Essential Gnostic Scriptures: Texts of Luminous Wisdom from the Ancient and Medieval Worlds?including the Gospels of Thomas, Judas, and Mary Magdalene

Author: Marvin Meyer

Product Type: Paperback

Published: 11/22/2011

Table of Contents: Intoduction / Marvin Meyer -- 1. The Gospel of Thomas -- 2. The Gospel of Mary -- 3. The Gospel of Judas -- 4. The Secret Book of John -- 5. On the Origin of the World -- 6. Thunder -- 7. The Gospel of Philip -- 9. The Secret Book of James -- 10. The Round Dance of the Cross -- 11. TheBook of Baruch -- 12. The Song of the Pearl -- 13. The Songs of Solomon -- 14. Poimandres -- 15. The Ginza -- 16. Songs from the Mandaean Liturgy -- 17. The Coptic Manichaean Songbook -- 18. The Great Song to Mani -- 19. The Mother of Books -- 20. The Gospel of the Secret Supper -- 21. A Nun's Sermon -- Epilogue: the inner light of gnosis A Historical Meditation / Willis Barnstone -- Notes -- Bibilography. Biographical Note: 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 Endowment 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. Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references.;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. Review Quotes: "An important sampler of relatively unknown spiritual literature."-- Library Journal "May well be the most comprehensive collection of Gnostic materials ever gathered into one volume. A valuable resource."-- Publishers Weekly "An enormously rich collection of sources--a wonderful achievement!"--Elaine Pagels, author of Beyond Belief Reading Line: Texts of luminous wisdom from the ancient and medieval worlds - including the Gospels of Thomas, Judas, and Mary Magdalene