Antiquitopia

In the Life of Adam and Eve , Michael commands all the host of heaven to bow down before the newly created Adam--the very spitting image of God--and yet only Satan abstains, claiming one should only bow before God (Satan, then, becomes the first strict monotheist, or monolatrist). This text may seem to challenge the concepts of monotheism or monolatry, although it may only challenge our MODERN concepts of monotheism rather than ancient standards. At the same time, the Rabbis, in a bit of a later time, clearly found the notion of the angels or the hosts of heaven bowing before Adam troubling. R. Hoshaya said: When the Holy One, blessed be He, created Adam, the ministering angels mistook him and wished to exclaim "Holy" before him. What does this resemble? A king and a governor who sat in a chariot, and his subjects wished to say to the king, "Domine! (Sovereign)!" but they did not know which it was. What did the king do? He pushed the governor out of the chari...

It seems my posts lately have been more concerned with what we don't or can't know more than what we know. That's the life of an antiquarian! Because of this, while I was reading through George Buchanan Gray's very lucid Sacrifice in the Old Testament , I was struck by the following sentence: Yet it is important to determine, if not the extent of our knowledge, the depth of our ignorance, that what knowledge is possible may be the more clearly and vividly apprehended. (p. 211) I find that, even though Gray cannot always give an answer, he asks great questions and discusses them with great clarity. When I find myself disagreeing with him, it is usually not because the question is poor, but, to the contrary, because we have made so many more discoveries since his book was published in 1925 in terms of material remains and textual discoveries. Yet those discoveries should teach us not just new things about what we know, but how partial are knowledge truly is and remain...

Mark Goodacre reflects on the impossibility of reconstructing the so-called "historical" Jesus at Bible and Interpretation : Bultmann's notorious claim that “I do indeed think we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus” is on one level overstated and easy to dismiss. There are lots of things that we can know about the life of Jesus with a degree of confidence, his healing activity, his proclamation of the kingdom, his connection to John the Baptist, the call of disciples who continued the movement after his arrest and crucifixion, and so on. Beginning from this kind of secure information, one can produce a good sketch of the life of Jesus, and E. P. Sanders has illustrated how much one can do with this kind of data when we integrate them into an informed understanding of Jesus' historical context. But knowing things about the historical Jesus is not the same as being able to write his biography. Bultmann rightly pointed out that we do not ...

I am doing some late-night reading of the Odes of Solomon, and I was struck by Ode 36: I rested on the Spirit of the Lord, and she raised me up to heaven; And caused me to stand on my feet in the Lord's high place, before his perfection and his glory, where I continued praising by the composition of his odes. (The Spirit) brought me forth before the Lord's face, and because I was the Son of Man, I was named the Light, the Son of God; Because I was most praised among the praised; and the greatest among the great ones. For according to the greatness of the Most High, so she made me; and according to his newness he renewed me. And he anointed me with his perfection; and I became one of those who are near him. And my mouth was opened like a cloud of dew, and my heart gushed forth a gusher of righteousness. And my approach was in peace, and I was established in the spirit of providence. Hallelujah. (Trans. Charlesworth in Charlesworth, OTP 2) Although this is Charlesworth's tran...

The traditional oral epic singer is not an artist; he is a seer. The patterns of thought that he has inherited came into being to serve not art but religion in its most basic sense. His balances, his antitheses, his similes and metaphors, his repetitions, and his sometimes seemingly willful playing with words, with morphology, and with phonology were not intended to be devices and conventions of Parnassus, but were techniques for emphasis of the potent symbol. Art appropriated the forms of oral narrative. But it is from the dynamic, life principle in myth, the wonder-working tale, that art derived its force. Yet it turned its back on the traditional significance to contemplate the forms as if they were pure form, and from that contemplation to create new meanings. (Albert Lord, Singer of Tales , 220-21) I appreciate the emphasis on singer as seer, the poet as prophet (something Ovid would capitalize on!), but I wonder what he means by "religion in its most basic sense"; ...

James McGrath posted this, and I could not resist also having it on my blog. It is Hebrews 1 in Star Wars format created by Aaron Rathburn . It strangely matches up quite well. I still wanted to see an imperial cruiser passing by right after it!

From T.S. Eliot's "Choruses from 'The Rock'" (yes, I have been reading a lot of T.S. Eliot lately): All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

From T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men": I. We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us--if at all--not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. .... V. Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm B...

In a fairly biting 1961 review of Walter Kaufmann's Religion from Tolstoy to Camus , Susan Sontag undermines that books' project of what she calls religious fellow-traveling--a generalized religiousness with no content--by questioning the very possibility of being "religious" in a general sense: Does the notion "religion" have any serious religious meaning at all? Put another way: can one teach or invite people to be sympathetic to religion-in-general? What does it mean to be "religious"? Obviously it is not the same thing as being "devout" or "orthodox." My own view is that one cannot be religion in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not "language." Similarly one is not "a religionist," but a believing Catholic, Jew, Presbyterian, Shintoist, or Tallensi. Religious beliefs may be options, as William James...

