Antiquitopia

I am thinking of revamping some aspects of my Jesus and the Gospels course.  And I was considering ending the semester (next time I teach it) with a representation of Jesus found in a modern novel.  What novels do you think would be particularly good for this?  Either because it is a good piece of writing, or because it would stimulate conversation, or because it is a fun read, etc.?

In a recent article in the Atlantic , Noah Berlatsky attempts a comparison between modern discussions of gay marriage and the 19th Century marriage experiments, mentioning Mormons and Shakers but focusing on John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida Community (which, the article omits, is the origin of Oneida silverware, though originally the company made animal traps). As  Jillian Keenan  reiterated last week at  Slate , gay marriage opponents often assert that allowing same-sex marriages will lead us to polygamy and other perversions. It's an odd rhetorical move, inasmuch as, in terms of chronology, the slippery slope from gay marriage to polygamy appears to run in the wrong direction. The major American experiment with multiple wives in one marriage, occurred, after all, in the 19th century with the early Mormon Church. To talk about polygamy, then, doesn't raise the specter of a dystopic future. It points instead to the past. And it also underlines the extent to which marriage ...

Samaritans made their annual Passover sacrifice yesterday on Mt. Gerizim: The Samaritan community conducted its annual Passover sacrifice Tuesday evening under the leadership of a new high priest, as 50 sheep were slaughtered on Mount Gerizim in an ancient ceremony that attracted more than 1,000 spectators from around the world. High Priest Aabed-El Ben Asher was elevated to his position, which is reserved for the eldest member of the priestly family, following the death last week of High Priest Aaron Ben Ab-Hisda at age 84. Ben Asher, 78, is the 133rd high priest in a line that the Samaritans claim stretches back to Aaron, brother of Moses. There are fewer than 800 Samaritans.  See more here .  One thing I learned from the article is that Samaritans are known for their tahini.  

When evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land.   When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.   He intended to pass them by.   But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified.   But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I, do not be afraid.”   Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased.   And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. (Mark 6:47-52) The more I read the Gospel of Mark, the weirder the Gospel seems.   It is not necessarily weird in and of itself, but the relationship between my expectation of what the Gospel says and what it actually says is often discordant.   I am perhaps too influenced by Matthew’s and Luke’s glosses,...

I have several friends who will be interested in the following book : Joss Whedon and Religion Essays on an Angry Atheist’s Explorations of the Sacred   Edited by  Anthony R. Mills, John W. Morehead  and  J. Ryan Parker  Foreword by  K. Dale Koontz   This is a collection of new essays on the religious themes in, and the implications of, the works of Joss Whedon, creator of such shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel , and  Firefly , and more recently writer and director of the box-office hit  Marvel’s The Avengers . The book addresses such topics as ethics, racism, feminism, politics, spiritual transformation, witchcraft, identity, community, heroism, apocalypse, and other religiously and theologically significant themes of Whedon’s creative enterprises. The disciplinary approaches vary as well; history, theology, philosophy of religion, phenomenology, cultural studies, and religious studies are all employed in different way...

I had a student who raised a question when studying the Gospel of Judas—whether or not Judas had any relation to Secret Mark.   The reason is that they both turn a distinctive phrase:   “mystery/mysteries of the kingdom.”   I appreciated the thought, and I had no answer at the moment, except that most scholars shy away from using Secret Mark in their reconstructions these days, given all of the speculation about it possibly being a modern forgery perpetrated by its discoverer, Morton Smith.   I, nonetheless, had an itch in the back of my head to look back into the synoptic Gospels—if for no other reason than Secret Mark’s vocabulary and phrasing is rarely, if ever, distinctive (indeed, one of the arguments for it being forged is that it overuses typical vocabulary of Mark).   So, I turned to the synoptics, and, interestingly, they rarely use the phrase.   “Mystery” and “Mysteries” may show up, and “kingdom” is all over the place, but ...

