This volume is a biblical theological critique of the Apostles' Creed and a development of the role of the Holy Spirit in the church, the world, and the personal experience of Christian faith. It addresses the creed as a historic document, an artifact of early Christian theological development, and a long-standing guide for the form and content of that faith tradition. This book is an appreciation of the Apostles' Creed in terms of its persistent pastoral effect in the church. It is also a criticism of aspects of the creed that are unbiblical and crafted for political or extraneous...

The United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) entrusted author James Robinson with tracking down the place where the Nag Hammadi Codices had been discovered. Priests whom the author interviewed in the region told Robinson that the codices had once been in the possession of a priest in the town of Dishna, a bit further upstream than Nag Hammadi itself. Robinson found that this priest had not had the Nag Hammadi Codices but rather the Bodmer Papyri. For Dishna is where the monastery headquarters of the first monastic order was located. The Bodmer Papyri discovery consisted...

The Sermon on the Mount is often considered a model for the moral and religious conduct of man. Such an interpretation defrauds the Sermon of its real meaning, according to Eduard Thurneysen, and results in a futile legalistic attempt to fulfill the Sermon's commands. Dr. Thurneysen insists that the Sermon on the Mount must be understood in terms of gospel and nothing but gospel. It is to be read with eyes directed only to Jesus and not to the problems of life as such. Then the problems will be set in true perspective, too. He further asserts that the Sermon is gospel in the form of law. Each...

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About the Contributor(s): James M. Robinson is Professor of Religion Emeritus at Claremont Graduate University, where he was founder and director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. As permanent secretary of UNESCO's International Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices, he edited The Coptic Gnostic Library, reprinted in five volumes (2000); among his many other publications is Language, Hermeneutic, and History.

The Nag Hammadi Story is not a history of research in the usual sense of a Forschungsbericht, which would report on the massive amount of scholarship that has been devoted to the content of the Nag Hammadi Codices for more than a half-century. Rather it is a socio-historical narration of just what went on during the thirty-two years from their discovery late in 1945, via their initial trafficking, and then the attempts to monopolize them, until finally, through the intervention of UNESCO, the whole collection of thirteen Codices was published in facsimiles and in English...

The seven Manichaean papyrus codices of the fourth or fifth century were discovered in illicit excavation in 1929 in the Egyptian desert. They were acquired in about equal halves by A. Chester Beatty for his library and by Carl Schmidt for the papyrus collection of the Staatliche Museen of Berlin. Having had access to the inventories, correspondence, and files in Berlin, Robinson provides translations of the German and French documents to increase access to information previously unavailable to the scholarly community. He narrates the slow and problem-ridden path of the acquisition,...