"In addition to his responsibilities at the church in Philadelphia, however, Taussig is a professor of biblical literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York. One of his areas of expertise is those early Christian texts that are not part of the New Testament. Along with Karen King of Harvard Divinity School and others, he has championed the idea that the Gnostic Gospels were not necessarily heretical but were rather were an example of the diversity of thought and ideas that Christians were grappling with in the first and second centuries. Many of the academics who study these texts no longer use the term “gnostic” because of its connotation of heresy.
What’s more, Taussig believes that many of these texts are, in their own way, scriptural, as worthy of meditation and prayer as the texts in the 27 books of the New Testament. He often preaches from the early Christian texts. And in February 2012, he and a group of nationally known spiritual leaders and scholars got together in New Orleans to conduct an interesting exercise: to choose texts that might integrate well with the New Testament itself. They chose 10 of them, and the results were published in a book entitled “A New New Testament.” Earlier this year, the book landed on my desk, which is how I stumbled across Taussig and his work.
Those early Christian texts can seem quite astonishing. Several of them are told from the point of view of a woman, something that is not true of any of the New Testament. The Gospel of Mary, for instance, tells the story of Mary Magdalene, “who is portrayed as one of Jesus’s closest associates,” as Taussig writes in an introduction to that gospel, and has been given teachings from Jesus that she passes on to his male disciples. A second book that is written mostly in the female voice is “The Thunder: Perfect Mind.” A poetic work, what is particularly amazing about it is that the female voice is that of the deity Herself."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/opinion/nocera-the-gospel-according-to-mary.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131224&_r=0
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