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...

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...

I just finished reading Elaine Pagels's new book, Revelations:  Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation , and thought I would collect some of my thoughts.  There have been many initial reviews that will, most likely, show greater verve and greater detail than what I am going to discuss here; this is more of a series of notes rather than a review, per se.  See Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker here . Moreover, three chapters of the book previously appeared as more technical articles, whereas the book is for a more general, non-specialist audience.  What struck me is that the book is really about shifting contexts of visions, particularly John of Patmos's Revelation .  The different chapters of the book provide different political contexts from an imperial telescope to intra-Christian microscopes in overlapping contexts that slowly spiral outward in space and time until one finds oneself far away from the late first century setting (Page...

The historian of ancient religion typically lives in a patchwork world.  The dearth of ancient evidence is a daily reality to which one submits oneself.  The study of Moses in antiquity, however, oddly presents itself as an embarrassment of riches.  In addition to the Hebrew Bible and Jewish sources, Christian, Muslim, and even “pagan” writers repeatedly retold stories of Moses, sometimes presenting an entire “life,” sometimes focusing on specific episodes or events, and sometimes referring to a general quality or ability of Moses.  Second Temple Jews revisited Sinai over and again, retelling how Moses received the Torah in new circumstances.  He was alternatively invoked as absolutely unique and a model for emulation.  Several events, tropes, roles, and images caught the ancient imagination:  the birth story; the burning bush revelation of the divine name; the signs and wonders he performed in Egypt; the Passover; the Exodus; standing on Sina...