Antiquitopia

Jonathan Klawans’s Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism responds to evolutionary and supersessionist scholarship that has read sacrifice and the temple as things that were replaced by something better that came along later (Jesus for Christians and prayer for Jews), reading polemics that derive from Hebrews (for Christians) and Maimonides (for Jews) anachronistically back into sources, such as the prophets, the Dead Sea Sectarians, aspects of the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. This book builds upon his earlier work, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Israel , and relies heavily upon the insights of Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger and her more recent analysis in Leviticus as Literature , depicting purity laws, sacrifice, and, with it, the temple as a “symbolic system.” Purity, sacrifice, and the temple are all interrelated: you must have ritual purity to approach the sanctuary to offer a sacrifice. After a fantastic lite...

For over two and a half decades, the Republican Party has had a virtual monopoly in mobilizing strongly religious voters. Yet, two new tendencies are apparently buckling this trend. On the one hand, there are new fissures in the relationship between evangelicals and conservative Catholics and the GOP with the rise of environmentally-conscious evangelicals and the importance of immigration reform, the minimum wage, and opposition to Iraq among conservative Catholics. Indeed, if you take abortion off the table, then many new alliances and religio-political possibilities arise. The other tendency is the stepping-up of religious language and a more comprehensive political strategy geared toward religiously-inclined voters among Democratic candidates. This latter trend is the subject of not only one, but TWO articles in the latest edition of Time Magazine . The first article discusses the religious background and the increased usage of religious language among Democratic presidential candid...

The scholarly community is in mourning as the Vatican Library closes for a THREE-YEAR rebuilding. A Columbia professor of mine who studies medieval Christianity gave me a heads up on this when I was leaving for Rome around the end of May. As Paleojudaica reports, scholars were sitting elbow to elbow with piles of manuscripts trying to finish their research before the inevitable closing. So, what do we do for the next three years? Oddly enough, a little over half of the Vatican's approximately 70,000 original docs are on microfilm at St. Louis University (a good Jesuit school), which will make St. Louis, originally my neck of the woods, of all places the new hub for those needing access to any vatican codex or manuscript for the next three years. Perhaps I will have a research-related reason to go home after all. I have also heard a rumor from a source here in NYC that there are other microfilms of much of the library in Brussels, or some northern European city, but I have not re...

Yesterday I was invited to join "Epherika" and her class to go to the Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The Lubavitch is one of many Hasidic (alt.sp. Chassidic) Jewish communities. We had an absolutely fantastic time. Two rabbis led us around, taking us to a very active and wonderfully noisy synagogue with people praying and arguing about this or that point in the Talmud. We stopped at "770." We checked out a little Judaica store with just shelves full of books, shofarim, fantastic children's toys (such as Hebrew blocks, Hebrew mats, and even Hebrew balls), and music (I almost bought a Matisyahu album--I think Matisyahu comes from Crown Heights, but I could be mistaken). We saw some rare books and scrolls that they have in their library. We went to the mikveh, where they separated the men from the women and gave us separate talks and tours. Interestingly, the women had a convert while we had one of the rabbis. And, finally, they took us to a very g...

As predicted, the Discovery Channel will be airing a special on a mummy that has recently been identified as Queen Hatshepsut based upon a tooth (see my post from June 27). The special is this Sunday, July 15, at 9 pm. Since I do not get the Discovery Channel, somone will have to tell me how it goes. But if you are like me and do not have cable (or limited cable), check out the cool website DC has set up for this.

The New York Times has a lengthy article today on Hillary Clinton and Faith. It basically gives a history of her background as a Methodist (often modified by the adjective "liberal") and how that drives her social and political activism. Much of the article talks about how her increased references to her religious background during her campaign have been interpreted (from calculated, politically motivated, and convenient to sincere). I do not think I am one to judge; only she knows her sincerity. I would say the same thing about W. Of course, faith and politics is a huge ball of yarn that is difficult to untangle, but here is question concerning just one strand of it: Cannot a politician of any persuasion have a sincere faith (whatever that means) even if it is exploited for votes? Or, put another way, just because a politician's faith is invoked to get votes, does that make her or his faith less sincere?

I have been away for the last week and was happy to see when I returned that my copy of the critical edition of the Codex Tchacos was waiting for me in the mailroom. Of course, it is entitled the "Gospel of Judas together with the Letter of Peter to Philip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos" with the Gospel of Judas in much larger print than the other titles for marketing purposes, to be sure. But I am particularly excited to read the books getting less press. Two of them, the Letter of Peter to Philip and James, are attested in the Nag Hammadi Codices, and so FINALLY we can see variant readings of the same text and begin to discuss issues of transmission history in ways that we cannot for most NHC documents. But the real gem, in my view, is the tentatively-titled "Book of Allogenes," which appears to be almost a midrash on Jesus' temptation in the desert and the Transfiguration all wrapped into one, but instead of saying "Jesus" t...

The New York Times reports that the residents of ancient city of Cologne, which hosts the greatest cathedral in Germany, is split concerning the building of a new mosque on the site of a converted factory. As the article reports, there are already dozens of mosques in Cologne, which, by the way, hosts one of the largest Muslim populations (approx. 120,000 people mostly of Turkish descent) in Germany, but they are all in tucked-away factories and warehouses that do not attract much attention. This new mosque would be Germany's largest and would give Cologne's Muslims a more conspicuous place of worship they can take pride in, and, even being Germany's largest mosque, it would not compete with the famous cathedral in proximity, size, or grandeur. More conservative elements of the population, nevertheless, have petitioned for the suspension of the project, citing the "common historical background" of non-Turkish German residents against the relatively "new...

I just finished reading Peter Schafer's new book, Jesus in the Talmud . Previous discussions on this theme have revolved around whether or not the rare appearances of Jesus in Rabbinic literature can contribute to our understanding of the "historical Jesus." Notable in this respect is the highly erudite and ultimately fruitless study by Johann Maier entitled, Jesus von Nazareth in der talmudischen Ueberlieferung . Schaefer seeks to move beyond such questions and discuss why Jesus is portrayed the way he is in the Talmud (basically, and to no one's surprise, in a very negative light). His thesis is that the Talmud's occasional discussions of Jesus--when Jesus usually is NOT the primary topic under discussion, but is merely used as an example for another point--provides a "devastating counternarrative" to the gospels. "Counternarrative," by the way, is Schaefer's favorite word in this book. To demonstrate this, he engages in close readi...

The New York Times has an article today that discusses the similarities, both flattering and not so flattering, between the U.S. Republic/Empire and the Roman Republic/Empire. These are comparisons that have been kicked around for years (centuries, actually). The original founders often compared the burgeoning government with the Roman Republic and Empire, focusing on the positive aspects and warning of the negative aspects (note, though, that some of what they viewed as positive, we would view in a more negative light, and so on and so forth). For the nineteenth-century interest, just look at the architecture in D.C.!!! Today this comparison abounds in politics, popular media, scholarship, and on the street. For example, if you ever stop and listen in the halls of Union Theological Seminary, it seems that this is almost all you hear with the important and clearly overblown and exaggerated caveat that Jesus and Paul were obviously ANTI-empire (the NT evidence is a bit more complex wit...