Product Description

A new edition of our classic, The Other Bible, including a new index, new cover, and a new introduction from the author to bring The Other Bible up to date.

The Other Bible gathers in one comprehensive volume ancient, esoteric holy texts from Judeo–Christian tradition that were excluded from the official canon of the Old and New Testaments, including the Gnostic Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Kabbalah, and several more. The Other Bible provides a rare opportunity to discover the poetic and narrative riches of this long–suppressed literature and experience firsthand its visionary discourses on the nature of God, humanity, the spiritual life, the world around us, and infinite worlds beyond this one.

This new edition will include a full index and a new introduction from editor Willis Barnstone.

o The interest in Gnostic texts begun with The Da Vinci Code has spread to include many of the other "suppressed" early texts of Judaism and Christianity, and this book contains many of them in one volume.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87042 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Released on: 2005-09-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 800 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060815981
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Willis Barnstone is a poet and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He is the author of The Poetics of Ecstasy: From Sappho to Borges; The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice; and The Gnostic Bible; and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

Customer Reviews

An overview at best
It should be made clear to any potential buyer that this book is composed primarily of EXCERPTS from the various texts, not the complete works. While Barnstone is a talented translator in his own right, the translations in this book are not his. Rather, they are culled from various sources, many in the public domain, such as the R.H. Charles editions of the Pseudepigrapha. While these translations are passable, they are often not based in the latest scholarship.

If you are looking for a Readers' Digest Condensed Apocrypha, this book might be worth it, but for serious study, your money would be better spent on the Charlesworth Pseudepigrapha, the Schneemelcher/Wilson New Testament Apocrypha, the Garcia Martinez Dead Seas Scrolls, and the Robinson Nag Hammadi.

Enlightening look at History/Development of Western Religion
This is a wonderfull compendium of Gnostic, Hermetic and non-cannonical Judeo-Christian scriptures. You will find selected chapters and passages from a ubiquitous array of ancient texts influenced by many faiths and philosophies.

Among other things, this book introduces you to:

-- The origin of the fallen angels and levels of heaven and hell (Book of Enoch et al) later depicted by Dante and Blake.

-- The Nag Hammadi Gonstic texts

-- The Hermetical texts

-- The Manachean texts

-- The Mystical texts of the Dead Sea scrolls and Kaballah

-- Strange Gnostic Christian beliefs from Simon Magus to the almost Satanic Cainites.

-- The complete 'Q'-sourced Gospel of Thomas

-- The Infancy Gospels of Christ

One of my favorite selections, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, reminded me of the Jerome Bixby SF Classic "It's a Good Life." with little Jesus terrorizing the town (wishing bad people away).

You will clearly understand after reading this book just how hetergeneous the early Christian communities really were in their beliefs. In fact, the earliest beliefs seem more Gonstic in flavor than they later came to be with the establishment of the Roman Church.

I would highly recommend this book to both the scholar and faithfull alike. For the former, it offers a look at the hisotry and development of Western religion and philsophy through original source material, while to the latter, the origin of some widely held notions, particularly about Heven and Hell, can be found here.

excellent source for apocrypha scriptures
Willis Barnstone did an excellent job in compiling "The Other Bible". This book is one of the best that I've encountered as to having almost all the Gnostic, Pseudepigrapha (Jewish), Apocrypha (Christian)books, and the Dead sea Scrolls translated into common english. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in alternative scriptures for use in problimatic archaeological writing where other written material would be useful. The only problem with the book is the bias I detected on the part of the editor, and the fact that other Christian-Jewish apocrypha were left out of this publication (Ex: The book of Adam and Eve 1 & 2, most all Apocrypha of the early church letters , The Story of Ahikar, and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs). However, this book does rate very highly as compared to other apocrypha translated books I have read in the past. A must for anyone interested in this type of literature.