04-16-2010, 05:27 PM
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Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Falls Creek, Oz.
Posts: 11,192
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Is the Gospel of Thomas Ascetical?
Richard Valantasis -
Is the Gospel of Thomas Ascetical?
Quote:
It is time for reevaluating the categories that scholars have used to classify the religious literature of the Greco-Roman and Late Antique world. Michael Williams, in his magisterial new book Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category, began the process of serious reappraisal by challenging the modern construct "gnosticism."
He argues that the modern construction of historical gnosticism does not adequately explain the literature generally classified as gnostic and that this categorical insufficiency demands alternative ways of studying and understanding the diverse religious movements of the period. My study of asceticism, although independent of Williams' work, continues that reexamination of categories using the specific case of the Gospel of Thomas and its classification as an ascetical text.
Since the very early years after the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, some scholars almost instinctively have sought to interpret it as ascetical. Asceticism as a category explained some of the gospel's peculiar sayings, or resonated with the exoticism of the geographical location of its discovery so close to a Pachomian monastery, or...
Revisiting an Old Problem with a New Theory - Journal of Early Christian Studies 7:1 Journal of Early Christian Studies 7.1 (1999) 55-81
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