Antiquitopia

In an earlier post , I had noted Moses' importance in Greco-Egyptian magic, riffing off of a statement that John Gager made.  I wrote: The Moses of the magical papyri provides another piece of the puzzle of what Jews, Christians, and others on the ground thought, what they did, and, again, reasons for his exaltation and, just as often, suppression.  It is a clear example, here, of exaltation.  I wonder, what Christians did with this view of Moses as magician?  Does his exaltation here mirror his exaltation in contemporary Christian sources of the mid-second to fourth centuries?  How does it compare with contemporary Egyptian Christian sources of different opposing parties of the hierarchy, the monks, and the traditions of Nag Hammadi?  Indeed, it is fascinating territory into which the magical Moses takes us.  It is a messy, difficult terrain, but ultimately a fruitful one. In this post, I would like to delve a little deeper in the Mose...

The qualities of religious experience mirror those of poetry--and, indeed, some of the best accounts of religious experience are related through poetry (think of St. John of the Cross); as one bends and bursts beyond the typical conventions of language, so does the other.  The most engaging poetry pulls at all five senses.  So too, the expression of religious experience.  I realize that what follows may not be technically be poetry in the sense of ancient meter and verse (though it has some of those things!), but one could easily consider it "prose poetry."  Indeed, St. Augustine of Hippo, trained as a rhetor and as a professor of rhetoric, was a master of style, and his Confessions is a masterwork on many levels including its means of expression.  Late have I loved you, Beauty so old and so new: Late have I loved you. And see, you were within And I was within the external world And sought you there, And in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovel...

            Continuing my pursuit of ancient quirks, I want to discuss the strange first-century interest in Moses’ beauty.   I have discussed it in Hebrews 11 and Acts 7, in Philo of Alexandria’s recounting, and now that other prominent first century Jewish writer: Josephus. Josephus picks up on this broader first-century promotion of the fine physique of Moses, but there are some major alterations, dislocations, and expansions.               To briefly recap, previous traditions directly relate Moses’ beauty at birth as the reason why his parents, particularly his mother, decided to save him from infanticide.   Although Acts 7:20 merely notes that Moses at birth “was beautiful (ἀστεῖος) before God,” Hebrews 11:23 reasons that, “By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful (ἀστεῖον)...

Today (June 13) marks five years that I have been blogging.  My inaugural post marked the beginning of my dissertation writing--in June of 2007 I would have been working on my proposal.  2007 was an interesting year.  I went to Italy, and now realizing that it has been five years think I should go back soon!  In the fall of 2007 I met my wife.  Much has changed over the years.  Last year my academic adviser, Alan Segal, passed away.  He saw me to completion, but will never see the book that comes from my research.  There are some continuities.  I am still living with the project that I proposed then, although extraordinarily transformed from proposal to dissertation and transformed greatly again from dissertation to monograph.  I am now thinking of developing my next major project.  I have a lot of the interests I noted then: The name of my blog reflects a combination of interests. I study antiquity, but I am also fascinated by...

Columbia University Press just emailed me to inform me, to my great pleasure, that Alan Segal's book, Sinning in the Hebrew Bible:  How Its Worst Stories Speak for Its Truth , has been posthumously published. I was Alan's TA for his Hebrew Bible class (a few times) where he developed many of the ideas found in this book.  He had been mulling these stories long before I started graduate school, however.  It has had ripples beyond his own classes:  his focus on the seedier elements of the Bible has influenced how I teach the Bible in my introductory classes.  I remember our discussions, either over lunch or visiting his home in New Jersey, on how he was going to frame this book--though I never read the manuscript itself.  He passed away while it was in the final stages of publication, but now it finally sees the light of day. Here is the blurb from CUP's webpage: Stories of rape, murder, adultery, and conquest raise crucial issues in the Hebrew Bible, ...

            I have been contextualizing treatments of Moses in the first to fourth centuries CE, particularly pertaining to his visions in early Christian sources (see my discussion here ):  particularly how those visions are alternatively highlighted, expanded, or suppressed and diminished in the sources--and why?  In order to do this, however, it is important to see what the earliest Christians' contemporaries were doing with Moses, how they were using his visions, promoting or suppressing them.  While the earliest Christians, represented in the NT, largely suppressed Moses' visionary abilities, later Christians sought to affirm and even expand them.  Many Jewish (and don't forget Samaritan) trends in the first to fourth centuries also sought to expand what Moses saw and heard on the mount.  Josephus, however, proves to be more exceptional in this regard.       ...

It turns out that many of the Loeb Classical Library volumes have now become public domain.  Get a copy of your FREE LCL volumes here or here .

I have been fascinated with the traditions of Moses in the first to fourth centuries CE lately.  In connection with my "Christian Moses" project, I have been reading up on how his reputation developed in contemporary sources.  For this, there are many important scholarly works, but perhaps one of the most helpful ones in considering his broader significance in the ancient world is John Gager's Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism .  Of any figure from the Jewish tradition, Moses was the best-known to outsiders.  And while many erudite Greeks and Romans (and Egyptians) tended to refer to Moses as a lawgiver (usually as one inferior to Plato, among others), perhaps the most widespread view of Moses was that of a magician.  He is invoked among the Greek and Demotic magical papyri as an authority--sometimes works are written in his name (such as the much under-studied Eighth Book of Moses) or his name is invoked in surviving amulets because it was thought to have power in ...

