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Today Gnosticism is the object of renewed interest among scholars, owing largely to the publication of a remarkable library of Gnostic scriptures. Known as the Nag Hammadi Codices, for the town in southern Egypt near the site of their discovery, the library consists of twelve 4th century papyrus books containing 52 texts that are thought to have been translated from the original Greek into Egypt's ancient Coptic language. Many scholars believe that it will become as important to understanding the early Christian era as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the library of a Jewish Essene community that was discovered...
...Fuel. The Nag Hammadi texts are already adding new fuel to a longstanding debate over the relationship between Gnosticism and early Christianity. Scholars have long believed that some New Testament passages attack incipient forms of Gnosticism. The traditional explanation is that Gnosticism matured after the birth of Christianity and became its archenemy, not only as a separate religion but also as a heretical wing within the early church. Yet some experts, among them Germany's New Testament Critic Rudolf Bultmann, are persuaded that Gnosticism was a full-fledged, working religion even before the arrival of Christ...
...Nag Hammadi texts, says New Testament Scholar James M. Robinson, who led the team that has compiled them, offer the first comprehensive view of Gnosticism as "a religion in its own right." That view is startling indeed. The Gnostics were imaginative religious scavengers who borrowed freely from various sources to furnish their own scriptures. But they evidently felt a particular need to co-opt and corrupt elements of their rival, Christianity. Typically, two of the best-known tracts from the Nag Hammadi library, the previously published Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Philip, contain sayings of Jesus purportedly collected...
...fourth grade but I took a musical aptitude test and flunked it"-and continued until this past summer. There was little parental pressure to be a star and she doesn't regret starting lessons so late, "because when I did begin, my parents didn't have to nag me to practice." She spent the first month of the past summer studying intensively under Russell Sherman, a teacher associated with the New England Conservatory. Sherman at one point, Krag says, told another pupil of his that "he took me on to broaden his horizons." She practised eight hours...
...problem continued to nag him. A year ago he tried out a new version at Stage West in West Springfield, Massachusetts, in which he mixed together parts of both third acts. I didn't see this production; but when the Theatre Company of Boston did the play at the Loeb Theatre two months ago, director David Wheeler did a bit of mixing of his own, and also substituted a single intermission just before the big confrontation instead of preserving the two in the text...