An Invitation
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 12/27/2010 12:38 PM 
Categories: Books That Didn't Make It Into the Bible, Scholarship, Gospel of Judas, Gnosticsm, Christianity, Goddesses, History, Bible, Gospel of Mark, Dead Sea Scrolls, Gospel of John, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Luke, Gospel of Matthew, Gnostic Gospels
Categories: Books That Didn't Make It Into the Bible, Scholarship, Gospel of Judas, Gnosticsm, Christianity, Goddesses, History, Bible, Gospel of Mark, Dead Sea Scrolls, Gospel of John, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Luke, Gospel of Matthew, Gnostic Gospels
It is nearly the new year, a time of looking backwards and looking towards the year ahead. In this break between semesters I have been thinking about this weblog project, which I have kept for 3 years, and in one important respect I have failed: few people ask me questions.
People ask me questions on website forums so my aethereal presence is not too fierce or inaccessible. So, it is a new year. There is an email link on the left sidebar. (My helper will not let me simply post it, pointing to a wave of Chinese spammers who seem to think I have no staff (that is true, I have nearly no staff) and that I am ignoring the background of this site (not at all, I pay fairly in pizza for someone else to pay attention to the background if this site): posting my email evidently would make that problem worse.)
The entire purpose of this site is the answering of questions. I am terrible at coming up with questions that do not sound like "Name three uses of the Infinitive in Koine" or "What are the main theological themes in Paul's Letter to the Romans?" I am here to serve: the internet (and the world) are an ocean of perplexity and misinformation. Ask me a question about religion or archaeology and I will try to answer it.
-Kushana
What did Christianity mean to the central asian tribes in late antiquity and early middle ages?
We have some idea of what they had in terms of writings based on what made it to china, and we have the communications with the "nestorian" patriarch, but what do we have in the way of artifacts or graves to indicate what their christian practice consisted of?
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There have been some excellent recent books on Nestorian Christianity (and on Manichaeism, which revered Jesus and used some Christian scriptures), any one of them would answer your question.
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Or, more biblically, has the Fourth Gospel ever been read (by a community who left records) as an immortality manual along the lines of taoist spiritual alchemy, taking "eternal life" utterly literally?
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Not that I know of: read Gregory Riley's Resurrection Reconsidered for why resurrection (and immortality) of the ordinary physical body was not part of early Christianity's cultural vocabulary.
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