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Gnosticism and the History of Religions

by David G. Robertson
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Current price ₹3,839.00
Original price ₹4,607.00
Original price ₹4,607.00
Original price ₹4,607.00
(-17%)
₹3,839.00
Current price ₹3,839.00

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Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9781350258594
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publisher Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 240
  • Original Price: GBP 29.99
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 454 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Gnosticism, History, and Biblical Studies / General

Building on critical work in biblical studies, which shows how a historically-bounded heretical tradition called Gnosticism was 'invented', this work focuses on the following stage in which it was "essentialised" into a sui generis, universal category of religion. At the same time, it shows how Gnosticism became a religious self-identifier, with a number of sizable contemporary groups identifying as Gnostics today, drawing on the same discourses.

This book provides a history of this problematic category, and its relationship with scholarly and popular discourse on religion in the twentieth century. It uses a critical-historical method to show how and why Gnosis, Gnostic and Gnosticism were taken up by specific groups and individuals - practitioners and scholars - at different times. It shows how ideas about Gnosticism developed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, drawing from continental phenomenology, Jungian psychology and post-Holocaust theology, to be constructed as a perennial religious current based on special knowledge of the divine in a corrupt world.

David G. Robertson challenges how scholars interact with the category Gnosticism, and contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between primary sources, academics and practitioners in category formation.

Kundt, Radek: - Radek Kundt is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He is also a Research Fellow at the LEVYNA Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, Masaryk University, Czech Republic.

Martin, Luther H.: - Luther H. Martin is Professor of Religion Emeritus at the University of Vermont, USA.

Robertson, David G.: - David G. Robertson is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. He is co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, and co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion. His work applies critical theory to the study of alternative and emerging religions, "conspiracy theory" narratives and the disciplinary history of the study of religions. He is the author of UFOs, the New Age and Conspiracy Theories (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-editor of After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (2016) and the Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion (2018).

Wiebe, Donald: - Donald Wiebe is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Trinity College, University of Toronto, Canada.

Xygalatas, Dimitris: - Dimitris Xygalatas is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Experimental Anthropology Lab at the University of Connecticut, USA.

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