Essential Gnostic Scriptures

by BARNSTONE, WILLISMEYER, MARVIN

• ISBN13: 9781590305492
• ISBN10: 1590305493
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-12-28
• Publisher: Shambhala

Summary

Gnosticism was a diverse religious movement of the first millennium C.E. whose followers sought salvation above all through personal religious experience. Gnostic writings offer striking perspectives on both early Christian and non-Christian thought. This collection provides fresh translations of some of the most popular and beautiful Gnostic texts, with an eye to presenting them as literature, with full appreciation of the aesthetic sense of the original languages of Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Arabic. Among the works included are new translations of the best-selling Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Judas-along with many lesser-known texts of profound wisdom and striking beauty.

Author Biography

Born in Lewiston, Maine, Willis Barnstone was educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, the Sorbonne, and Yale. He taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949–51), and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War. During the Cultural Revolution he went to China where he was later a Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984–85). Former O'Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University.

His publications include Modern European Poetry (Bantam, 1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984), Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (Yale, 1993), Funny Ways of Staying Alive (University Press of New England, 1993), The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (University Press of New England, 1996), the memoir With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (University of Illinois, 1993), Algebra of Night: Selected Poems—1949–1998 (Sheep Meadow, 1999), The Apocalypse (New Directions, 2000), Life Watch (BOA Editions, 2003), Border of a Dream: Poems of Antonio Machado (Copper Canyon, 2003), and The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala Publications, 2003).

A Guggenheim Fellow, his awards include a National Endowment for the Arts award, a National Endowments for the Humanities award, an Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, a W. H. Auden Award of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Midland Authors Award, three Book of the Month Selections and four Pulitzer Prize nominations for poetry. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Doubletake, Harper's, New York Review of Books, Poetry, Paris Review Poetry, Partisan Review, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Gospel of Thomas	p. 17
The Gospel of Mary	p. 49
The Gospel of Judas	p. 56
The Secret Book of John	p. 75
On the Origin of the World	p. 90
Thunder	p. 99
The Gospel of Philip	p. 107
The Gospel of Truth	p. 114
The Secret Book of James	p. 121
The Round Dance of the Cross	p. 127
The Book of Baruch	p. 132
The Song of the Pearl	p. 143
The Songs of Solomon	p. 151
Poimandres	p. 154
The Ginza	p. 165
Songs from the Mandaean Liturgy	p. 170
The Coptic Manichaean Songbook	p. 173
The Great Song to Mani	p. 182
The Mother of Books	p. 185
The Gospel of the Secret Supper	p. 209
A Nun's Sermon	p. 217
Epilogue: The Inner Light of Gnosis: A Historical Meditation	p. 219
Notes	p. 253
Bibliography	p. 267
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