What's new on my bookshelves

The complete title of this book is rather long, when I include the subtitle:  The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth ~ by Marvin Meyer, 2005.  Meyer offers fresh translations of a dozen books, most of which were found at Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian desert in 1945.

My interest in this area started when I read the then-newly published The Gnostic Gospels, a scholarly book by Elaine Pagels (1979) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred best books of the twentieth century.  Many years later, I also read her bestseller, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), in which she says the Gospel of Thomas reveals, along with other apocryphal teachings, that Jesus was not God but rather a teacher who sought to uncover the divine light in all human beings.  She argues that the Gospel of John was written as a reaction and rebuttal to the Gospel of Thomas.

This sort of thing fascinates me, so I developed a class about "Six Gospels," using the four gospels that made it into the Christian Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) along with two of the gospels found at Nag Hammadi:  The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene).  For later classes, I decided to include a gospel by James, the brother of Jesus.  James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem, which was decidedly on the side of Christians conforming to Jewish customs, like circumcision.  Now I want to read Meyer's new translation and see what I notice this time around.  If you are interested in attending the class when I teach it again, let me know.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Remember when you were a kid and getting new crayons was a big deal?  Getting new books holds the same kind of magic for some of us big kids.  Susan at Color Online came up with the idea of New Crayons as a metaphor for the new books that have arrived at your house.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------