Valentinian Melons

April DeConick has been talking about Gnostic mushrooms, based upon a reference in Irenaeus, and it reminded me of the same writer's parody of the Pleroma in terms of vegetables:

There exists a certain royal Pre-principle, pre-unintelligible, pre-insubstantial and pre-prerotund, which I call Gourd.  With this Gourd there coexists a Power which I call Supervacuity.  This Gourd and this Supervacuity, being one, emitted without emitting a Fruit visible in all its parts, edible and sweet, which language calls Cucumber.  With this Cucumber there is a Power of the same substance, which I call Melon.  These Powers, Gourd and Supervacuity and Cucumber and Melon, emitting a whole multitude of Valentinus' delirious Melons.  For if one must accommodate ordinary language to the first Tetrad and if each one chooses the terms he wants, who would keep him from using these last terms, much more worthy of credence, in ordinary usage, and known by all? (Against Heresies 11.4; trans. Robert M. Grant).  

Say what you want about Irenaeus or his argument or his larger project; he's often quite funny.

In Memory of Jane Schaberg

I was saddened just now to discover the passing of Jane Schaberg, Professor of Religious Studies and Women's Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, from Mark Goodacre's blog.  I had only met her once, but recall being quite moved by listening to James Tabor giving a talk on her behalf at SBL a few years ago.  I love her work, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament, from which I regularly assign portions for my Sexuality and Christianity class.  She wrote brilliantly, challenging entrenched scholarly perspectives with good research and, something much rarer, creativity.

Update:  See now April DeConick's post addressed as a letter to Jane Schaberg.

Hebrews and the Social Sciences

Reviewing some works on Hebrews and the "social-scientific method," by which one usually means taking the insights of sociology and anthropology and applying them (or putting them in dialogue with) the biblical texts, I have been somewhat amused that, when discussing cultic aspects at least, the typical go-to's are still Victor Turner and Mary Douglas.  No one would deny their importance and influence.  And the latter is particularly understandable, since she did theorize using the Pentateuch, especially Leviticus and Numbers, to discuss ritual as a symbolic system.  Nonetheless, the social sciences move on and Bible scholars are often the last to know.  So, I had an idea perhaps for a future project in which one might be a little more overt about the the implications of the application of the social sciences and the Bible--that is, instead of making a particular thinker the background or general approach one has to the text, to see what happens when one makes the application the very topic under investigation.  Considering my own interest in the scholarly study of ritual (or ritualization), this might be an interesting, fun, and educational project to clarify the implications of using "this" thinker rather than "that" one.  I can just imagine the chapters (or sections for a smaller project).  So what would happen if you dedicated separate chapters or sections to different thinkers and how their thought related to Hebrews (Why Hebrews?  As the Doctor says, "Because it's cool."). 

Hebrews and Ritual Studies:

1.  Betwixt and Between:  Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Liminality, and Hebrews

2.  The Symbolic System of the Heavenly Sanctuary:  Mary Douglas, Structuralism, and Hebrews

3.  Ritualizing Jesus’ Sacrifice:  Catherine Bell and Hebrews

Conclusion:  Insights, Blind Spots, and Next Steps

One could, of course, open it up beyond this as well with Geertz, Bourdieu, etc.

The Social Network of the Epistle to the Hebrews: A Proposal

There have been persistent problems when thinking about the intellectual, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds of Hebrews with various ones being postulated and rejected.  Different contexts arise in scholarship like a whack-a-mole, popping up, dropping from sight, and reappearing in new places.  Contexts are proposed through perceived similarities—oftentimes compelling, but always with a slight stretch, revealing new lights and truths concerning Hebrews but always concealing a lie.  Others will point out the differences in order to undercut such possible contexts, as if any two writers ever agree on all details!  (As a side note, how often does a pupil sound exactly like his/her teacher?  We would expect numerous continuities, to be sure, but also a great deal of development, alteration, and reworking as we find among early Christian texts where we cannot exactly place lines of influence).  It is an odd exercise in which parallels equal contact and differences undermine it.  Nonetheless, socially, one should expect similarities and differences as people pass on ideas from group to group and then adapt them to new audiences and new circumstances.  One should expect emphases in earlier works to be de-emphasized as they become less relevant and older obscure elements to be emphasized as they become more relevant.  These days the search for a single background to Hebrews has largely been abandoned, even as, I myself, have sought to include and “complexify” that background further in my dissertation and more clearly, I think, in my monograph.