I haven't done a quote of the day in a while--so perhaps quote of the year?  Anyway, here it is from the always-quotable Peter Brown: "The miracles of Gregory of Tours are poetry in action." (Peter Brown, "Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours," in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity , 226) This is a sentence delivered mid-paragraph--so easy to overlook buried as it is.  But it stopped me in my tracks.  It struck me as somehow significant, disclosing something important not necessarily about Gregory of Tours but how miracles may have been understood in late-antique Gaul.  Or, better yet, how WE can try to understand the significance of miracles in late-antique Gaul.  But what this significance is is not quite clear.  Or maybe that's the point:  poetry is pregnant with multiple possible meanings, though often employing a particular "theme."  It is not practicing poetry or the practice of poetry, but the poetry of practice...

Anthony LeDonne seeks out the answer to this question that other scholars of the historical Jesus have seemingly shied away from (I wonder what Freud would think of this telling omission). As Anthony notes, the breast-feeding image of Madonna and Child becomes quite popular in medieval Europe.  What is even more interesting are the depictions of Christ offering his own breast milk among the writings of mystics, usually among women mystics but not exclusively so.

A recent article in the Chronicle (via Anthony LeDonne ) has raised this question and answered very strongly in the affirmative.  It is one thing to say a method or approach is ineffective or not useful, and quite another to say that it is actually dangerous. I remember hearing Jan Assman speak at Union Theological Seminary when I was a graduate student at Columbia.  I honestly don't remember a word he said, but just remember him speaking in stereotypical professorial tweed. The article is quite long, but the beginning does point out some of the important breakthroughs of Mnemohistory developed by Aleida and Jan Assman in the past few decades.  Such as... In his recent volume,  Cultural Memory and Early Civilization :  Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination  (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Assmann recapitulates a number of his most important findings. Building on the work of previous theorists of cultural memory as an approach to histor...

Larry Hurtado is discussing the role of revelatory experiences (and "charismatic exegesis") for the religious innovation of including Jesus as a figure of worship in emergent Christianity.  The information can be found scattered throughout his books (starting with One God, One Lord ), but is the basis of some recent lectures he gave in the Houston area.  Give it a look--this aspect of his thesis has always most fascinated me throughout his various writings.

Just saw this today (via Invocatio ):  it is a Latin composition class that is quite creative.  Instead of composing boring prose, students learn how to compose magical spells.  Moreover, the entire class is based upon role-playing games; so, everyone takes on the identity of an ancient person and works on their Latin through the different developments in the game each week.  And when one reaches a new "level" in the game and score points, it affects one's grade. Perhaps something fun and educational to think about for any language teacher out there; might be interesting to apply to other types of classes, too.  Maybe in a Gospels class, everyone takes on a character in Gospel literature, see how that character develops each week in new readings?  If someone is, for example, Matthew/Levi, they would, furthermore, learn more in-depthly about ancient tax systems, tax farming, etc.?  Just thinking out loud.

Today in my Gospels class we were reading the Proto-Gospel of James, which has a very fascinating depiction of time: But I, Joseph, was walking, and I was not walking.  I looked up into the air, and I saw that it was greatly disturbed.  I looked up to the vault of the sky, and I saw it standing still; and the birds of the sky were at rest.  I looked back to the earth and saw a bowl laid out for some workers who were reclining to eat.  Their hands were in the bowl, but those who were chewing were not chewing; and those who were taking something from the bowl were not lifting it up; and those who were bringing their hands to their mouths were not bringing them to their mouths.  Everyone was looking up.  And I saw a clock of sheep being herded, but they were standing still.  And the shepherd raised his hand to strike them, but his hand remained in the air.  I looked down at the torrential stream, and I saw some goats whose mouths were over the wate...

Mark Goodacre has, as per usual, some very interesting thoughts about the phenomenon of blogging, this time regarding the rare case of a peer-reviewed article offering a full critique of a blog post. I think Goodacre's comparison with a conference paper is nearly apt.  I tend to think of a conference papers and blog posts as "thinking out loud," as a works in progress, as ways to informally experiment with new ideas that is often difficult to do in more formal contexts.  A conference paper is, however, more formal and goes through a peer-review process of acceptance and rejection (even if not as rigorous as a journal or a book) and, at least for me, longer than a blog post (I know some of you like really long blog posts--I simply don't).  And, indeed, some of these things do develop into more formal contexts.  Goodacre mentioned this; my series of blog posts on "God and the Senses," which were a series of posts of me thinking out loud, will be making thei...

