In the collection of Gnostic texts discovered near Nag Hammadi in 1945 in Upper Egypt, some gospels are considered as Apocryphal texts, for instance the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Philip, which contain sayings from Jesus known from the New Testament or quite different from those in New Testament.
This collection illustrates the diversity of spiritual and religious currents of the first centuries of Christianity, when the first Christians began to express their faith with the concepts of the philosophers of Antiquity.
The posterity of the Gnostic esoteric currents is of interest to historians of ancient philosophy, from Christian heresies (Alain Le Boulluec is a specialist of this question), but also to specialists of the Manichean religion : we can cite here the work of Michel Tardieu, one of the world’s formost experts on ancient religions, who held the chair in the history of the syncretisms of Late Antiquity at the Collège de France.
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Manichaeism
Michel Tardieu,
University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Gnose et Manichéisme. Entre les Oasis d’Egypte
et la route de la Soie
A. Van den Kerchove et L. G. Soares Santoprete (dir.),
Turnhout, Brepols, 2017.
Noms Barbares I. Formes et contextes d’une pratique magique
M. Tardieu, A. Van den Kerchove et M. Zago (dir.)
Turnhout, Brepols, 2013.
Pensée grecque et sagesse d’Orient. Hommage à Michel Tardieu
M. A. Amir-Moezzi, J.-D. Dubois et alii (dir.),
Turnhout, Brepols, 2009.
Codex de Berlin,
Michel Tardieu
Paris, Le Cerf, 1984.
Recherches sur la formation de l’Apocalypse de Zostrien et les sources de Marius Victorinus,
Michel Tardieu
Louvain/Paris, Peeters/Librairie Vrin, coll. « Res Orientales », IX, 1996.
Le Manichéisme,
Michel Tardieu
Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll. « Que Sais-Je ? », n° 1940, 1981. Rééd. 1997. Traductions italienne (1988 et 1996), roumaine (1996), portugaise (1991), bulgare (2001) et japonaise (2002).