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...

For my exams a couple years ago now, I developed a syllabus for a course that I would have loved to take but have never seen offered: "Jews in Ancient Egypt." If anyone is interested in this subject, I would highly recommend Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, T he Jews of Egypt: From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) [ Les Juifs d’Egypte, de Ramsès II à Hadrien (Paris: Editions Armand Colin, 1992)]. This is perhaps the most comprehensive and readable guide. Modrzejewski bases his observations in papyrological and evidence, but uses other types of documents to fill in the overall picture. He covers everything from biblical stories, the military colony of Elephantine, and Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt to reminiscences of Egyptian Judaism in late antique Egyptian papyrological documents, Rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity. Perhaps his most interesting chapter is on the LXX. One of my interests in the subject was, especially...