This volume brings together a rich and varied collection of essays by Gilles Quispel (1916-2006), Professor of the History of the Early Church at Utrecht University from 1951 until his retirement in 1983. During his illustrious career, Professor Quispel was also visiting Professor at Harvard University in 1964/65, and visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven from 1969 until 1974. The fifty essays collected in this volume testify to most of the prominent themes from Professor Quispel’s scholarly career: the writings of the Nag Hammadi library in general and the Gospel of Thomas in particular; Tatian’s Diatessaron and its influences; the Hermetica; Mani and Manichaeism; the Jewish origins of Gnosticism; and Gnosis and the future of Christianity. This volume also makes a number of his less known earlier publications (mainly presented under the heading ‘Catholica’) available to the international community. Until shortly before he died, Professor Quispel remained active in his study of the Gospel of Thomas. He had been one of the first to acquire the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas, of which he published the first translation in 1959 and his final translation in 2005. He was also active in researching the Diatessaron, and Valentinus ‘the Gnostic’. One of his most recent essays – published for the first time in this volume – is on ‘the Muslim Jesus.’

Mani and Augustine: collected essays on Mani, Manichaeism and Augustine gathers in one volume contributions on Manichaean scholarship made by the internationally renowned scholar Johannes van Oort. The first part of the book focuses on the Babylonian prophet Mani (216-277) who styled himself an ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’, on Jewish elements in Manichaeism and on ‘human semen eucharist’, eschatology and imagery of Christ as ‘God’s Right Hand’. The second part of the book concentrates on the question to what extent the former ‘auditor’ Augustine became acquainted with Mani’s gnostic world religion and his canonical writings, and explores to what extent Manichaeism had a lasting impact on the most influential church father of the West.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have expanded the corpus of early Jewish apocalyptic literature and tested scholars’ ideas of what apocalyptic means. With all the scrolls now available for study, contributors to this volume engage those texts and many more to reexplore not only definitions of the genre but also the influence of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the study of apocalyptic literature in the Second Temple period and beyond. Part 1 focuses on debates about categories and genre. Part 2 explores ancient Jewish texts from the Second Temple period to the early rabbinic era. Part 3 brings the results of scroll research into dialogue with the New Testament and early Christian writings. Contributors include Garrick V. Allen, Giovanni B. Bazzana, Stefan Beyerle, Dylan M. Burns, John J. Collins, Devorah Dimant, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Frances Flannery, Matthew J. Goff, Angela Kim Harkins, Martha Himmelfarb, G. Anthony Keddie, Armin Lange, Harry O. Maier, Andrew B. Perrin, Christopher Rowland, Alex Samely, Jason M. Silverman, and Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg.

The Christian Reception of the Hebrew name of God has not previously been described in such detail and over such an extended period. This work places that varied reception within the context of early Jewish and Christian texts; Patristic Studies; Jewish-Christian relationships; Mediaeval thought; the Renaissance and Reformation; the History of Printing; and the development of Christian Hebraism. The contribution of notions of the Tetragrammaton to orthodox doctrines and debates is exposed, as is the contribution its study made to non-orthodox imaginative constructs and theologies. Gnostic, Kabbalistic, Hermetic and magical texts are given equally detailed consideration. There emerge from this sustained and detailed examination several recurring themes concerning the difficulty of naming God, his being and his providence.

Challenging nearly two centuries of scholarship, The Apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans offers the first close analysis of Laodiceans. Philip Tite offers a detailed study of this Latin letter by exploring the epistolary conventions utilized by the letter writer.

Sacred Disobedience: A Jungian Analysis of the Saga of Pan and the Devil traces the ancient Greek God Pan, who became distorted into the image of the Devil in early Christianity. When Pan was demonized, the powerful qualities he represented became repressed, as Pan’s visage twisted into the model of the Devil. This book follows a Jungian analysis of this development. In ancient Greek religion, Pan was worshipped as an honored deity, corresponding to an inner psycho-spiritual condition in which the primitive qualities he represented were fully integrated into consciousness, and these qualities were valued and affirmed as holy. But in the era of early Christianity Pan “dies,” and the Devil is born, a twisted inflation, possibly due to an underlying repression. In the Jungian system, repressed psychic contents do not disappear, as proponents of the new order tacitly assume, but distort and grow more powerful, or “inflate,” to cripple the psyche that refuses to incorporate these split-off elements. Repressed contents will expand to explosive force as the repressed elements eventually return regressively from below. It becomes important then, to understand what qualities the primitive Goat God carried, to appreciate what was repressed in the Western psycho-spiritual system, and what subsequently needs reintegration.