Antiquitopia

There is a small detail that Matthew adds to Mark's narrative concerning the broader effect of Jesus' death and resurrection: the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.  (Matt 27:52-53). The line to inspire every zombie apocalypse to come:  the dead climbing out of their graves to mingle among the living.  Or so it seems.  From an ancient Jewish perspective, it appears that Matthew is saying that Jesus' resurrection has triggered the general resurrection (Paul says something similar--that Jesus is the "first fruits" of the resurrection, suggesting the season of resurrection is at hand for the rest of the "fruits").  The general resurrection occurs at the end of time (or the end of the age), which suggests that at Jesus' death and resurrection the "Kingdom of Heaven" has broken into this w...

I was reading a bit of Leviticus Rabbah and found a gem of a passage: R. Judan b. R. Simeon said:  Behemoth and the Leviathan are to engage in a wild-beast contest before the righteous in the Time to Come, and whoever has not been a spectator at the wild-beast contests of the heathen nations in this world will be accorded the boon of seeing one of the World to come. (Leviticus Rabbah 13.3) How cool is that?  Behemoth vs. Leviathan--the great, untamable beasts described at the end of Job!  Come one, come all for this once in an afterlife-time event!  It is like King Kong versus Godzilla!  It is also an interesting view of the afterlife:  it is compensation for this life.  By giving up the animal fights of the arena in this life (reference to Roman practices), one gets to the see the ultimate beast-fight in the world to come.  (Leviticus Rabbah, by the way, predicts that they will kill each other in this contest.)

April DeConick has a piece in the Huffington Post of the forgotten women of Easter.  Check it out here .

So I found out (a couple days ago now) that my paper proposal for the Society of Biblical Literature's Group, Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity , has been accepted.  Here is my title and abstract: “God and the Senses:   Smelling, Tasting, and Touching God in Early Christianity” The study of ancient Jewish and Christian mystical thought, writings, and practices has typically focused on divine visions and auditions, how seeing and hearing God is portrayed or represented or the practical steps involved to see or hear God in a ritual context, whether esoteric or in broader liturgical contexts.   While justified by many of the writings themselves, this focus nonetheless overlooks that much ancient Jewish and Christian mystical thought and practice engaged all five senses.   In this paper, I propose to investigate how early Christian writings variously spoke of encountering God not only by sight and hearing, but also by smelling, tasting, and...

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence" (My Title is Commentary Enough)

My monograph, The Sabbath and the Sanctuary:  Access to God in the Letter to the Hebrews and Its Priestly Context , is now officially being promoted in the Mohr Siebeck catalogue .  Here is the info: Jared C. Calaway The Sabbath and the Sanctuary Access to God in the Letter to the Hebrews and its Priestly Context Who can enter the sacred and heavenly presence of God? And how? Various ancient Jewish and emergent Christian groups disputed these questions in the first century CE. Jared C. Calaway states that the Letter to the Hebrews joined this debate by engaging and countering priestly frameworks of sacred access that aligned the Sabbath with the sanctuary. From the Hebrew Bible through late Second Temple Judaism, the sanctity of the sanctuary could be experienced through the Sabbath, sacred space through sacred time. In its sweeping vistas of Sabbath rest and the heavenly homeland, the heavenly sanctuary and the coming age, and the heavenly priesthood...

So, I have a question for any Catholic canon law specialists.  The blessing today (3/13/13) for the new pope, Francis I, included a plenary indulgence.  They explicitly stated that the plenary indulgence worked remotely through media (so if you watch the blessing on tv, hear it on the radio, watch it on the internet, it counts).  I realize that remote blessings and indulgences have occurred on television before, but with recording technology and the re-posting of the blessing on the internet, might raise some issues.   1.  Temporal issues.  The plenary indulgence is mediated through television, the internet, etc.  Is there a temporal limit to the blessing?  That is, does this mean whenever one watches the recording they receive a plenary indulgence?  If there is a temporal limit, what is it?  2.  Problem of recording and repetition.  If there is no temporal limit, or at least a generous one, an additional questio...

So, to go along with my previous post on why I would not want to time-travel back to antiquity, I was just reading in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents a recurrent issue in European writings from the discoveries of the Americas and other places in the 1500s and 1600s through the present day really of the idea of the "noble savage" and the longing for the "state of nature." He writes, "In consequence of insufficient observation and a mistaken view of their manners and customs, they appeared to Europeans to be leading a simple, happy life of few wants, a life such as was unattainable by their visitors with their superior civilization" (Standard Edition, pp. 38-39; trans. James Strachy). Freud, much like his predecessors and contemporaries then makes a fairly standard (but methodologically problematic) maneuver of equating such non-European indigenous societies with either classical antiquity or an even earlier age:  "It seems certain th...

Sometimes people (students, family, my spouse, etc.) ask if I could go back in time to antiquity, if I would?  That is, if the Doctor showed up on my doorstep with his TARDIS and asked where and when I would like to go, would I visit the people I study for a living? I always answer absolutely NOT.  I have many reasons why I don't want to meet the people or visit the ancient societies that I study.  One reason is this .

As someone who, on the one hand, has and highly enjoys teaching broad core curricular courses (e.g., Columbia University's Literature of the Humanities) that stretch you as both instructor and student, allowing a broader view of things than is typical in teaching and especially research, and, on the other hand, always attempts to familiarize students with texts outside of "canon" (whether strictly understood in terms of the biblical canon or more loosely in terms of a "literary canon"), I find the following statement by Edward Said quite striking: We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented...in such works.  Culture and Imperialism , 66. He is understanding "canonical" in the broader sense--the "great books" point of...

Rebecca Lesses, a few days back, has posted on a book from Mohr Siebeck that she contributed to called Hekhalot Literature in Context, edited by Ra'anan Boustan, Peter Schäfer, and Martha Himmelfarb.  Her own piece is "Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature."  Here is the info from the Mohr Siebeck website : Hekhalot Literature in Context Between Byzantium and Babylonia Ed. by Ra'anan Boustan, Martha Himmelfarb and Peter Schäfer Over the past 30 years, scholars of early Jewish mysticism have, with increasing confidence, located the initial formation of Hekhalot literature in Byzantine Palestine and Sasanian or early Islamic Babylonia (ca. 500–900 C.E.), rather than at the time of the Mishnah, Tosefta, early Midrashim, or Palestinian Talmud (ca. 100–400 C.E.). This advance has primarily been achieved through major gains in our understanding of the dynamic and highly flexible processes of composition, redaction, and transmission that produced the He...

I am pleased to announce that Jodi Eichler-Levine's book, Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children's Literature .  Here is the blurb: This compelling work examines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children’s literature. Through close readings of selected titles published since 1945, Jodi Eichler-Levine analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe's pogroms, children’s literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficult collective pasts.   In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine changes our understanding of North American religions. If children are...