Antiquitopia

Anthony LeDonne and Chris Keith asked me to offer some memories of Alan as his final Ph.D. student that he saw to completion in honor of their book giveaway of Two Powers in Heaven .  I thought I would reproduce what I wrote for them for my readers here. My reflections of Alan Segal as his final Ph.D. student.  Alan was a brilliant man. He was the stereotypical absent-minded professor with his head in the clouds. Often I would walk into his office to discuss my research projects with him, and he seemed to be in another world. Nonetheless, months later he could quote what I said to him back to me verbatim. Who knows how many languages he knew!? He could recite poetry and/or order a meal in most of them. As an advisor, he let his students develop their own ideas and follow them wherever they led. That is, one thing I really appreciated was that he was not trying to create carbon copies of himself or make us elaborate his ideas, but was there to guide our very different pro...

Anthony LeDonne and Chris Keith are giving away a copy of my late advisor, Alan Segal's first book, Two Powers in Heaven here .  Three and a half decades after it was first published by Brill, it remains a foundational book that discusses intermediation, Christology, and the interrelationships between the emergent Rabbis and emergent Christians.  A seminal work, Baylor University Press has now republished it in a far more affordable form.  So now we can actually assign it in a graduate course!

Larry Hurtado notes here that my late advisor's first book, Two Powers in Heaven, is now being re-printed by Baylor University Press at an affordable cost. Here is the blurb on BUP's site: In his now classic   Two Powers in Heaven , Alan Segal examines rabbinic evidence about early manifestations of the "two powers" heresy within Judaism. Segal sheds light upon the development of and relationships among early Christianity, Gnosticism, and Merkabah mysticism and demonstrates that belief in the "two powers in heaven" was widespread by the first century, and may have been a catalyst for the Jewish rejection of early Christianity. An important addition to New Testament and Gnostic scholarship by this much revered scholar, Segal's   Two Powers in Heaven   is made available once again for a new generation.

I just received in the mail a copy of James McGrath's new book, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context , sent to me from the University of Illinois Press. Given that I have been reading and reviewing Bauckham's book on a very similar subject, I probably should give some time to this work as well. I would like to thank James for keeping this book short! Something I am not very good about in my own writing. Text, notes, bibliography, and index are all only 155 pp. Only 104 pages of text! So, it looks like a much quicker read that Bauckham. I'm sure most of you read McGrath's blog already and are quite up-to-date about this book. But I will just point out its general layout and leave reading and reviewing to a future time when I have more time. His first chapter focuses on the issue of method and scholarly study of ancient Jewish and Christian perspectives on the divine. It seems at first glancing that he lays out a typology of monothe...

Today many people have posted on the new list of the top 100 Theology blogs for online Christian colleges and universities--which, alas, I did not make. I am very happy with being in the top 50 ancient history blogs , though. Listed as number one on this list is a blog by Michael Heiser, investigating the two powers in heaven controversy in ancient Judaism. Heiser's research is on the divine council in second temple Jewish literature (both canonical and non-canonical, he notes), and his dissertation is available on his website. As a student of Alan Segal, whose own dissertation over thirty years ago was on this very issue and remains an authoritative source for its investigation, I was attracted to the issues discussed on this blog.

I just stumbled onto this site: Encyclopedia Mythica . It looks like a quick and easy reference to various gods or figures of various myths and legends throughout world literature, ranging from Celtic, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, Persian, Indian, etc. Most of the "articles" are only a few lines long--enough to give you some bearings--while others are longer (the entry on Metatron is lengthier!). If anything, it might be useful if you are reading along in a text and do not know who or what a particular character is. Here is the entry on Metatron for a test-case: Metatron by Ilil Arbel, Ph.D. The myths of Metatron are extremely complicated, and at least two separate versions exist. The first version states he came into being when God created the world, and immediately assumed his many responsibilities. The second claims that he was first a human named Enoch, a pious, good man who had ascended to Heaven a few times, and eventually was transformed into a fiery angel. Some la...