The Gnostics : myth, ritual, and diversity in early Christianity / David Brakke.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brakke, David.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gnosticism.

Church history--Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600.

Church history.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (181 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Brakke writes a pioneering study of the way the demon role relates to religious thinking and to cultural anxieties. The author’s sources include biographies of exceptional monks, collections of monastic sayings and stories, letters from ascetic teachers to their disciples, sermons, community rules, and biblical commentaries. When monks imagined the resistance that they had to overcome in cultivating their selves or the temptation that offered an easier path, they saw supernatural beings that could take the shapes of animals, women, boys, and false angels in their attempts to seduce monks away from their devotion to God. And when they considered the inclinations in their own selves that opposed their best intentions, they concluded that demons introduced such problematic “thoughts” to their minds. Although the last twenty years has seen an explosion of scholarship on early Christian asceticism, producing brilliant explorations of the body, sexual renunciation, fasting, and gender, combat with demons has been left relatively unexplored.

Contents:

Imagining "Gnosticism" and early Christianities

Identifying the Gnostics and their literature

The myth and rituals of the Gnostic school of thought

Unity and diversity in second-century Rome

Strategies of self-differentiation.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674262331

0674262336

9780674058897

0674058895

OCLC:

733332472