More proto-biblical strangeness...

[fajrdrako]

I'd never come across The Secret Gospel of Mark before, though it's hardly the first time I've come across simliar ideas. I wonder how many other peculiar revisions of the Jesus story I've missed.

Comments

[waltzie.livejournal.com]

Have you read Lamb by Christopher Moore?

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

If you check "Gnosticism" and "Nag Hammadi" you will find large numbers of stories that sprang up but were not accepted as canonical, partly because they often contradict common themes of the four gospels which were accepted, such as that what Christ taught was available to all, not just students of esoteric knowledge, and that God created the material universe and it is good.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

No - should I? Is that a recommendation? Good title!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Back about twenty years ago I read a few books on gnosticism, and found it interesting enough, but not interesting enough to pursue further. I think that what has happened is that more documents have been found or studied or translated.... I'd love to have more information on some of the more esoteric Greek religions.

Mind you, there are enough odd byways of even canonical Christianity to keep a person entertained for a long time.

There are tons of them out there!

[idiotgrrl.livejournal.com]

We know about the Gnostic books that keep on turning up because they were mentioned in the writings of the time. We know a lot about the "nice stories but not very cononical" books that were also circulating throughout the Roman Empire. And more keep turning up regularly.

What happened was that The Movement was growing at a high rate of speed, a lot of it through private meetings, word of mouth, letters, and that startling innovation in communications, the codex.

Think about it. REAL scholars used scrolls. To find a reference you had to either scroll down to where it was, or have the thing memorized. Early Christians of all sorts were, by and large, not scholars, but written material had a huge place in the spreading of the faith in all its wild and wacky variety. Earlier, someone had come up with a quick & dirty reading format for travelers, used mostly for trashy Greek novels. (Oh, yes, and many of them were apparently marvelously trashy.) You put the material onto pages all the same size, stack them in order, and bind them. Then you could stick it in your pocket or shoulder bag or, if you were a Roman Citizen, in the sinus of your toga. (Don't ask; toga wrapping was an art. But when done properly, there was a large fold you could put things into. Like a Medieval sleeve.)

And --- you could immediately leaf over to the reference you needed. So while Greek Novels were the first things published in this new form, Bibles rapidly outstripped it, and all sorts of other Christian literature followed at a high rate of speed. The format was so *convenient*, you see.

OF course, a lot of what we find are scrolls, since eventually people decided to turn respectable and put them in the true scholarly form. Rather like collecting our emails into a book.

Well, I said wild and wacky variety - that's historical fact. What else were all these Councils of Nicea etc all about? People were actually killing each other over these various varieties! Constantine knocked some heads together and said "Settle it once and for all, I don't really care how."

But a much earlier council had said "These gospels are the real thing; these others aren't." How did they decide? I wasn't there. But you can measure the stylistic differences - not to mention the differences in content! - from the ones they accepted and get some sort of clue.

I know. TMI. I got the entire load dumped on me from World Religions 107 (final next week), Roman Civ 205 (final next week) and the one lecture of the Institute for Medieval Studies I was actually able to attend. And did they converge? Ask me how far they converged.

P.S. Augustine was a Roman, if a very late Roman. His contemporary Jerome is Medieval, if very early Medieval. How do I know? Their flavor tells me so.

Re: There are tons of them out there!

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Augustine and Jerome? They were doing different things. Both when they were working in an academic manner used more Classical Latin, both in colloquial situations used Vulgar, and both tried to sound nice and Ciceronian on occasion. The biggest difference linguistically is that Augustine was useless at Greek (does not seem to be good at learning languages) and may not even have had Latin as his first language. Elsewhere it was usually noteworthy that people who didn't speak Latin as children usually sound a lot more Classical.

How do I feel about both of them? Late Antiquity.

[waltzie.livejournal.com]

It's the gospel according to Jesus' childhood best friend Biff. :D

I loved it but I'm not deeply religious or easily offended.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

But is it good?

I'm not Christian and not easily offended either, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Re: There are tons of them out there!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I found myself musing: what if, some day, someone wanted to put out a respectable, canonical compendium of the views expressed on Livejournal? And then everything else would be non-canonical, or gnostic, and would be the normal random chaos we're all used to, but the canonical version would sound so erudite, and poetric.

Such is history.

Re: There are tons of them out there!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

My Latin is not quite smooth enough (yet) to pick up on their stylistic differences, but I have always had a fondness for Jerome, if only because I love Caravaggio's painting of him, the one that's in the Co-Cathedral of St. James in Valletta, Malta.

I also prefer Jerome's style - the sound of the words he uses - though since I've only read Augustine in translation, that may be totally misleading.

Especially since I read Augustine (mostly) in Penguin editions, and I find Penguin translators to be ... by and large ... poor stylists.