Antiquitopia

At the International Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Buenos Aires last month, I gave a paper entitled, "Place, Movement, and Community: A Critical Reading of Hebrews 11."  It was received rather well - somewhat to my surprise.  And I had a nice Q&A session with a lot of questions from Lawrence Schiffman of Dead Sea Scrolls fame, interestingly enough - especially interesting since, unlike my book, I did not once refer to the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice in particular or the Dead Sea Scrolls in general.  By the way, Buenos Aires is a fantastic city for a conference. The following is my abstract.  For anyone who wants a copy of the paper as delivered in Buenos Aires, please email me at my Illinois College account (Jared.Calaway@mail.ic.edu): Borrowing insights from spatial theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, and anthropologists of movement (whether pilgrimage, emigration, or dislocated populations), this paper will explore t...

It has been a long while since I have posted anything, and now, as the semester is about to start, seems the worst time to start posting things.  Nonetheless, I have a few things to create a series of posts about - and hopefully I'll have the time to bring them through to completion - due to my many busy activities this summer. This summer I led a group of students on the Camino de Santiago, walking a portion in France and the final portion in Spain.  I also presented at the International Society of Biblical Literature's Hebrews Group in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  I will also present on a similar theme (space, time, etc. in Hebrews) at the annual meeting this November.  Finally, I am slated to turn in an Encyclopedia article on the general trends of methods of studying mysticism in the past century or so. I want to use the blog as a (hyper)space to recall issues from the Camino and round out some comments on methods of researching mysticism (since the article leng...

I will be traveling to my first International SBL this summer in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  It will also be my first time in South America.  It will be a nice cooling off period (it is winter down there in July) after I walk the Camino in Spain this summer.  Here is my abstract: Place, Movement, and Community: A Critical Reading of Hebrews 11 Borrowing insights from spatial theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, and anthropologists of movement (whether pilgrimage, emigration, or dislocated populations), this paper will explore the relationship between the building of the heavenly city by God and the use of movement among the past faithful in Hebrews 11, drawing attention to how this combination of space and movement rhetorically creates an imagined community in the face of adversity.   This paper will further investigate how these related elements of space/place and movement extend throughout the fabric of the homily.

I thought after last night's post that I would go ahead and post the abstract from my own paper at the Midwest SBL, which generated more discussion than I expected - always good.  So, here it is: Jesus as Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer in Hebrews Creation imagery extends throughout Hebrews more than any other New Testament text, yet has received less attention than John 1, Colossians 1, or 1 Cor. 8:6.  Those who have discussed creation in Hebrews have focused on how it relates to the work's cosmology.  This paper, however, will analyze its relationship to Christology, arguing that Hebrews maintains a consistent division between what and how God and the Son create.  God creates and is the source of all things, including the heavenly tent and city, while Jesus is the creative agent of the "ages," who inherits, sustains, and destroys heaven and earth. A copy of the paper is available upon request - just send me an email to my Illinois College email account.

Mike Kibbe, a student at Wheaton, has reviewed my monograph here .  I would like to thank him for giving it some attention!

After publishing my recent book , I am of course in need of a hiatus from Hebrews and am off to different research projects, particularly my Christian Moses stuff.  But when I return to Hebrews--and I shall return--it will likely be because of Hebrews 9:23, a line that has bothered me every time I've read it.  Quoting from the RSV: "Thus it was necessary for copies of the heavenly things to be purified by these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these." Before this in chapter 9, there is a conflation of several sacrificial rites from the Day of Atonement (Lev 16) to the blood used to establish the covenant (Exod. 24:6-8), etc.  These rites established and purified the earthly sanctuary (the copies of heavenly things).  But that is not the part that bothers me; it is the second phrase.  While the better sacrifices refers to Jesus', why, oh why, would the heavenly things / heavenly sanctuary need to be purified at all?  ...

My book, The Sabbath and the Sanctuary: Access to God in the Letter to the Hebrews and Its Priestly Context, is now printed, published, and available for purchase from Mohr Siebeck!  Check it out here  and order it for your libraries today!

My monograph, The Sabbath and the Sanctuary:  Access to God in the Letter to the Hebrews and Its Priestly Context , is now officially being promoted in the Mohr Siebeck catalogue .  Here is the info: Jared C. Calaway The Sabbath and the Sanctuary Access to God in the Letter to the Hebrews and its Priestly Context Who can enter the sacred and heavenly presence of God? And how? Various ancient Jewish and emergent Christian groups disputed these questions in the first century CE. Jared C. Calaway states that the Letter to the Hebrews joined this debate by engaging and countering priestly frameworks of sacred access that aligned the Sabbath with the sanctuary. From the Hebrew Bible through late Second Temple Judaism, the sanctity of the sanctuary could be experienced through the Sabbath, sacred space through sacred time. In its sweeping vistas of Sabbath rest and the heavenly homeland, the heavenly sanctuary and the coming age, and the heavenly priesthood...

