mountainman

In the Nag Hammadi text "The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles" (NHC 6.1), Peter states that Lithargoel, whom everyone considers to be really Jesus in disguise, is carrying a codex in his left hand.

Would anyone like to guess what codex Jesus was carrying?

Was it the Greek LXX, did the Christians beat Martial to codex technology or is this a purposeful Gnostic anachronism?

mountainman

Gandhi carried the Gita. Maybe Jesus carried the Gita? Both used salt.

I still think the best explanation is that we are dealing with a purposefully anachronistic comment. by the author. If Jesus carried any writing in the early first century it would have to a scroll, not a codex.

Toto

Acts of Peter and the 12 Apostles does not even purport to be historical, so the term "anachronistic" does not make a lot of sense.

Is there a real issue here?

mountainman

Let's assume an author was writing about Jesus in the disguise of Lithargoel the Pearl merchant during the rule of Marcus Aurelius. It would have been known to that author that the codex technology was only just available and that his character Jesus, in the disguise of Lithargoel, could not have been carrying a book around the island city of "Habitation".


Anachronisms also appear in allegorical fiction, and this appears to be an example of an anachronism. Is there any other explanation you can think of? We can see it is described as a complex document.

mountainman

Dated from the later second century CE is the papyrus fragment P.Oxy. 1381. The author of P.Oxy 1381 is gravely ill. Asclepius appears in a dream:




Jesus was not reported to have carried around the Greek LXX.

And here we have a citation in which Asclepius, or the physician of Asclepius, carries a book in his left hand.

One real issue is the following provisional hypothesis for discussion ...



Lithargoel as a Physician of Asclepius

Although one scholar has entertained the hypothesis that Lithargoel was a "Jewish Asclepius", I can find noone yet entertaining even for discussion, the hypothesis that Lithargoel is intended, by the author of NHC 6.1, to represent not Jesus, but a physician/priest of the Graeco-Roman healing god Asclepius, whose temples were destroyed in the Christian revolution of the 4th century. This political context is matched quite well with the dating of the NHC to the mid 4th century.


When this hypothesis is explored, the academic physican priest of Asclepius (and not Jesus) is therefore the identity to make reference to the Bagavad Gita ("City of Nine Gates"). This hypothesis explains why this story is located in the most expensively bound codex of all the 12+ codices discovered, and why the rest of book 6 is concerned with clearly non-christian tracts, such as Hermes and Asclepius.

sotto voce

Jesus would not have used anything so half-baked.

mountainman

Surely Jesus knew that he was about to inherit the encrypted name of Joshua from the Greek LXX?

Didn't Jesus teach his apostles to read and write Greek in between healings and miracles school?


TAOPATTA: NHC 6.1

I think the association between Lithargoel and Jesus is a purposeful veneer.
The Christians make the superficial association that Lithargoel is Jesus.
That's precisely what the author intended.
Beneath the surface the author intends precisely the opposite.
A play which has two separate meanings for two separate groups.

The open meaning was intended so that the Christians see themselves as "insiders".
They know that Lithargoel MUST be Jesus.

IMO the Gnostic author was playing a joke on the Christians.
The Christians still have not got the joke, 1.5 millenia later.
The hidden meaning was not, and is not understood by the Christians.
The hidden meaning was that the physicians of Asclepius still ruled. (Not for long obviously)
And that the Christian apostles were non-ascetic bonehads (they repeatedly do not recognize Jesus Lithargoel)

sotto voce

I'm sure he knew about his name when his father explained to him what he was doing in Egypt.

Nah. They all knew Greek anyway. Good for business.

GakuseiDon

This one, according to Eusebius:


It even has some nice crosses on the other side:


Obviously symbolic of Christ being crucified between two "thieves".

Oh, and also: Pygmies!

Aren't I terrible, putting tangents in MM's thread by introducing my own hobby-horse?

judge

as this was long before Kindle, I believe it was this. (or via: amazon.co.uk)