| The New York Times, October, 6, 2007: Save the Gnostics! |
Oct. 8th, 2007|09:00 am |
Save the Gnostics
By NATHANIEL DEUTSCH
THE United States didn’t set out to eradicate the Mandeans, one of the oldest, smallest and least understood of the many minorities in Iraq. This extinction in the making has simply been another unfortunate and entirely unintended consequence of our invasion of Iraq — though that will be of little comfort to the Mandeans, whose 2,000-year-old culture is in grave danger of disappearing from the face of the earth.
The Mandeans are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity, cousins of the people who produced the Nag Hammadi writings like the Gospel of Thomas, a work that sheds invaluable light on the many ways in which Jesus was perceived in the early Christian period. The Mandeans have their own language (Mandaic, a form of Aramaic close to the dialect of the Babylonian Talmud), an impressive body of literature, and a treasury of cultural and religious traditions amassed over two millennia of living in the southern marshes of present-day Iraq and Iran...............
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06deutsch.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Cross-posted:
http://community.livejournal.com/gnosticism/45835.html
http://alexrainy.blogspot.com/2007/10/new-york-times-october-6-2007-save.html |
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