“The Virgin Mary in Ritual in Late Antique Egypt: Origins, Practice, and Legacy” examines the significance of the Virgin Mary for the ritual activities of Christians in Egypt, from the early conceptual roots of Marian veneration in the second century, to its diffusion among the …
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Scholarly writings on material found in the Nag Hammadi codices have increasingly focused on their socio-historical contextualization, since the dismantling of Gnosticism as a coherent religious affiliative category - as initiated by Michael A. Williams (1996) and Karen L. King …
The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the Cathar community of Languedoc, far from being heretics as is generally thought, practiced an early form of Christianity. A few scholars have suggested this interpretation of the Cathar beliefs, but none have pursued it …
This dissertation focuses on the construction, contestation and (re)formation of various scholarly and cultural identities expressed through the shorthand "Gnosticism." Much of the ancient data for Gnostics is shrouded in irrecoverable mystery-from the discoveries at Nag Hammadi…
This dissertation offers a holistic review of the so-called "Platonizing Sethian apocalypses" discovered, in Coptic translation, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. These texts are of fundamental importance to the history of philosophy and early Christian literature, for they played…
The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship among Paul, Simon Magus, and Marcion. Simon was called “the root of all heretics” by Irenaeus. The Tübingen school led by F. C. Baur viewed Simon in the Pseudo-Clementines as Paul in disguise. Marcion was anothe…
The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles, discovered along with 46 other tracts at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, is still very much in its infancy of scholarly analysis. Until now the approach to this text has been primarily that of introductions to the text. Most of these introd…
This dissertation is a response to the call for the application of sociological methods to the study of Gnosticism, It treats the economic and social origins of Gnosticism as a case study in the sociology of religious movements and situates Gnosticism in relation to the social a…
The Call from Beyond and the Nag Hammadi Library asks whether the call from beyond (which Hans Jonas described in 19341 and rearticulated in 19582 ) appears in the Nag Hammadi Library. This standard (and commonly understood) term in secondary literature has never been comprehens…
In the mid 1990's, Aarhus University's Per Bilde detailed a new hypothesis of how Judaism, Christianity and Gnosticism were connected. Bilde suggested that Christianity acted as a catalyst, propelling Jewish Apocalypticism into Gnosticism. This dissertation applies the epistle o…
Middle Platonism espoused an intellectual system that would explain how a transcendent supreme principle could relate to the material universe. The central aspect of this system was an intermediary, modeled after the Stoic active principle, which mediated the supreme principle's…