Overview

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).

Full Product Details

9781563384097

Table of Contents

Reviews

Heavily documented, interesting, challenging, with a provocative glimpse into early Christian literary history and theology. Currents in Theology & Mission, 4/04--Sanford Lakoff Currents In Theology and Mission

The Gospel of Thomas and the Secret Gospel of Mark are two early Christian texts known in the second century, suppressed, or simply lost, only to surface in the latter half of the twentieth century. Marvin Meyer has been one of the few New Testament scholars to make them a focus of his research and to incorporate them into a modern historical construct of Christian origins. For over twenty years Meyer has investigated the less-well known and less popular aspects of Christian origins, its lost gospels, and the unfamiliar ancient culture in which Christianity became a Hellenistic religion. His collected essays on the two most notorious of these ancient gospels, Thomas and Secret Mark, demonstrates their importance for the origins of Christianity and brings them into the main stream of New Testament scholarship. Charles W. HedrickDistinguished Professor of Religious Studies Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri--Charles W. Hedrick

Author Information

Marvin Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Chapman College.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available