I wonder if we could do a different type of analysis that can take all of these partial contacts into account to use the Epistle to the Hebrews as an example to illustrate the much broader social networks of early Christians.  In this case, the content of a document will be important only insofar as it shows intellectual contact and exchange (including the necessary and inevitable changes that occur as ideas are communicated from person to person).  Having been in conversation with April DeConick with her concepts of “Network Criticism,” in which she takes more cognitively than I am thinking of here, and with a friend of mine, Kevin Sullivan, who is writing a book on early Christian travel (one implication of which is that the dissemination of ancient Christian letters and texts need not take years or decades, which scholars inexplicably assume when trying to date documents, but mere months--think of Paul's letters!), I began to think about the communication networks of early Christians and how we might use texts as the evidence of communication, dissemination of ideas, including constant change and adaptation from locality to locality as each connected by a larger interactive network. 

Approaching the issue as a social network mostly downplays the importance of direct literary dependence:  if we see a couple texts as different nodes—say Hebrews and 1 Peter—along a network of ongoing communication and exchange, then whether one directly influenced the other is less of a question than how it can illustrate and unearth underlying social networks (there could be multiple mediating people or groups between them along the same network, for example).  In this line of thinking, the particular combination of similarities and differences and the values we assign to them (such as how unique the similarities are, etc.) indicate not “influence” vs. “no influence” but where they lie upon the vast, complex networks of communication and exchange.  In this case, we should NOT be surprised to see a work like Hebrews falling along very complex intersections of the network and having multiple strands of this network, both proximate and remote, interconnections in which it draws on several lines that resemble other “nodes” along that network but equals and completely fits none of them.

This, moreover, could be the initial mapping of the social network of the earliest Christians using the texts less as content describing such interactions (e.g., Acts) but as the material evidence of such interactions.

Of course, all reconstructions must necessarily be partial.  My primary operating assumption is that these are not the only things written by our authors.  Paul surely wrote more letters than have survived; the writings of his churches to him (which he refers to) have not survived; you don’t become as good a writer as the author in the Epistle to the Hebrews overnight—it would be miraculous if this were the first and last thing the author ever wrote.  Therefore, I am assuming that whatever reconstruction we have is just the skimming of the surface of a much vaster, intricate network of early Christians communicating to one another.  Moreover, this is only part of the written network; undergirding this would also be a more personal network of oral communication and personal interaction.

Moreover, just because an author has evidence of contact with certain forms of thought that are prominent in a particular locality does not mean the author was necessarily from that locality or that the author was writing to or from that locality at the moment of writing; it means that the author has some acquaintance with those forms of thought.  For example, I have read, absorbed, actively incorporated, and developed things that I have read from Russia, Germany, Greece, France, England, Canada, and all over the U.S.  I am not from all those places; I have not visited all of those places; I have not met every author I have ever read; but they are part of my broader intellectual network.  The author of Hebrews may have familiarity with Alexandrian thought, whether passing or more intensive, but it does not mean that he ever went there, that he was from there, or wrote to there.  It means it is part of his network.

Once we start pulling on the different threads of these interconnections, what might follow?  

God and the Senses (2): Hekhalot Rabbati §§163-164

I wanted to continue my discussion of God and the senses with Hekhalot Rabbati for a couple reasons.  Firstly, I have been sitting on this passage for a while and wanted a forum to discuss it.  Secondly, it contributes to two series of posts at once:  resuming (at least briefly) my "Daily Hekhalot" discussions from last summer and the series of posts on "God and the Senses," for which my primary concern has been and will be after this for the most part with early Christian texts.  Hekhalot Rabbati has many series of hymns set within various narrative frameworks throughout (though usually they are set within a series of other hymns).  If Michael Swartz's conclusions in his analysis of Ma'aseh Merkavah (another Hekhalot work) are at all transferable, then we might consider that the hymnic portions of the work are older than the other portions.  The passage I want to discuss is quite notable for several reasons:  (1) it engages at least 4 out of 5 senses; (2) it is really about communal instruction of worship; thus, (3) it is a hymn sung about communal practice of engaging (and as we shall see, embracing, with even erotic overtones) God. 

I will give the text in Hebrew; my translation; and then discuss the passage.

Text:

‎   ברוכים לשמים ולאר‫ץ יורדי‬ מרכבה
‎אם תאמרו ותגידו לבניי מה אני עושה
‎בת‫פילת שחרית ובתפילת המנחה וערבית ‬
‎בכל יום ובכל שעה ושעה שישר‫' אומ' לפני קדוש ‬
‎ולמדו אתם ואמרו להם
‎שאו עיניכם לרקיע כנגד בית תפילתכם בשעה שאתם אומ' לפני קד'
‎כי אין לי הנאה בכל בית עולמי שבראתי
‎באותו שעה שעיניכם נשואות בעיניי ועיניי נשואות בעיניכם
‎בשעה שאתם אומ' לפני קד'
‎כי הקול היוצא מפיכם באותה שעה
‎טורד ועולה לפני כריח ניחוח

‎והעידו לי‫/‬לו‫/‬להם מה עדות אתם רואים אותי
‎מה אני עושה לקל‫סתר פניו של יעקב אביכם שהיא חקוקה לי על כסא כבודי ‬
‎‫כי בשעה שאתם אומרים לפני קדוש ‬
‎‫כורע אמי עליה ומחבקה ומנשקה ומגפפה וידיי על זרועתיו שלשה פעמים‬
‎‫ שאתם אומרים לפניי קדוש  כדבר שנ' ק'ק'ק'‬

Textual Notes:
I generally used O1531 as a guide, but overall this is a conflation of mss.

