Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice - Disengaging Ritual in Ancient India, Greece and Beyond - Peter Jackson
9. Beyond Righteousness and Transgression: Reading the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Judas from an Acosmic Perspective
Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice - Disengaging Ritual in Ancient India, Greece and Beyond - Peter Jackson
Jörgen Magnusson [+]
Mid Sweden University and Uppsala University
Jörgen Magnusson is Associate professor in the study of religions at Mid
Sweden university, department of humanities and of the history of religions
at Uppsala University. Magnusson received his PhD in history of
religions at Uppsala University 2007. His main focus has been on early
Judaism and Christianity, and especially in their Gnostic forms, elucidated,
for example, in his dissertation Rethinking the Gospel of truth: a
Study of its Eastern Valentinian setting 2007. In addition, he has published
on the historical Jesus and Manichaeism. He is presently working on a
number of analyses of The Gospel of Truth from Nag Hammadi.
Description
Jögen Magnusson opens his case with a summary of the scholarly controversies surrounding the concept of “Gnosticism” in the wake of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945. He then proceeds to compare the understanding of Gnostic mythology in a recent addition to the data set, the so-called Gospel of Judas (first made publicly accessible in 2006), as well as in one of the most studied texts in the Nag Hammadi corpus, the so-called Gospel of Truth. Magnusson identifies important points of dissent in the two treatises that provide different, yet distinctively Gnostic views regarding the sacrificial death of Jesus.