Lds gospel library 3.0
However, overlays of tradition will doubtless have been added to the earlier stories and teachings.įrom the point of view of the restored gospel, Latter-day Saints can usually justify a rather straightforward method of identifying doctrines and teachings which derive not only from Jesus’ era but more notably from the earlier period of the patriarchs and prophets. To be sure, second-century literature will contain doctrines and accounts which go back to the age of Jesus himself. And this observation dictates that we use caution. But, obviously, we are taken back neither to the time of the earliest church nor to an even earlier period required for those texts attributed to Old Testament personalities such as Adam and Seth. This period, of course, is a good deal closer to the era of Jesus than the fourth-century copies found near Nag Hammadi. Beyond this, it is possible by various means to demonstrate that some texts, or parts thereof, were originally composed at least as early as the second century A.D. What we possess in the Nag Hammadi library are copies produced in the second half of the fourth century A.D. The solution, I suggest, is largely one of dating. For, on the one hand, a few texts deal tantalizingly with prominent figures from the Old Testament-such as Adam and Melchizedek-while, on the other, many deal with Jesus and his disciples. īefore we turn to an examination of teachings found in this literature, it is important to discuss the inevitable question whether these texts constitute reliable historical and doctrinal accounts which go back to the personalities featured in the documents. For our purposes, the Nag Hammadi texts reinforce this impression by claiming that Jesus and his disciples had taught doctrines and practiced ordinances which the budding Catholic church came to reject or deny. But his basic thesis that the early church did not constitute a unified entity after the deaths of the Apostles still stands. To be sure, it inspired studies which took issue with his views.
Įven today, the question remains whether Bauer’s challenge to the old way of viewing early Christian history has ever really been met. For him, Eusebius’s view of a unified, monolithic church could not be taken seriously in light of the earliest regionalized evidence. After focusing on organization, order of services, types of sacraments and ordinances, and various doctrines, Bauer concluded that Christianity differed significantly from one location to another. Remarkably, this Eusebian concept of early Christian history persisted until 1934, when this idea was seriously challenged by Walter Bauer, a German scholar who had investigated the early church by geographical regions. His basic view was that the mainline church had enjoyed a continuous, unbroken historical succession from the Apostles, whereas the heretics had formed splinter groups deviating from the church’s ongoing, inherited repository of true doctrine. The approach to the historical interpretation of the early Christian church which has dominated almost all serious investigations has been that of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in the early fourth century, the first to attempt to write a history of the Christian church covering the period from Jesus’ time to his own. Interpretations of Early Christian History Now that we possess a substantial collection of their literary remains in the Nag Hammadi corpus, a new assessment of these so-called heretics and their relation to early Christianity has been called for. Since antiquity, these Christians and certain of their teachings have been known from long and venomous treatises written against them and their doctrines by early Church apologists who portrayed them as heretics and perverters of God’s word. And while the texts are not all demonstrably Christian in origin, this notable library consists largely of heretofore unknown writings preserved by Christians who both stood apart from the early Catholic church and yet at the same time claimed to possess the true gospel. Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were gathered by a Jewish sect, these documents were collected by Christians. Written in Coptic on papyrus leaves, this collection of texts includes fifty-two separate works which were originally bound in twelve or thirteen leather-covered codices.
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In 1946 or 1947, it is reported, an Egyptian camel driver named Mohammad Ali discovered a cache of early Christian texts in Upper Egypt, now known as the Nag Hammadi library.