Translation:
Blessed are you who descend to the chariot to the heavens and the earth.
If you will say and will proclaim to my children what I do:
During the morning prayer and the afternoon prayer and the evening one,
Every day and every hour when Israel says before me "Holy,"
You teach them and say to them:
"Lift your eyes to the expanse over against your house of prayer;
At the time you say before me "Holy,"
For I have no enjoyment in all the world that I have created
As at that time that your eyes are lifted up to my eyes
And my eyes are lifted up to your eyes
At the time when you say before me "Holy"
For the voice goes out from your mouths at that time
Stirs and ascends before me as a pleasing savor.

They testify to me (to/for me/it/them) what testimony you have seen.
What I do to the brightness of the face of Jacob you father that is engraved for me upon my throne of glory
For at the time you say before me "Holy"
I bow down upon it and embrace it and kiss it and clasp it
And my hands (rest) upon its arms three times
At the time you say "Holy."
As it is said, "Holy Holy Holy"

Commentary:
This hymn from Hekhalot Rabbati is a good example of a communal experience of the divine in which multiple sense are, throughout, engaged.  This experienced is reported back to the human community by the descender to the chariot, who acts somewhat like a messenger, or, better yet, a diplomat between God and Israel.  Here he reports what happens in heaven during the Qedushah, the recitation of the angelic formula from Isaiah 6:3:  "Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD of hosts."  In the meantime, knowing what God does, Israel has actions to perform in response.  So, let's see how the sensual engagement plays out.

Firstly, I would say that the primary sense engaged in this is auditory.  It is a hymn, after all, about singing hymns.  One learns through the mediation of the mystic diplomat about the divine-human relationship through singing it and singing about the recitation of the Qedushah itself.  This auditory experience is not merely human either:  it is about divine senses and sensibilities as well:  it is hearing Israel say "Holy" that gives God pleasure. 

Next there are also visual cues throughout.  This is part of the instruction for communal practice:  the human community is instructed to lift their eyes to the expanse (or firmament) above and God will also look upon the people.  It is a moment of eye-contact, an interlocking gaze, between humans and the divine during worship. 

There is also smell, at least for God.  In this the human breath used to say "holy" goes forth and rises to God "as a pleasant savor."  This terminology is the same used in the Bible (particularly the P Source) for sacrifice--when sacrifices are offered, they are a pleasant savor before God.  It designates the divine acceptance of the offering.  Sacrificial language is being transferred here to the vocalization of the word "holy."  The human breath itself becomes the sacrifice. 

The last part is tactile.  This, again, falls mostly on the divine side of things; nonetheless, the embrace of God and Jacob or "Israel" on the throne has elicited a great deal of commentary (well, as much commentary as anything else in Hekhalot scholarship), noting its potential eroticism.  There are two words here that could be translated as embracing (and while the first is in Pi'el, in Hithpa'el it can be used to denote making love).  It is an ultimate "touching":  embracing and kissing.  The loving, erotic embrace between God and the crystalline image of Jacob, representing Israel (note: קל‫סתר‬ is likely from the Greek word κρὐσταλλος or "crystal" indicating here likely brightness or brilliance of Jacob's countenance) .  The lovers (God and Israel) show physical affection (almost like they're making out) during the moment of the Qedushah, embracing one another three times (one for each "holy"). 

The only sense missing is taste, unless it is implied in the kiss (or unnecessary due to the savor).  Nonetheless, this hymn stands out as a highly sensual account of the relationship between God and Israel as lovers who embrace during the recitation of the Qedushah:  firstly flashing flirting eyes to each other as they recite, then smelling, and finally touching and embracing.  The senses engaged, moreover, become ever-more intimate as one moves from sight (at a distance) to smell (in the presence of) to touch (the closest one can get to another without complete absorption).  All through the means of the delight of saying and hearing "Holy."

