Overview Of Coptic Literature

I came across the following pdf, An Overview of Coptic Literature, at http://www.coptic.org/language/overview.pdf at the Coptic.org site. It looks like a pretty thorough listing of existing material in Coptic, including some ancient Egyptian religious material than exists in Coptic translation. Oddly, it speculates that the Gospel of Thomas might be Manichaean rather than Gnostic (not to mention that Thomas probably isn't even Gnostic Gnostic.) I hadn't heard that one before.

Steve Davies in Jerusalem

Stevan Davies was in Jerusalem last year to take part in a BBC documentary about Jesus the Healer. Steve wrote a book by that title that looked at the historical Jesus in terms of spirit possession. Steve talked the BBC into letting him spend some time in Jerusalem and he took plenty of photos to which he has attached a running commentary and what amounts to a guided tour of old Jerusalem.
http://www.misericordia.edu/users/davies/Jerusalem/beginning.htm

The pages have an added curiosity value in that they contain photos of Steve himself. His image has never appeared on any of his books.

Palm Tree Garden

http://www.palmtreegarden.org/ is a Gnostic site with links to other relevent sites and the beginnings of a Gnostic Wiki. Their online shop includes Gnostic mugs and Sophia stein. Some comment about the fall of Sophia is surely in order. They also plab an online Gnostic library and print journal.

Coptic Resources

Well, it's from famine to feast with this blog! Here's another link, to Lance Eccles' home page. Eccles is the author of An Introductory Coptic Reader: Extracts from the Gospel of Thomas with Full Grammatical Explanations, published byDunwoody Press. He has PDF files of morphologies for Sahidic and Bohairic, and a classified vocabulary with illustrative sentences.
http://www.ocs.mq.edu.au/~leccles/coptic.html

Another Gospel of Judas article

Publisher's Weekly has an article on the Gospel of Judas, with reference to Charles Hedrick.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6311833.html

Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Philip

There was an interesting little discussion a few days ago on the Crosstalk historical Jesus discussion list. See posts 20652 onwards, the thread titled Mary Magdalene as Jesus' Wife in the Gospel of Philip http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/messages/20652

John C. Poirier pointed out that discussion of the meaning of Mary being Jesus's "companion" (as most of the English translations put it) has focused on the meaning of the Greek loan word koinonos. But the Gospel of Philip also refers to Mary Magdalene using the Coptic word hotre, which has a tenuous connection to marriage in Crum's Coptic dictionary. The ensuing discussion suggests that this is no more a direct statement of Jesus being married to Mary than is the Greek koinonos. I feel that "companion" remains a good translation, since it preserves a certain ambiguity of meaning. In modern English one can refer to one's sexual partner as one's companion, but it's certainly not the primary meaning of the word.

The Lost Sayings of Jesus: Annotated and Explained

I received the first copy of my new book, The Lost Sayings of Jesus: Annotated and Explained
a few days ago. It looks very nice, but I can still hardly read it. Perhaps after a few glasses of wine. It collects sayings of Jesus outside of the New Testament and the Gospel of Thomas. It's organised into Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, Islamic and other sources. I hit on the idea of doing this in response to Skylight Paths' request that it be a multi-faith book, and it turned out to be a great way of making sense of the sayings. It has a larger selection of extracanonical sayings than any other collection for the general reader, and the annotations allow me to explain where the material is coming from, and what its context is.

It has a nice foreword by Gnostic expert Stephan Hoeller. And I like the stylised portrait of Jesus on the cover. More on the agrapha soon.

Terje Dahl Bergesen Blog

http://weblog.bergersen.net/terje/

Terje Dahl Bergesen has a number of interesting articles in his Gnostic blog, including an obituary of Gilles Quispel, the scholar who bought Nag Hammadi codex I and was involved in the inaugural translation of the Gospel of Thomas. He was an expert in Valentinianism, amongst other things.

John Dart article on the Gospel of Judas

I missed this article by John Dart on the Gospel of Judas. It's a nice overview with some quotes from Charles Hedrick.

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=1594

Gospel of Judas Update

The initial books on the Gospel of Judas will be appearing in April. There will be three books. The first two are published by National Geographic:-

The Gospel of Judas
This appears to be the first publication of the text itself, in Coptic and in English translation.
The Lost Gospel : The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot
The second book appears to be an account of how the Gospel of Judas came to light again. Presumably it will also contain a translation of the text.

Also, James Robinson has written his own book on the torturous provenance of the Gospel of Judas
The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel

There are now sundry news items about the Gospel of Judas. Rather than post all the individual links here's a link to Google News:-
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=gospel+of+judas

The main point of controversy in the media seems to be whether the gospel contains genuine historical knowledge about Judas and Jesus. The asumption behind many of teh articles is that the canonical gospels contain accurate historical information.