By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2026-07-29T18:05:05-04:00July 29th, 2026|Tags: Ancient Writings, Translation Issues|
When we think about early Christian monks and nuns, we often imagine illiterate men and women whose lives are devoted to prayer, solitude, and spiritual discipline. But how did these communities learn? An interview with Dr. Lillian Larsen
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2026-06-04T07:03:03-04:00June 2nd, 2026|Tags: Ancient Writings, Baptism, Concepts of God|
"But your true self, in the hermetic worldview, is trying to break out of the distractions, and it’s trying to awaken itself. It’s trying to think God and to see God in reality." An interview with Rev. M. David Litwa.
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2026-02-17T18:17:58-05:00February 17th, 2026|Tags: Ancient Writings, Apocalypse of Adam, Demons, Magic, Revelation of Adam|
How did King Solomon wind up in later Christian traditions? The Revelation of Adam—a second-century book from Nag Hammadi—claims that the great Seth became incarnate in a human being who was born of a virgin. He sounds a lot like Jesus with a twist! An interview with Dr. David Brakke
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2025-08-07T19:03:22-04:00August 13th, 2025|Tags: Ancient Writings, Christian History by the Century, Dead Sea Scrolls, Demons, Greco-Roman|
What older scholarship once dismissed as a “silent” era—an apparent gap between the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic writings and later Jewish literature—turns out to have been a crucible of creativity.
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2025-06-12T21:58:41-04:00June 4th, 2025|Tags: Ancient Writings, Christianity, Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi|
Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library made a big splash in the media in the forties and the fifties as giving us a new light on the secrets of early Christianity—each in different ways. An interview with Dr. Matthew Goff and Dr. Dylan Burns
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2025-05-07T00:59:55-04:00May 7th, 2025|Tags: Ancient Writings, Christianity, Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi|
You are bringing us back into antiquity in a way we've never seen before. Dylan, you're stretching our minds in terms of what we're calling Christian. Matthew, you're telling us we have more legitimacy in what we're looking at. An interview with Dr. Matthew Goff and Dr. Dylan Burns
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2026-05-19T00:52:01-04:00February 26th, 2025|Tags: Ancient Writings, Apocrypha, Apocryphal Texts, Christian Canon|
By themselves, the Apocryphal writings are fascinating, and historically, they have much to tell us about the ancient state of religious thought. An interview with Dr. Matthew Goff
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2025-01-08T11:48:15-05:00January 8th, 2025|Tags: Ancient Writings, Parables, Plato|
There's a Logos, there's an order that we don't see. And so both Plato and Jesus actually have that quality, just expressed in different ways. For Jesus, his behind-the-scene is the basileia tou theou, the Empire of God. An interview with Dr. David Galston
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2025-03-25T04:58:26-04:00December 17th, 2024|Tags: Ancient Writings, Apocrypha, Early Christian Texts, Extracanonical Texts, Nag Hammadi, Noncanonical Texts, Translation Issues|
When people begin to realize the treasures of the Nag Hammadi Library, the Gospel of Mary, and other extracanonical writings, they'll be happy to find more English translations to read on two excellent websites. An interview with Mark M. Mattison and Rachel Bousfield.
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2024-11-12T23:55:16-05:00November 13th, 2024|Tags: Ancient Writings, Christian Canon, Dead Sea Scrolls, Demons, Gratitude, Thanksgiving|
I hope the exposure of both myths—Thanksgiving traditions and canonical traditions—resets the course for a more informed appreciation of the treasures buried in the pseudepigrapha even as some Americans have embraced a more inclusive Thanksgiving table.
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2024-11-06T07:31:29-05:00November 6th, 2024|Tags: Ancient Writings, Gnosticism, Religious Boundaries, Valentinus|
There’s a comfortable mix between Jewish and Christian ideas, definitely. We have a writing that's coming from a group of Jesus followers who had inherited the teachings and ideas of James, the brother of Jesus. An interview with Dr. Samuel Zinner
By Shirley Paulson, PhD|2024-07-24T05:36:56-04:00July 24th, 2024|Tags: Ancient Writings, Apostles, Gender Issues, Sex, Women|
We will consider how early Christian narratives emphasized standards of sexual abstinence as a means of spiritual flourishing for others, particularly for the apostles of Jesus, and how women’s bodies drive these narratives. Presenter: Mallory Challis with host Dr. Shirley Paulson