God and the Senses (General Suggestions)

As noted in my previous post, I think it would be helpful to think about the many different ways in which the sense are activated or engaged, whether physically or metaphorically, for Jewish and Christian (and Islamic) mysticism.  In that post, I discussed one of the hymns in the Acts of Thomas.  In the forthcoming posts, I have collated a few different Jewish, but primarily Christian works that engage multiple senses at once:  some of the hymns of Hekhalot Rabbati, Origen's Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs, and the Gospel of Philip.  A little further afield, I have also noticed this recurrence among Sufi poets, particularly in Rumi's poetry.  I will be hitting upon the ancient Jewish and Christian works in the next few weeks when I have some time after doing my research and teaching work for the day (so rather occasionally).  I wondered, however, if anyone had any other ideas for texts to investigate that engage multiple senses (if not all five) at once.

God and the Senses (1): Acts of Thomas

In an earlier post, I noted that while vision and audition are the predominant aspects of sacred or divine encounters (hierophany and theophany respectively) that there is a dearth of comment from a modern perspective on the engaging of other senses.  It is not just seeing God or hearing God, but also smelling, tasting, and touching.  Taste, indeed, will play an important role in Christian encounters, largely due to the Eucharist.  But Jewish, Christian, and Islamic works (and I limit myself to these since I am most familiar with them; not because I think it is lacking elsewhere) often engage multiple senses at once when speaking of the self and God.  Of these, perhaps smell is the most interesting:  it permeates and envelops but is not enveloped by you; it is evanescent but ever-present; it may surround you, but you cannot grasp it.  Touching often gives a sense of immediacy and intimacy, and tasting is perhaps most intimate, but also can be used to discuss transformation.  Indeed, seeing and hearing are important, but mystical works engage all the senses as a fuller expression of how all-encompassing the divine or sacred encounter can be for these authors. 

I plan to make note of several passages and authors, but here is a passage from the Acts of Thomas 1.6-7, a hymn (ed. Schneemelcher and Wilson):

The maiden is the daughter of light,
Upon her stands and rests the majestic effulgence of kings,
Delightful is the sight of her,
Radiant with shining beauty.
Her garments are like spring flowers,
And a scent of sweet fragrance is diffused from them.
In the crown of her head the king is established,
Feeding with his own ambrosia those who are set him.
Truth rests upon her head,
By (the movement of) her feet she shows forth joy.
Her mouth is open, and that becomingly,

Thirty and two are they that sing her praises.
Her tongue is like the curtain of the door,
Which is flung back for those who enter in.
,
Which the first craftsman wrought.
Her two hands make signs and secret patterns, proclaiming the dance of the blessed aeons
Her fingers the gates of the city.
Her chamber is full of light,
Breathing a scent of balsam and all sweet herbs,
And giving out a sweet smell of myrrh and (aromatic) leaves.
Within a strewn myrtle branches and
And the are adorned with reeds.

[There is a bit here describing this as a cosmic wedding ceremony with bridesmaids and a bridegroom; and then the wedding feast]

And [they] shall linger over the feasting
of which the eternal ones are accounted worthy,
and they shall put on royal robes
and be arrayed in splendid raiment,
and both shall be in joy and exultation
and they shall glorify the Father of all,
whose proud light they received
and were enlightened by the vision of their Lord,
whose ambrosial food they received,
which has no deficiency at all,
And they drank too of his wine
which gives them neither thirst nor desire;
And they glorified and praised, with the living Spirit,
The Father of Truth and the Mother of Wisdom.

I was reading this passage in class today for my Sexuality class--partly for how wedding imagery (most of which I dropped here) has been reworked and partly for the image of the divine feminine.  For my current purposes, however, I want to note how sensual this scene is.  We do have a lot of visual imagery:  the maiden is the daughter of light; thus, there is a lot of light imagery:  effulgence, radiance, shining beauty.  She looks like spring flowers.  There is also the movement of her feet, suggesting dancing and joy.  Visual imagery also shows up in the second part:  those who have a vision of their Lord receive enlightenment--this language also shows up for the "bridegroom" (those who see him are enlightened), identifying the bridegroom with the Lord.  There is also the engagement of the ears and hearing.  Firstly, this is a hymn so would have been sung and heard.  Secondly, within this hymn is mention of the maiden's praises and songs.  So we get light, beauty, dancing, praise, and songs: a very joyous scene.  But to stop there would be to miss half of the experience:  it is also about smelling and tasting.  There is the sweet fragrance of flowers, balsam, aromatic leaves, and myrrh.  It is an experience that engages the olfactory senses as much as any other.  Moreover, food is mentioned--ambrosia and wine--and, therefore, taste.  The ambrosia (the food of the gods) and the wine are the Lord's, which, one of my students perceptively suggested today, looks like a Eucharist reference (or easily interpreted as such in an early Christian document).  So we have seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting:  the only thing missing is touching.  The smelling and tasting communicate something that seeing and hearing cannot:  immediacy and intimacy--one can see and hear from afar, but tasting and smelling (and touching if it were there) need greater proximity. 