The "business up front and party in the back" was not an invention of the 1980s, but evidently was the fashion of sixth-century Constantinople. From Procopius' S ecret History : ...the partisans [the Blues under Justinian] changed the style of their hair to a quite novel fashion, having it cut very differently from other Romans. They did not touch moustache or beard at all, but were always anxious to let them grow as long as possible, like the Persians. But the hair on the front of the heart they cut right back to the temples, allowing the growth behind to hang down to its full length in a disorderly mass, like the Massagetae. That is what they sometimes called the Hunnish style. (Trans. G.A. Williamson) It seems Procopius is blaming the Blues under Justinian for inflicting the worst hair fashion upon humanity in the sixth-century CE. But perhaps the Mullet existed even earlier, if it is the style of the Massagetae and the Huns.

To the musical innovator, Les Paul, who died in NY yesterday:

I just saw this for the first time today...and it is well-worth your next five minutes. John Lennon sings, Eric Clapton plays lead guitar, Keith Richards is on bass, and Mitch Mitchell (from the Jimi Hendrix Experience) is on drums. The introduction is a conversation between Lennon and Mick Jagger. Here is "Yer Blues"!

From the Associated Press : August 13, 2009 Hallelujah! Mich. Church Wins $70, 000 in Lottery By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 7:05 p.m. ET HASLETT, Mich. (AP) -- Divine intervention? Or just plain luck? No matter what the circumstances, a Michigan church is $70,000 richer courtesy of the Michigan Lottery. The Covenant Life Worship Center and its 25 members in Haslett, Mich. had one of the second-prize tickets in the Lucky 7s raffle held May 4. The $10 ticket was purchased at a convenience store in Haslett, five miles northeast of downtown Lansing. The lottery Web site says the odds of a single ticket winning $70,000 in Lucky 7s are one in 55,556. Michigan Lottery officials say the church will receive the full amount of the prize because it is a tax-exempt group. Pastor Marilyn Parmelee tells the Lansing State Journal that the prize money will go toward the church building fund, setting up a missionary fund and supporting local community service projects. I cannot recall any passage in...

Roger Bagnall, a papyrologist formerly at Columbia University and now at NYU, is releasing a new book on ancient Christian book production in Egypt from Princeton University Press : For the past hundred years, much has been written about the early editions of Christian texts discovered in the region that was once Roman Egypt. Scholars have cited these papyrus manuscripts--containing the Bible and other Christian works--as evidence of Christianity's presence in that historic area during the first three centuries AD. In Early Christian Books in Egypt, distinguished papyrologist Roger Bagnall shows that a great deal of this discussion and scholarship has been misdirected, biased, and at odds with the realities of the ancient world. Providing a detailed picture of the social, economic, and intellectual climate in which these manuscripts were written and circulated, he reveals that the number of Christian books from this period is likely fewer than previously believed. Bagnall explains ...

In Bible and Interpretation , Philip Davies offers some critical advice about the words we throw around as bible scholars, suggesting we need a Bible Dictionary so that we don't continue to misuse them. Here's one of the entries: ISRAEL (a) A probably fictitious entity supposedly composed of the elements of two nation-states formed in Palestine during the Iron II period under the kings David and Solomon (b) The name given to a kingdom centered in the Ephraimite hill country of Palestine between the end of the 10th and the end of the 8th centuries BCE, possibly deriving its name from a group mentioned in the MERNEPTAH STELE. This entry greatly oversimplified the issue: the Israels that the biblical writers offer us are more varied and variegated: the books of Deuteronomy, Kings, Ezekiel, Chronicles, and Ezra, for instance, all differ on what “Israel” includes (make up your selection from Samarians, Judeans, and Judeans claiming to be returned from exile, proselytes, gerim). It ...

I just found out about Dudeism , which looks like another version of my Apatheism. Here's the snippet from the homepage: Come join the slowest-growing religion in the world - Dudeism. An ancient philosophy that preaches non-preachiness, practices as little as possible, and above all, uh...lost my train of thought there. Anyway, if you'd like to find peace on earth and goodwill, man, we'll help you get started. Right after a little nap. The site lists the great dudes of history, including Jesus, Snoopy, and, of course, THE Dude, Jeffrey Lebowski. "The Dude Abides!"

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way , In Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) I started reading Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time , today. I might finish it within a year, although I doubt it. This statement about the moment of awaking from dreaming just a few pages in has been, I think, something that permeates the folds of his narrative so far--our fixed conceptions of things versus the things themselves, which, in fact, are never accessible, and the turbulence churned by the assailing of our fixed conceptions when challenged by an incongruent conception equally fixed. The unfixed moment between waking and dreaming, between our conceptions of things as themselves and someone else's conceptions of things as something else, creates convolutions of space and ti...

Yesterday, a turn away from the world meant a turn towards the self: a turn away from Marxism meant a turn toward psychoanalysis: in that case, the Real was still somehow present, if only as an aching throb, an open wound. Today, even psychoanalysis and desire must be shunned as being too modern, and as requiring an assessment of late capitalism that the postmodern subject cannot tolerate. What offers itself as a substitute is then art and religion, pseudo-aestheticism in the form we have examined it here and its ghostly afterimages in the slow rotation of the religion of art into the art of religion. (Fredric Jameson, "Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity," The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998) 134) In the balanced dialectic of the statement, the presence of the "Real" in Marxism and psychoanalysis (even if present only as an open wound) is matched by its pseudo-aestheticism of the permutations of th...

