The Gnostic Scriptures : A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions by (The Anchor Bible Reference Library)

Rating:
Summary: Very Useful For Tackling a Tough Area
Review: Bentley's "Gnostic Scriptures", while it may not be as complete as the Nag Hammadi Library, is for me the more useful volume. The introductions are very detailed, and many conventions of this arcane type of literature are clarified. I don't really understand some of the complaints in the other reviews. Books are grouped by school of thought, and the order seems very logical to me. Many writings are fragmented, and those who wish to read this kind of thing need to learn to deal with brackets. The translation job is generally quite a bit more illuminating than other translations of the same material I have read. This is an excellent resource.

Rating:
Summary: Very Useful For Tackling a Tough Area
Review: Bentley's "Gnostic Scriptures", while it may not be as complete as the Nag Hammadi Library, is for me the more useful volume. The introductions are very detailed, and many conventions of this arcane type of literature are clarified. I don't really understand some of the complaints in the other reviews. Books are grouped by school of thought, and the order seems very logical to me. Many writings are fragmented, and those who wish to read this kind of thing need to learn to deal with brackets. The translation job is generally quite a bit more illuminating than other translations of the same material I have read. This is an excellent resource.

Rating:
Summary: Confusing and more confusing
Review: I bought this book for a research project I'm doing for college. I thought this would be a great book considering that it had so much of the lost books in it. When I started trying to do my research using this book I couldn't understand it at all hardly. The format was confusing in that stuff was all over the place. I also couldn't tell at times when it was the translators words or the real words from the books. I also think that the translator omitted much of the words and changed things. I would not buy this book again. The only thing that was good about it was that it did have so many of the books in it.

Rating:
Summary: Confusing and more confusing
Review: I found this book to be extremely insightful. It contains a lot of classic Gnostic text, along with plenty of commentary and additional historical facts by the editor. If you're looking for a concise and clear book on Gnostic Scripture and some of it's history, this is a good place to start.

Rating:
Summary: Inerrancy
Review: This really has two separate parts. Firstly doctrines of the Gnostics are reconstructed from the viewpoint of those who wrote againsts them, such as Ireneus. These early anti-heretics were for most of the last two millenia our only source of knowledge about the Gnostics. The second part consists of writing by the Gnostics themselves unearthed around 1900 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and written in Coptic.
The Nag Hammadi writings contain sayings attributed to Jesus that are not identical with those in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These collections of sayings have sometimes been referred to as Gospels, most notably the Gospel of Thomas, although they do not contain anything like a biography of Jesus.
This raises a problem for Christians who believe in the inerrancy of scripture, although none of the sayings contradicts what the Bible says. Conservative Christians, and, I think, the Roman Catholic Church, reject the possibility that the Gospel of Thomas is a old and as authentic as the New Testament. Many scholars believe that they may be from sources as close to Jesus as our Four Gospels are.