Reconstructing Manichaeism from scraps of ancient texts and the ungenerous polemic of its enemies (such as the ex-Manichaean Augustine of Hippo), BeDuhn reveals for the first time the religion as it was actually practiced. He describes the Manichaeans' daily ritual meal, their s…
This volume reproduces nineteen chapters and articles published between 1991 through 2008, on Manichaeism, and its contacts with Augustine of Hippo, its most famous convert and also best-known adversary.
"Gnosticism, as a category in religious studies - and public discourse - is inexorably entangled with the phenomenological "History of Religions" school. Building on critical work in biblical studies, which shows how a historically-bounded heretical tradition called Gnosticism w…
"In this book, Nicola Denzey Lewis dismisses Hans Jonas' mischaracterization of second-century Gnosticism as a philosophically-oriented religious movement built on the perception of the cosmos as negative or enslaving. A focused study on the concept of astrological fate in 'Gnos…
Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism provides an annotated anthology of primary sources highlighting Manichaeism, a dualist religion emerging in Mesopotamia in the third century and which spread rapidly throughout the Roman and Sasanian empires until it was violent…
Valentinus was a popular, influential, and controversial early Christian teacher. His school flourished in the second and third centuries C.E. Yet because his followers ascribed the creation of the visible world not to a supreme God but to an inferior and ignorant Creator-God, t…
"This definitive introduction to the gnostic scriptures provides a crucial look at the theology, religious atmosphere, and literary traditions of ancient Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism. It provides authoritative translations of ancient texts from Greek, Latin, and Coptic, …
