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Wednesday, October 08, 2014

A Gnostic Gospel, a monster, and a visit to the bank


- the resurrected Ichabod Crane

Tonight I watched the latest episode of Sleepy Hollow at Hulu and learned about the Codex Tchacos ...

an ancient Egyptian Coptic papyrus containing early Christian gnostic texts from approximately 300 AD:

- The Letter of Peter to Philip
- The First Apocalypse of James
- The Gospel of Judas
- A fragment of the Book of Allogenes (or the Book of the Stranger, this is different from the previously known Nag Hammadi text Allogenes.)

The Codex Tchacos is important, because it contains the first known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas, a text that was rejected as heresy by the early Christian church and lost for 1700 years. The Gospel of Judas was mentioned and summarized by the Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons in his work Against Heresies ...


And also about a (fictional) sketchbook belonging to Benjamin Franklin containing a drawing ...



which looks remarkably like da Vinci's Vitruvian Man ...



As Ichabod says, the drawing is of a creature assembled from parts of deceased soldiers, a kind of golem/frankensteinian monster created by Franklin at the behest of George Washington to go to bat for the good guys against the Headless Horseman, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yep, those guys ;) ...



Before they can re-create the creature, they need the Headless Horseman's head, which has been secreted in a safety deposit box at the local bank ;) ...



Hard to explain here for those who haven't been watching the series the whole fantasy/history/religious horror background of the show, but it's a lot of fun!

5 Comments:

Blogger Dina said...

Hi Crystal. I think this is something you might enjoy:
http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2014/10/inviting-science-fictional-ushpizin.html

12:25 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

Hi Dina,

Thanks for the link. That's so interesting - it's kind of like the imaginative prayer style that Ignatius teaches. I'll have to send that link to a friend I have who's a big fan of Firefly :)

11:05 AM  
Blogger Dina said...

I had never even heard of Firefly. But I do like reading the Velveteen Rabbi.

11:37 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

I tried a couple of episodes but didn't like it so much myself, although the guy who created it has done some very good other stuff.

12:18 PM  
Blogger Dina said...

Thanks for referring me to your 2010 post. Very educational.
Everything was and is so complicated in those matters. Back then during the Council I was just a college kid busy with my studies.

12:11 PM  

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