Elaine Pagels "Revelations" Review

As April DeConick has noted at Forbidden Gospels, Adam Gopnik has rather whimsically reviewed Elain Pagels's new book, Revelations on the book of Revelation and other ancient revelations in the New Yorker.  It is quite an entertaining read.

Religion and Food

About a month ago, some fellow religion colleagues and I were having dinner and started bantering.  During the banter, I suggested a course on religion and food.  At the time, I was half-joking, but I have been occasionally thinking about it over the past month and increasingly think it would be an interesting course.  Anthropologists have long discussed food and culture, and so there is already a lot of theoretical material out there.  And different religious traditions have food laws, customs, etc.  There are the discussions of food and sacrifice, often looking at sacrifice as a meal or the ritualization of a meal at least.  There is, in Christianity, of course, the ritualized meal of the Eucharist.

So I have been trying to think of different types of course that could approach religion through food.  There could be a comparative course that discusses different religious traditions through food, meals, cuisine.  There could be a course in my own specialization of ancient Christianity and Judaism in its ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern contexts that focuses on food and religion in those contexts.  Perhaps a course on Food and Christianity through the ages form antiquity, medieval, to modern periods.  It seems, indeed, like a very flexible topic that could be quite fruitful as an upper level undergraduate course or perhaps a more advanced master's level course.

So, right now I am thinking about pitching such a course, but also wanting to compile a bibliography, either for background information for me (as the instructor) or for assignments.  Some initial thoughts that came to mind are as follows:


Theoretical (Mostly Anthropological and Sociological) Treatments:
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked

Claude Levi-Strauus, The Origin of Table Manners

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (which covers some food laws of the Hebrew Bible)

Carole Counihan, Food and Culture:  A Reader--this has a great deal of interesting essays including theoretical treatments, discussions of particular groups (such as Jean Soler's famous treatment on Jewish food laws; Douglas's famous analysis of the meal; etc.)

Courtney Bender, Heaven's Kitchen

Sacrifice and Food:
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, eds., Cuisine of Sacrifice

Christianity (in different periods):
Hal Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal
Caroline Walker-Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast

Food and Identity (including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim material):
David Freidenreich, Foreigners and their Food
David Kraemer, Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages

These are things that I thought of, but there has to be so much more out there on Christianity and Food, Judaism and Food, and especially religious traditions with which I am far less familiar.  If anyone has any suggestions on Food and Religion from a particular theoretical vantage point, a particular tradition, or a particular period of time, or a particular region, I would be very interested in hearing them.  Moreover, if anyone has actually taught such a course, I would be interested in hearing what you did, how it went, and what you might do differently. 

The Beauty of Moses

I have been working through the different references to Moses in the New Testament for an upcoming project.  While there are some well-worn topics discussed by scholars (Jesus as a prophet like Moses; which, from the other perspective, makes Moses a Proto-Christ; Moses as faithful servant; etc.), I was struck by a detail--one of the smallest of details--that shows up in the Acts of the Apostles in Stephen's speech and again in the Epistle to the Hebrews.  Acts 7 and Hebrews are often discussed together, particularly for their rather similar views of the temple and the notation of Moses making the tabernacle "according to the pattern" shown to him--used in both texts to suggest a temple not made with hands and that God does not dwell in hand-made temples.

But there is another detail that I had not previously considered about Moses they share:  his beauty.  When Stephen begins his discussion of Moses (which takes up about half of his speech), he states:

At this time Moses was born and was beautiful (ἀστεῖος) before God. (Acts 7:20)

Similarly, in the "hall of faith" chapter of Hebrews, one reads:

By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful (ἀστεῖον).  (Heb. 11:23)

I am not particularly surprised by its occurrence, in and of itself.  It appears to be merely a reference to the LXX version of Exodus 2:2:  "Seeing that he [Moses] was beautiful (ἀστεῖον) they sheltered/covered him for three months."  There it translates the Hebrew טוב.  To see where the NT authors found the tradition of Moses' beauty at birth, one need look no further than Exodus.  Nonetheless, I think it is worth stopping and considering.

First the terminology.  Both Acts and Hebrews have the same term as found in Exodus:   ἀστεῖος.  It literally means "of the city," much like "urbane."  It has a range of meanings relating to urbanity, such as well-bred, courteous, polite, refined, elegant, clever, pretty, and, as translated here, beautiful or lovely.  I also did a quick and dirty search, and, as far as I can tell, in the New Testament this term only shows up in these two places.  So, for at least these NT writers, it is something that is associated with Moses and not found with anyone else.

