(If I did not love this I would not do it. )
Dear Jnyusa,
Before the Romans were the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and Alexander's successors -- and of course we have some texts, formal and informal (and archaeology) -- but nothing with the depth and texture of the Talmud and Mishna. (We do have odd things like a second Temple in Egypt, which didn't cause half the furor one might guess it would have. )This is what would fascinate me the most about any ancient colonial period. Surely there was culture shock for all the Peoples occupied by Greece and then Rome.
Which reminds me, I have a great deal of fun-reading I'd like to do, myself.Onto the reading list it goes, but it might be summer 2007 before I get to it. I try to immerse myself in one new topic every summer.
Good luck! I think my work will last well into the summer, too.It's usually great fun, but for professional reasons I was chained to a certain field in math last summer and I'm afraid it will be so this summer, too.
It doesn't help that Google was being particularly muddled and inexact on the topic.To be honest, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I found on Gnosticism via google
<K. thinks> Have you read Pagels? (There are two good books of Gnostic texts: Bentley Layton's Gnostic Scriptures and Marvin Meyer's The Gnostic Bible, but for a good, readable introduction to Gnosticism, itself, I still can't think of anything better than Elaine Pagels' two books Adam, Eve, and the Serpent and Gnostic Gospels. There's N. C. Lieu's books -- but they only cover one branch of Gnosticism (Manichaeism), which is great if you want to know about Augustine's youth - or the great and splendid oddness that is Manichaeism - but they will tell you things that don't apply to other ilks of Gnosticism. Oh! Ye gods, read Hans Jonas' The Gnostic Religion, that's a good starting place. (After that Kurt Rudolph's Gnosis is a good supplement to any of the above. )... but I doubt that I could read scholarly texts on this subject because I lack the background.
Short answer: read Jonas. His book is lovely and readable -- older but classic.
OK.I intended this facitiously - because of their mutual emphasis on ‘logos.’ But it meant something different to Heraclitus than it meant to John.
It's just a hobby: one topic that fascinates me is why people enter (or leave) a religion, and there are a lot more contemporary sources than ancient ones. (I can think of two: Augustine's Confessions and Apuleius' Golden Ass. )I had forgotten how familiar you are with Scientology. Now I remember your posts about this on TORC.
-Kushana