As I was googling for pictures of the Jesus Fish, I ran across a short essay by G. Stroumsa in googlebooks here from Messiah and Christos , on the problematic origins of this symbol. Here are some pics of ancient depictions of the fish (much less stylized than today's bumper version) from the catacombs of Rome: The fish and anchor is from the Catacomb of St. Domitilla; the anchor, fish, and Chi-Rho is from St. Sebastian; and the color fish with loaves (obviously depicting the famous miracle from the gospels) is from St. Callixtus. Finally, here are some fish from the mosaic of a third or fourth-century church floor from Megiddo (just discovered in 2005):

One of the oldest Christian symbols is the fish, which has been commodified on the backs of cars for many years now. Some of the earliest ones to come out were simple or included IXTHUS inside, the Greek word for "fish" that is also an acronym for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior" (also in Greek). Then I was amused that there was a Darwinian response, with "Darwin" inside the emblem that has now evolved into an amphibious form: Then the "fish wars" were well underway. In response, a "truth" fish eats the "Darwin" amphibian, in what one might call the most ironic of all of fish--since, well, Christian authorities tended to oppress scientific discovery in the late medieval and early modern eras: Although, it seems, some are responding to this with a call to "make love, not war" in one of the funniest of these car bumper emblems I have seen: Now these things have exploded. A couple years ago I was amused to see a Jew...

A 3000-year-old Egyptian bust of a woman (above) from the Field Museum in Chicago (which has the largest Egyptian collection in North America, if I recall correctly) has an uncanny resemblance to the late Michael Jackson. See brief discussion here .

No, not the North American Patristics Society, but the real thing--a nice midday snooze. I personally love naps. I am lucky to be in a profession that has a certain degree of daily scheduling flexibility that allows me to drop home for a good 20-30 minute recharge in dreamtime, but I wish I had more opportunities. The NYTimes has a short piece critiquing the Pew Research Center's recent survey on napping, claiming that the framing of the questions clearly show the hand of a non-napper. Something about the shape of this survey suggests — ever so slightly — that napping is aberrant behavior, a personal rebellion against workplace wakefulness. But how would the number of adult American nappers change if American businesses encouraged napping? If businesses knew, as all good nappers know, that a short nap is the best way to recharge yourself during the day? We suspect the numbers would rise dramatically, proving that there is no hard and fast distinction between nappers and non-nappe...

I am working through Ken Schenck's Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews at the moment (I'm sitting in the library with the book open as I am writing this). I just have read the introduction and it looks like it will be an interesting read. While I am predicting that our perspectives on temporal and spatial dimensions in Hebrews will cohere more broadly (although I cannot guarantee any agreement in matters of detail), we seem to get there by different roads. He focuses on the narrative and rhetorical worlds assumed and shared by the earliest, let's say, meaning-making community. I too am interested in rhetorical aspects of Hebrews, especially as it relates to how the author plays with spatial and temporal dimensions (often transmuting one into another), yet he gets there through Wittgensteinian language games with some Ricouer while I prefer the route of Bakhtinian dialogism (and, since we're talking about space and time and how they interrelated, the Bakhtinian Chro...

NYTimes ran a short article on the violence and prejudice against Pakistani Christians: GOJRA, Pakistan — The blistered black walls of the Hameed family’s bedroom tell of an unspeakable crime. Seven family members died here on Saturday, six of them burned to death by a mob that had broken into their house and shot the grandfather dead, just because they were Christian. .... The attack in this shabby town in central Pakistan — the culmination of several days of rioting over a claim that a Koran had been defiled — shows how precarious life is for the tiny Christian minority in Pakistan. More than 100 Christian houses were burned and looted on Saturday in a rampage that lasted about eight hours by a crowd the authorities estimate was as large as 20,000 strong. In addition to the seven members of the Hameed family who were killed, about 20 people were wounded. The authorities, who said the Koran accusation was spurious, filed criminal charges in the case late Sunday and apprehended at leas...

Last month, I posted on the similar imagery used in 1 Enoch 62:2 and Heb. 4:12-13: that of the word with a sharp sword for the purpose of judgment. In the comments, Ken Schenck noted the similar imagery in Wisdom of Solomon 18:15-16, while Brian Small noted some very important differences between the function of 1 Enoch and Hebrews in this regard. In his Carnival of Hebrews posts this month, he reiterates these differences, and, in the comments of that post, Tony Siew pointed out another striking usage of the sword-in-mouth in Rev. 19:15, coming from the word of God (19:13). Here they all are: And the Lord of Spirits upon the throne of his glory, and the spirit of righteousness was poured upon him. And the word of his mouth will slay all sinners, and all the unrighteous will perish from his presence. (1 Enoch 62:2) The all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of they a...