Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Jeffery Peter
Title : The secret Gospel of Mark unveiled Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery
Year : 2007

Link download : Jeffery_Peter_-_The_secret_Gospel_of_Mark_unveiled.zip

"A Discovery of Extraordinary Importance" The whole story spans more than thirty years, from 1941 to the present. I am shocked to find how much of it I have already forgotten. No doubt if the past, like a motion picture, could be replayed, I should also be shocked to find how much of the story I have already invented. Memory is perhaps more fallacious than forgetfulness. Morton Smith An Ancient Monastery East of Bethlehem in the Judean desert, on a cliffside overlooking the Kidron Valley, halfway between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, stands one of the most ancient monasteries in the Christian world, the Great Laura of Mar Saba. It is named in Aramaic for its founder, St. Sabbas, a Greek from Caesarea, in Asia Minor, who began building the first structure in the year 483. Sabbas lived a long life (439–532), which was well documented by Cyril of Scythopolis, who was able to interview many people who had known him personally. Cyril’s life of Sabbas forms the largest section of Cyril’s Lives of the Monks of Palestine, one of the core texts of monastic historiography. The Great Laura has been a major center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity ever since. Some of its monks were important authors and theologians,∂ and many became bishops, martyrs, and saints. Most eminent of them all was St. John of Damascus (eighth century), the great systematic theologian of Eastern Christianity, who formulated the Orthodox theology of the icons and perhaps the first Christian theological response to Islam. His prolific writings counterbalance the reticence of another St. John, called ‘‘the Silent,’’ who had fled an Armenian bishopric to become one of St. Sabbas’s original disciples, then chose to live in deliberate isolation, not speaking for many years. ...