A report about Early Christianity Studies

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.

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[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.