and others-who has changed forever how we read the canonical gospels and understand early Christianity. In this new collection of his work, Meyer looks at these revolutionary texts in original and illuminating ways.He writes, for example, about the naked youths in the villa of the Mysteries. On the walls of a villa in Pompeii, a famous mural depicts a naked male reading from a scroll, a look of wonder on his face. A naked youth again appears in the Gospel of Mark, abandoning his garment and fleeing naked when apprehended during Jesus'' arrest. A similar youth appears in the Secret Gospel of Mark. These youths, Meyer proposes, serve as an image of religious initiation, candidates for the mysteries of Dionysus or of Christ.This is one of the many aspects of the secret gospels that Meyer examines with expert insight and creativity. Topics range from gender and infancy stories to discipleship and the relationship of the Gospel of Thomas to Islamic literature. Meyer''s spellbinding readings of these materials offer fresh understandings of the canonical gospels.Marvin Meyer is Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies, and Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Chapman University, Orange, California. He is author of The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels and The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, and co-editor of Jesus Then and Now (Trinity Press International).

Albert Schweitzer's system of ethics as a way of life in which individuals live with compassion and respect for all living things - humans, animals, plants - is illuminated here through a series of essays by Schweitzer and renowned contemporary Schweitzer scholars from around the globe.

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 entrée to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.

Gnosticism was a wide-ranging religious movement of the first millennium CE—with earlier antecedents and later flourishings—whose adherents sought salvation through knowledge and personal religious experience. Gnostic writings offer striking perspectives on both early Christian and non-Christian thought. For example, some gnostic texts suggest that god should be celebrated as both mother and father, and that self-knowledge is the supreme path to the divine. Only in the past fifty years has it become clear how far the gnostic influence spread in ancient and medieval religions—and what a marvelous body of scriptures it produced. The selections gathered here, in poetic, readable translation, represent Jewish, Christian, Hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, Islamic, and Cathar expressions of gnostic spirituality. Their regions of origin include Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, China, and France. Also included are introductions, notes, an extensive glossary, and a wealth of suggestions for further reading.

Marvin Meyer is one of the leading experts on the secret gospels Gospel of Thomas, Secret Gospel of Mark, and others who has changed forever how we read the canonical gospels and understand early Christianity. In this new collection of his work, Meyer looks at these revolutionary texts in original and illuminating ways. He writes, for example, about the naked youths in the villa of the Mysteries. On the walls of a villa in Pompeii, a famous mural depicts a naked male reading from a scroll, a look of wonder on his face. A naked youth again appears in the Gospel of Mark, abandoning his garment and fleeing naked when apprehended during Jesus' arrest. A similar youth appears in the Secret Gospel of Mark. These youths, Meyer proposes, serve as an image of religious initiation, candidates for the mysteries of Dionysus or of Christ. This is one of the many aspects of the secret gospels that Meyer examines with expert insight and creativity. Topics range from gender and infancy stories to discipleship and the relationship of the Gospel of Thomas to Islamic literature. Meyer's spellbinding readings of these materials offer fresh understandings of the canonical gospels.Marvin Meyer is Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies, and Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Chapman University, Orange, California. He is author of The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels and The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, and co-editor of Jesus Then and Now (Trinity Press International).

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 entrée to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.

This volume contains a series of provocative essays that explore expressions of magic and ritual power in the ancient world. The essays are authored by leading scholars in the fields of Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern studies, the Hebrew Bible, Judaica, classical Greek and Roman studies, early Christianity and patristics, and Coptic and Islamic Egypt.The strength of the present volume lies in the breadth of scholarly approaches represented. The book begins with several papyrological studies presenting important new texts in Greek and Coptic, continuing with essays focusing on taxonomy and definition. The concluding essays apply contemporary theories to analyses of specific test cases in a broad variety of ancient Mediterranean cultures.