Anne Starr Kreps, "The Crucified Book: Sacred Writing in the Age of Valentinus "
English | ISBN: 0812253876 | 2022 | 200 pages | PDF | 897 KB
In the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, a crucified Jesus is depicted as wrapped in a scroll and reading aloud the contents of his heart as he dies. This is just one of many strange appearances of the physical book in this text and in the surviving fragments of Valentinus. Through its representations of the written word, Anne Kreps argues, the Gospel of Truth promoted a living document perspective on the holy book, encouraging the generation of religious books as new sources of revelatory authority.