While considering use, we should also note that it always refers to his "beauty" at birth.  It is used, in fact, as the reason used for his parents' sparing him:  they spared him, hid him, covered him because he was beautiful.

But this is missing a bigger question, I think.  Of all the passages, issues, characteristics, events of Moses' life, why remember this?  Why bring it up?  Is this a fixed part of tradition?  Are there other traditions of Moses' "beauty"?  Are there competing traditions of other figures' "beauty" that are not necessarily in the canon?  This question of why to recall this at all may seem odd when considering Acts 7 as a whole, where half the discussion is Moses--perhaps it is bound to come up.  Stephen talks about all kinds of events in Moses' life: his life in Egypt, his Exile, the Exodus, his meeting with the angel on the mountain, Sinai (somewhat), the golden calf, and the Tabernacle.  The passage generally emphasizes how the people failed to understand Moses' divinely appointed role and how they continually rejected him (using him as a prototype for the later rejection of Jesus).  Oddly, with all of this detail, the Passover is absent.  The actual Sinai experience is also rather vaguely discussed.  So, one might just say Stephen's speech has it because it has so much of the tradition, but, really, some major aspects of the Moses tradition emphasized so greatly elsewhere are downplayed here (the giving of the Torah on Sinai, though the burning bush episode receives extensive treatment, and the downplaying of the Passover).  This suggests that what does show up is important.  What is more, Acts 7:20 has a little editorial shift not found in Exodus or Hebrews:  not only was Moses "beautiful," but he was "beautiful before God."  Other texts usually just indicate his beauty in the eyes of his parents; here it is divinely acknowledged beauty.  It is a heightening of Moses' beauty.

Stephen speaks of Moses' beauty in a string of attributes of and actions by Moses.  In fact, the text emphasizes Moses' great qualities stating, "he was mighty in his words and his deeds."  How much more interesting, then, is it that Hebrews, which discusses Moses much more succinctly, also mentions this quality.  There are only four events mentioned in Heb. 11:23-28:  (1) Moses beauty as a child and his parents hiding him; (2) his rejection of his Egyptian upbringing in which he becomes sort of a proto-Christian:  "He considered abuse suffered for Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt"; (3) his vision of God "seeing him who is invisible"; (4) and the Passover.  So, when it comes down to the four things to mention "by faith" Moses (or Moses' parents) did: hiding him due to his "beauty" made the cut.  While mentioned elsewhere in Hebrews, Moses' vision of the pattern of the tabernacle is not here (see Heb. 8:5).  Also mentioned elsewhere is Sinai (Heb. 12), but it is not here (not explicitly anyway).  So, we receive an emphasis on Moses' beauty, his suffering (something also suggested in Acts 7), his vision of the invisible (something actually denied in Acts 7, where he meets an angel and, even then, looks away), and the Passover (something again ignored in Acts 7).  Between the two passages (again, without mentioning other parts of Hebrews), the only things that overlap as worth mentioning, as deserving emphasis are Moses' beauty and his suffering--suffering in a way that foreshadows Christ and Christ-followers.

So, clearly his beauty was important enough to heighten it (before God) and mention it in the sketchiest of biographies.  So why recall this aspect of Moses?  Put another way:  why is this social memory pattern preserved?  Why Moses the beautiful, Moses the urbane, Moses the lovely, Moses "of the astu" for the earliest Christians?

Ancient Israelite Wine

As others have also posted, there is an article in the Jerusalem Post about ancient Israelite wine here.  It is a nice companion to last year's discussion of ancient Israelite beer here.

St. Nick vs. Santa Claus

An old NYTimes Op-Ed article by one of my old professors, John Anthony McGuckin:

December 25, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

St. Nick in the Big City

By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN 

ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?

Well, it’s a New York story.

In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the message of Jesus’s humble birth.

But today’s chubby Santa is not about giving to the poor. He has had his saintly garb stripped away. The filling out of the figure, the loss of the vestments, and his transformation into a beery fellow smoking a pipe combined to form a caricature of Dutch peasant culture. Eventually this Magic Santa (a suitable patron saint if there ever was one for the burgeoning capitalist machinery of the city) was of course popularized by the Manhattanite Clement Clarke Moore published in “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” in The Troy (New York) Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823.

The newly created deity Santa soon attracted a school of iconographers: notable among them were Thomas Nast, whose 1863 image of a red-suited giant in Harper’s Weekly set the tone, and Haddon Sundblom, who drew up the archetypal image we know today on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. This Santa was regularly accompanied by the flying reindeer: godlike in his majesty and presiding over the winter darkness like Odin the sky god returned.

