Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Gnostic Gospel of Mary: Geography and Places

We're going to continue our look at some of the alternative gospels; we will next take a look at the Gospel of Mary. Here is the list of all the earthly, physical, geographical places listed in the Gospel of Mary:
  • (None)

Again: None. There are no earthly, physical, geographical places mentioned in the Gospel of Mary.

With the Gospel of Mary, we only have a fragment of the original: there are pages missing. It is possible that a copy of the full text will be found at some point, possible that the missing pages may be found one day. If we had the full text, it's possible that it might contain references to actual places. As for the text we have, the text which the scholars have studied and commented on, there are no references to actual geographical places.

Some call this the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, but that's really more than we know from reading it. It does mention a Mary, but she is not called Magdalene here. There were several women named Mary in the Biblical gospels. When people call this the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, they are relying on the earlier Biblical gospels as references to help them identify the people who are not fully identified here. And, as mentioned another time when we looked at alternative gospels, the Gospel of Mary does have an additional problem in claiming to be first-hand material on Jesus: the name "Jesus" does not appear in the text that we have.

2 comments:

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

send me an email so I can get your address.

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

I don't know if you see my blog on email or at the sight. I put the following disclaiming so I wont hurt your feelings by mistake.

first i quote your comments to my last deal then say:
"Nothing I say beyond this point should be construed as a commentary on Fisher's theology. I'm not talking about her understanding now. I'm talking about Christian ideas in general."