Gospel of Philip - Problems Concerning The Text

Problems Concerning The Text

The Gospel of Philip is a text that reveals some connections with Early Christian writings of the Gnostic traditions. It is a series of logia or pithy aphoristic utterances, most of them apparently quotations and excerpts of lost writings, without any attempt at a narrative context. The main theme concerns the value of sacraments. Scholars debate whether the original language was Syriac or Greek. Wesley W. Isenberg, the text's translator, places the date "perhaps as late as the 2nd half of the 3rd century" and places its probable origin in Syria due to its references to Syriac words and eastern baptismal practices as well as its ascetic outlook. The on-line Early Christian Writings site gives it a date ca 180 – 250. 2nd or 3rd century dates is the range given in The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook, Marvin W.Meyer editor, 1987 p. 235.

Read more about this topic:  Gospel Of Philip

Famous quotes containing the words the text, problems and/or text:

    The laying of fish on the embers,
    the taste of the fish,
    the feel of the texture of bread,
    the round and the half-loaf,
    the grain of a petal,
    the rain-bow and the rain.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    “What we know, is a point to what we do not know.” Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)