THE IMPORTANCE OF RELIGIOUS
STUDIES IN THE FIELD OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY
José Aristides da Silva
Gamito
The Christianity deeply marked the history of the
Western civilization. The understanding of this religious movement depends on a
specific research. Many academic papers are published each year in the field of
Early Christianity. In the Religious Studies, the early Christian literature
provides important sources for the knowledge of ideas, behaviors and ritual and
the roots of this religion.
The Early Christian Literature involves the literary
compositions written from the 1st century until the fourth ones. Beyond the New
Testament, there are hundreds of Christian texts from this period. Biblical
scholars expanded the New Testament Research with the contribution of the archaeological
findings of Oxyrhynchus and Nag Hammadi. An important step in this research is
the inclusion of apocryphal books in this field. For many centuries the
apocryphal texts were regarded as heretical teachings. When the academy became
independent with the secularization of theological studies was possible to
study these texts without ecclesiastical censure.
My area of interest is the Gospel of Thomas Studies. During
my Master’s degree studies in Religious Studies, I searched the identity of
Jesus in that Gospel. Since 2016, I published some papers about the theme. And I
developed the blog Luminare for
posting texts about this studies field. In Youtube, I created the serie
Christianitates with videos about the Early Christian Literature.
In a paper entitled “Discussing the literary genre of
the Gospel of Thomas: the Gospels of sentences”[1], I
discussed:
The literary genre “gospel” comprises four
kinds: Gospels of Sentences, of Dialogues, of Narratives and of Discourses. The
Gospel of Thomas is a gospel of sentences and it portrays the earliest textual form
in the history of the transmission of the teachings of Jesus. The these
traditions.
In a
second paper entitled “Women in the Gospel of Thomas: An analysis of gender
question in logion 114”, I discussed the rejection of Mary Magdelene within the
circle of disciples of Jesus.
Finally,
I made three presentations at Faculdade Unida de Vitória on the following
subjects: The identity of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, anthropological and cosmological
middle Platonic marks in the Gospel of Thomas and a literature around the name
of Judas Thomas.
[1]
GAMITO, José Aristides da
Silva. Discutindo o gênero literário do Evangelho de Tomé: os Evangelhos de
sentenças. Reflexus, ano 12, n. 20,
2018, p. 419-435.
