Essential Gnostic Scriptures Texts of Luminous Wisdom from the Ancient and Medieval Worlds?Including the Gospels of Thomas, Judas, and Mary Magdalene

The people we've come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the centuries with remarkable power and beauty-beginning with texts from the earliest years of Christianity-including material from the Nag Hammadi library-and continuing all the way up to expressions of gnostic wisdom found within Islam and in the Cathar movement of the Middle Ages. The twenty-one texts included here serve as a compact introduction to Gnosticism and its principal ideas-and they also provide an entrée to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.

Willis Barnstone, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His many books include The Poetics of Translation, The Other Bible, The New Covenant, The Complete Poems of Sappho, and The Restored New Testament. Marvin Meyer, PhD,5 is Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California. He is the author, editor, or translator of numerous books, including The Gospel of Judas, The Gospel of Thomas, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus, and The Nag Hammadi Scriptures.