The new Santa also acquired a host of Nordic elves to replace the small dark-skinned boy called Black Peter, who in Christian tradition so loved St. Nicholas that he traveled with him everywhere. But, some might say, wasn’t it better to lose this racially stereotyped relic? Actually, no, considering the real St. Nicholas first came into contact with Peter when he raided the slave market in his hometown and railed against the trade. The story tells us that when the slavers refused to take him seriously, he used the church’s funds to redeem Peter and gave the boy a job in the church.

And what of the throwing of the bags of gold down the chimney, where they landed in the stockings and little shoes that had been hung up to dry by the fireplace? Charming though it sounds, it reflected the deplorable custom, still prevalent in late Roman society when the Byzantine church was struggling to establish the supremacy of its values, of selling surplus daughters into bondage. This was a euphemism for sexual slavery — a trade that still blights our world.

As the tale goes, Nicholas had heard that a father in the town planned to sell his three daughters because his debts had been called in by pitiless creditors. As he did for Black Peter, Nicholas raided his church funds to secure the redemption of the girls. He dropped the gold down the chimney to save face for the impoverished father.

This tale was the origin of a whole subsequent series of efforts among the Christians who celebrated Nicholas to make some effort to redeem the lot of the poor — especially children, who always were, and still are, the world’s front-line victims. Such was the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends.
I like St. Nicholas. You can keep chubby Santa.

John Anthony McGuckin is a professor of religious history at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia.

Alan Segal Memorial in JAAR

I just received my copy of the latest JAAR (79:4).  In it is a short appreciation in memoriam of Alan Segal, my late advisor, written by Amir Hussain.  Amir tells of Alan's contributions to research in both ancient Judaism/Christianity and more broadly to the study of religion, his activities in the AAR, his teaching, and some personal remarks.

Codex Sinaiticus Facsimile

For those who missed it, Hendrickson Publishers has released a facsimile edition of Codex Sinaiticus.  Being to scale, it is of course huge, as is the price.

Check it out here for you or your library--it can be yours for only $799.

New Illustrated Conference of the Birds

I just saw that there is a new version of Attar's Conference of the Birds!  I am excited to check it out, since I teach the Conference of the Birds in my Exploring Mysticism course.

Check it out here.

Monk as Shaman?

It is always nice when multiple classes start overlapping.  My Religions of the World and my Sexuality and Christianity classes hit upon martyrdom and monasticism at the same time, although we spent much more time on these topics in my Sexuality and Christianity class.

I had a student in one class make a suggestion through a momentary flash of inspiration that the monks--at least many of the earliest eremetical hagiographies--acted much like a shaman.  I would like to sit, think, and see if we can develop this idea a bit and see where it leads us.

Firstly, while Shamanism proper belongs only to Siberia and the northern Caucuses, it is a phenomenon that shows some interesting cross-cultural comparisons with other phenomena of holy men and women, medicine men and women, etc., so long as historical context is properly taken into account.

Some of the qualities often associated with these figures are:

1.  Death imagery is prevalent--the shaman is surrounded by death imagery, often associated with the shaman's initiation.  The initiate undergoes a symbolic death, becoming a spirit in order to mediate the spirit realm.

2.  This mediation between the human community and the spirit realm occurs for multiple reasons, but the primary function is for healing.  Usually this healing occurs through either finding what malevolent spirit is affecting the human, or by finding the human's spirit (or soul, or some other aspect of self) that has become lost in the spirit realm and bring it back.

3.  This is often done through having visions in ecstatic states.

When looking at something like the Life of Antony by Athanasius, there are some interesting similarities.  Antony, when he is out in the desert, he is constantly interacting with the spirit realm--he is usually battling malevolent spirits (demons) as a spiritual warrior.  There is death imagery all over the place.  This is due to the fact that the monk is taking on many of the characteristics and imagery of the martyr, including athlete, warrior, and, with it, the death imagery.  Athanasius has Antony say, "I die daily."  He undergoes, through discipline, a symbolic death.  It is an enduring, repeating, ongoing death.  It is a disciplined death that gives him spiritual power to defeat demons and live an angelic life.  When people come out to see Antony, they want to hear teaching and discourses, but they also seek to be healed by him.  It is less clear that he is going into ecstatic states, but being out in a cave alone in the desert for a long time, he's probably seeing something!  

Was Antony a shaman?  No.  I largely reserve that term for its own historical setting.  Antony, while fighting and engaging with spiritual forces, does not seem to be going on spirit journeys to search for lost souls, etc., like a shaman does, though there are some hagiographies of monks he seem to have the ability to what we might call "astral project" or "appear" to others.  His death imagery belongs to a particular historical moment of the ending of official persecution of Christians in which martyrdom becomes less of a possibility and the Christian faithful are searching for new heroes--the desert monk.  Nonetheless, we can see that the shaman and monk as types of holy people have similar social functions that make them compelling to compare.  They are interstitial figures, who live on the fringes of society, but also at the intersections between the human and the spirit realms.  They are fringe mediators of the holy, and, typically, not central mediators such as priests (though both the shaman and the monk can be a priest, they do not need to be).

