Discovered in 1929, the Manichaean Kephalaia have opened up an important window on the early development of Manichaean doctrine. This study identifies a significant redactional tendency whereby the compilers of the text sought to clarify ambiguities in "canonical" Manichaean tradition by means of five-part numerical series. This discovery challenges the conventional wisdom of Manichaean scholarship, which has long maintained that, since Mani recorded his own teachings in a series of what later became canonical writings, Manichaean doctrines were transmitted relatively unchanged from...

This volume collects the contributions of a group of scholars who started rethinking, in 2004, the traditional category of New Testament Apocrypha according to the new perspectives of a greater continuity not only between early Jewish and Christian scriptural productions, but also between early Christian and late antique apocryphal literatures. This is the result of the confluence of two, so far, alternative approaches: on the one hand, the deconstruction of the customary categories of "Jewish Christianity" and "Gnosticism," and on the other, the new awareness that the production of new...