Tolerance, particularly religious tolerance, is often touted as one of the achievements of modern secular societies, such as in the U.S.  It, however, also involves an assumption of power:  who gets to tolerate whom?  The one who tolerates is in a different position than the one tolerated.  Perhaps we can think of something as mutual toleration as something equivalent to peaceful coexistence.  This alignment is, perhaps, the best one may get in some times and places.  But, if one seeks mutual respect, then something more active than toleration and coexistence is necessary.  To prevent stereotyping and caricatures of people who worship differently than you do, then something more active is necessary.  In a Huffington Post article , Rev. Lyndon Shakespeare of the National Cathedral, suggests that what can unite us is the ancient activity, persistent social custom of hospitality: Unlike some political options taken to address the poor treatment of ...

There has been seemingly increased discussions of what unites the humanities and the sciences.  One area that seems to unite different branches of knowledge is creativity , as well as a sense of wonder.  In a more limited scope, the ancient historian Robin Lane Fox reflects on the limits and potentials of creativity in historiography versus fiction.  In his Travelling Heroes , he begins with what looks like the basic assumptions of those writing fiction versus those writing history: Novelists, surely, need to imagine, whereas earthbound historians have only to collect as mundane information as survives. (p. 4)  Yet he begins to break down this dichotomy of data gathering versus creative imagination, showing the constraints in fiction and the role of the imagination in history-writing: Yet novelists become constrained by their own creations and by the need for them to be coherent as they develop.  Historians must amass and collect but they then have freedoms...

I just read this interview with Trappist monks just outside of Montreal on silence.  This paragraph caught my eye: Are all your actions done in total silence? How do monks coordinate work? There must be a small amount of words that are absolutely necessary to get through a day?   Father B: No, not all work is done in silence, though we try to keep a silent atmosphere whatever we do, even common work. We talk to convey necessary information; the point is to get to the point and stick to the point and the capacity for that varies from person to person. The ideal isn't to see who keeps the strictest silence but for all to help maintain a silent atmosphere. This says on one level that silence is in our lives to create an ambience of recollection so I'll remember and honor God's presence. On another level, silence reminds me that the misuse of words, the abuse of language can also be the sinful abuse of people; silence for us means not talking , more t...

I just read an interesting interview with Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton.  It covers a multitude of topics of interest, and several elements caught my eye in a general way concerning politics, religion, and culture (by the way, his discussion of the failed modern surrogates of religion is quite interesting).  But one that caught my attention in a specific way that has quite practical implications: How do you feel about current literary criticism? You were an episode in the history of literary criticism yourself, in a sort of transition phase from Leavisism to the present day… I’ve got a book coming out called something banal like How To Study Literature because I fear that literary criticism, at least as I knew it and was taught it, is almost as dead on its feet as clog dancing. That is to say, all of the things that I would have been taught at Cambridge—close analysis of language, responsiveness to literary form, a sense of moral seriousness—all of whic...

            As I am reading Philo for reading his discussions of Moses’ visions, I cannot but help return to this strange little obsession of mine with Moses’ “beauty” (ἀστεῖος).   In a previous post (from February--wow how time flies), I discussed the terminology and usage in the New Testament (Acts 7 and Hebrews 11).  There I had some helpful comments, and I have looked up how this little verse in Exod 2:2 has been re-interpreted by Rabbis, Josephus, and, here Philo.  It is time to put this into a little bit of context.                Naturally, one turns to Philo’s Life of Moses , although the terminology appears elsewhere.    In this work it appears in the following passages: Now, the child from his birth had an appearance of more than ordinary goodliness (ἀστειοτέραν), so that his parents as long as they could actually s...

I just saw that the newest book by John Anthony McGuckin, Ascent of Christian Law:  Patristic and Byzantine Formulations of a New Civilization , has come out.  McGuckin was one of my mentors in graduate school.  I took a couple classes with him on Byzantine Christianity.  His hobby horses have lately been concerned with Symeon the New Theologian and translating mystical liturgies.  He is especially known for his intellectual biography of Gregory of Nazianzus .  Although in the past decade he has had an explosion in publication output, I was still a little surprised when I discovered a couple years ago that he was researching a book on Byzantine canon law.  Here is the product description: This work asks the question: What did Christianity do to build a civilization? In the present age, law has been used energetically to micro-manage human societies, values, and aspirations. But did l aw work that way in antiquity? This little book is some form of ...

While working on Christian hermeneutic mobilizations of Moses’ divine visions (or lack thereof), I am indulging myself by reading quite a lot of Philo's writings.  Philo was extraordinarily interested in the intellectual, contemplative vision of God, seeing with the mind’s eye rather than the bodily one.  Therefore, there is so much one could say about how Philo conceives of the possibilities and limitations of divine vision and how they relate to his most exemplary visionary, Moses, whom he refers to as the greatest and most perfect man who ever lived (Life of Moses 1.1), the most beloved of God (Migration of Abraham 67; On the Confusion of tongues 95-97), and the friend of God (Heir of Divine Things 21).  There are astounding discussions of Moses’ visions, especially concerning the burning bush (astounding for its rather unexpected reticence), Moses’ entrance into the darkness where God was, and Moses’ vision of archetypal reality (the “pattern of the Tabernacle”)....

In a previous post , I laid out a preliminary hypothesis of why Christians were increasingly appropriating Moses' visions on Mount Sinai and to what ends:  asking the questions of "what did early Christians say Moses saw on the mountain?" and "why does it matter?"; that is, exegesis and its social implications.  I want to elaborate that working hypothesis a little bit, with the understanding that it is a working hypothesis--a general guide to my research and something that will, most likely, change as I accumulate more sources.   Whenever I have noted to others that early Christian authors make Moses a proto-Christian or that, according to early Christian literature, that in his visions he foresees Christ or, somehow, more directly encounters Christ, the inevitable response is “of course they do.”  But I think an important dimension is often overlooked in this response:  that by making Moses not just a proto-Christian seer, but, being the prop...