The Gospel of Judas is back in the news with reports of how comparative ink analyses between Judas and more quotidian late-antique Egyptian documents (contracts, etc.) were used to help authenticate and date the Gospel.  By authenticate, I mean that it is an ancient document rather than a modern forgery, and, therefore, tells us important new information about ancient Christianity.  Looks like the ink comes from the third century CE.

Archaeologists have been investigating a huge conical structure of unhewn basalt stones about 70 meters in diameter, 10 meters tall, and estimated to be about 60,000 tons in weight, found underwater in the Sea of Galilee.  They tentatively date it to about the third millennium BCE when other megalithic structures have been found.  See a brief news report here .

The NYTimes has a piece on how the Syrian Civil War--through vandalism, grave robbing, posting garrisons in ancient sites, and actual fighting--is destroying ancient archaeological sites, discussing Ebla as the primary example. Across much of Syria, the country’s archaeological heritage is imperiled by war, facing threats ranging from outright destruction by bombs and bullets to opportunistic digging by treasure hunters who take advantage of the power vacuum to prowl the country with spades and shovels. Fighting has raged around the Roman ruins of Palmyra , the ancient city in central Syria, once known as the Bride of the Desert. And the Syrian Army has established active garrisons at some of the country’s most treasured and antiquated citadels, including castles at Aleppo, Hama and Homs. ... Seen from afar, Ebla is a mound rising above the Idlib plain. It was first settled more than 5,000 years ago. It eventually became a fortified walled city whose residents worshipe...

In my occasional review of the articles in Arts & Letters Daily I ran across a rather interesting review article about demon possession and modernity .  The article, by Josephine Livingstone about a book by Brian Levack ( The Devil Within ).  The book, to be released on April 8, has the following description: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era of the Reformation, thousands of Europeans were thought to be possessed by demons. In response to their horrifying symptoms—violent convulsions, displays of preternatural strength, vomiting of foreign objects, displaying contempt for sacred objects, and others—exorcists were summoned to expel the evil spirits from victims’ bodies. This compelling book focuses on possession and exorcism in the Reformation period, but also reaches back to the fifteenth century and forward to our own times. Entire convents of nuns in French, Italian, and Spanish towns, 30 boys in an Amsterdam orphanage, a small group of young girls ...

It has been a big couple weeks with archaeological announcements. First, as everyone likely knows by now, the " Gates of Hell/Pluto " or "the Plutonion" was supposedly discovered by archaeologists in Turkey. And now there have been reports of a major excavation occurring in southern Iraq near the ancient city of Ur, famous for being Abraham's purported birthplace.  The dig site was originally identified by satellite, and they appear to have found a huge administrative complex about the size of a football field.

The Huffington Post reports a story of a woman who had a near death experience (NDE) and instead of just a tunnel with a light, she reports that she saw, heard....and smelled...and touched...and tasted God.  She says she experienced God as  “an immense brightness –- a brightness I could feel, taste, touch, hear, smell –- that infused me. Not like I had five senses, but maybe like I had 500 senses.” So the trope of smelling, touching, and tasting God (not just seeing and hearing God) persists in NDE's.  

There is a piece in the Religion Bulletin  on "Zombie Jesus Day" by Philip Tite, who plays with the importance of labels, shifting perceptions, and multiple "ownership" of holidays.  Quite appropriate for my recent discussion of the tombs opening in the Gospel of Matthew a few days ago, which has further links between the Gospel narratives and Zombies.

In case you missed it, there was an online discussion of the Gospel of Thomas between Simon Gathercole and Mark Goodacre on the Gospel of Thomas and its relationship to the synoptics.  It streamed live at The Marginal Review of Books at 9 eastern / 8 central this morning.  It is about a half hour long.

I was watching a recent episode of Raising Hope, called "Burt Mitzvah the Musical."  It is a musical episode including a lot of funny songs.  Here is "Rock the Torah":