First Fall

My latest painting, finished just two nights ago.

Did Christianity Make a Difference?

Christianity has now been with us for two millennia; it clearly has staying power--although as Philip Jenkins book on "The Lost History of Christianity" in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia reminds, religions can die.  But a question I would like to raise is what difference did it make?  This is not a theological question, nor a soteriological one.  It is a historical and social one.  The difference here is not so much concerned with how people have conceived of God or salvation, but how these conceptions have affected daily life and the rhythms of ancient society. 

Did conversion to Christianity affect these things?  Did it affect how a villager or urbanite went about their day, how they engaged with the sacred, or even their religious practices (new or just old rites redirected to new deities)?

This of course is a big question, bigger than perhaps most of us could capably answer in all its facets, and it is likely impossible to answer in all its facets because the type of evidence needed is in short supply.  Nonetheless, it comes from a few sources of research I’ve done or currently underway and may impact the course of research I choose to take to finally reach the ability to answer such a question. 

On the one hand stands Braudel’s famous account of the “longue durée” of Mediterranean society, which presents the daily rhythms of life as having remained largely unchanged for centuries and, in fact, that historians need to pay just attention to the persistence of customs and lifestyles and perspectives, which are largely invisible to us since people tend to comment on change rather than continuity.  If one were to consider Braudel, it seems that the shifting religions of the old polytheistic ones of different localities to Christianity to Islam (at least for the Southern and Eastern basins of the Mediterranean) would not have a significant affect on your average person’s daily life—not nearly so much as terrain, weather patterns, and, with these, food resources would.  One might also throw in, of course, the ways others have critiqued or built upon Braudel, for example in the massive volume edited by Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. 

On the other hand I would like to posit perhaps the most famous account of the social impact Christianity made in the late antique Roman Empire:  Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  As the pioneer of modern historiography, his account is both influential and outdated.  Nonetheless, it serves a point.  Here,  Christianity is more of a disease that led to imperial decline.  It is an argument for change with Christianity as an agent, but negative change.  Very few would today accept Gibbon’s argument.  Christianity may have had both positive and negative impacts on different levels and aspects of society, but generally the decline of the western portion of the empire (politically and socially) in late antiquity has multiple complex factors.  Nonetheless, even if rejecting this particular Gibbonite narrative, this should keep us open to ways religious views potentially have social impacts, whether positively or negatively or neutrally.

Whatever one makes of their particular historical claims, both accounts should sharpen our perspective so that we should be ready explain the ways Christianity’s spread both did and did not alter people’s lives in antiquity.  Consider, perhaps, its adaptability to shifting local customs as it spread throughout the Near East and Mediterranean and eventually into Europe.  This adaptability could explain, in fact, ways in which older customs persisted in the new religion and, therefore, ways things ultimately remained unchanged, even as theology shifted.  Yet I suspect the evidence should be more complex. 

So, where to look in how Christianity may affect daily life?  Unfortunately, as is well known, written sources are tilted toward the elite and this may not give much information on daily life with regard to a Christian life versus a pre-Christian life.  Nonetheless, one thing that does affect daily life and rhythms is spatial organization.  One place to start would be how Christianity altered the sacred spaces in the landscape of cities and towns throughout the ancient world.  Were the same places reused, were they destroyed, new places established?  How could one access these places in one’s daily wanderings through the city, town, or village?  Were pilgrimages and festivals major affairs of travel; or could they be celebrated within proximity to one’s home?  Or did it differ based upon class?  Mapping out the shifting or persistent places of sacrality within a particular locality would go a long way—and be within the realm of my current research interests.  There is also a general belief that as one shifts away from antiquity and transitions (ever so slowly) into the early middle ages, there is a general population shift away from urban areas to rural localities.  How was religious change affected by this or generally related?  If at all?

A second place to look at is how Christian upheld, overturned, or affected gender, gender roles, and the lives of people based upon concepts of marriage, celibacy, and the religious life.  This, in fact, is likely the best researched area in terms of what social effect Christianity may have made.  There are some very interesting works on how Christians overturned or rejected basic elements of honor and shame; how women refused the socio-sexual role imposed upon them through an alternative life of celibacy; etc.  There is, however, alternative ways in which Christianity upheld previous forms of the family, patriarchy, etc.

            If you were to ask this question—how did Christianity affect daily life, if at all, in antiquity—where would you look?