While I will return, as promised , to the full exposition of the sensuous language in the Gospel of Philip, I just came across this rather succinct note on the sensuous language in the Epistle to the Hebrews by Luke Timothy Johnson in his commentary on Hebrews: Readers quickly become aware of Hebrews' appeal to the senses of readers/auditors.  The smell of sacrifices is only implied (13:16), touch appears by way of contrast (12:18, 20), and taste is metaphorical (6:5).  But the author constantly appeals to the hearing of his listeners (2:1; 3:7; 4:7; 5:11; 12:19).  Most of all, the sense of sight is invoked, as the readers are asked to "behold," "consider,"  and "see" what the author seeks to convey (2:9; 3:1; 7:4; 12:3; 12:21).  Using oral discourse to portray visual scenes (in "word-pictures") is a common rhetorical technique ( ekphrasis ), and Hebrews uses it effectively, especially in 9:1-5 and 12:18-24. (8-9) I had been slowly compil...

I just saw the following is coming out from Mohr Siebeck sometime this month via Brian Small at polumeros kai polutropos , who seems to be becoming a full-time Hebrews bibliographer.   Jody A. Barnard The Mysticism of Hebrews Exploring the Role of Jewish Apocalyptic Mysticism in the Epistle to the Hebrews Jody A. Barnard examines the role of Jewish apocalyptic mysticism in the epistle to the Hebrews. Jewish apocalyptic mysticism is defined as a phenomenon occurring in late Second Temple Judaism (including early Christianity), which finds literary expression in the apocalypses and related literature, and exhibits a preoccupation with the realities of the heavenly realm, and the human experience of this realm and its occupants. The author demonstrates that there are numerous apocalyptic and mystical themes appropriated in Hebrews, and that there is evidence to suggest that this is not merely a conceptual and literary phenomenon, but is born out of, and infor...

So as I finish up readying a draft of my monograph to send to publishers, I have thought a bit about a potential future project that would be more patently methodological in nature:  what, if anything, can different scholarly frameworks of ritual tell us about Hebrews?  How might Hebrews help us to rethink those frameworks?  So, I toyed with this idea a bit here , spoken of it with biblicists, with people who study ritual or "ritual" in other contexts, etc., and with their feedback I have come up with this as a preliminary abstract and table and contents: The Epistle to the Hebrews and Ritual Studies:  An Investigation Jared C. Calaway Visiting Assistant Professor Illinois Wesleyan University Abstract: This study responds to the increasing interest in “social-scientific criticism” in biblical studies and its relative absence in the most cultically-interested work in the New Testament:  the Epistle to the Hebrews.  There have been so...

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 ap...

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 equ...

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 tim...

As I am revising my dissertation into a book for publication, I was thinking about smells and taste, especially smelling and tasting God. The Epistle to the Hebrews uses "taste" to describe salvific experience: "For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy..." (Hebrews 5:4-6a; RSV). Tasting and partaking are, in fact, strong indicators of proximity to God throughout ancient Jewish and Christian literature. There is the famous Psalm that says "taste and see that the LORD is good" (Ps. 34:8). But olfactory language is vibrant whether interpreted metaphorically or more literally. Most analyses of Jewish and Christian mysticism focus primarily on vision and audition, and rightfully so since these are the primary senses...

My 2010 Columbia Ph.D. dissertation, "Heavenly Sabbath, Heavenly Sanctuary: The Transformation of Priestly Sacred Space and Sacred Time in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the Epistle to the Hebrews," directed by Alan Segal is now available as an open access document through ProQuest. You can download a pdf here . Here is the abstract: This dissertation investigates how the Sabbath and the sanctuary interrelate in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian literature. Studies of sacred time and sacred space have generally treated them as separate yet complementary categories in the study of religion. This has been equally true of those studying the Sabbath and the sanctuary in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian literature. Considerations of their coordination have tended to be rare momentary glimpses rather than extended treatments. This study focuses on the coordination of sacred time of the Sabbath and sacred space of the sanctuary through how they come togeth...

James McGrath posted this, and I could not resist also having it on my blog. It is Hebrews 1 in Star Wars format created by Aaron Rathburn . It strangely matches up quite well. I still wanted to see an imperial cruiser passing by right after it!

I am working through Ken Schenck's Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews at the moment (I'm sitting in the library with the book open as I am writing this). I just have read the introduction and it looks like it will be an interesting read. While I am predicting that our perspectives on temporal and spatial dimensions in Hebrews will cohere more broadly (although I cannot guarantee any agreement in matters of detail), we seem to get there by different roads. He focuses on the narrative and rhetorical worlds assumed and shared by the earliest, let's say, meaning-making community. I too am interested in rhetorical aspects of Hebrews, especially as it relates to how the author plays with spatial and temporal dimensions (often transmuting one into another), yet he gets there through Wittgensteinian language games with some Ricouer while I prefer the route of Bakhtinian dialogism (and, since we're talking about space and time and how they interrelated, the Bakhtinian Chro...

Last month, I posted on the similar imagery used in 1 Enoch 62:2 and Heb. 4:12-13: that of the word with a sharp sword for the purpose of judgment. In the comments, Ken Schenck noted the similar imagery in Wisdom of Solomon 18:15-16, while Brian Small noted some very important differences between the function of 1 Enoch and Hebrews in this regard. In his Carnival of Hebrews posts this month, he reiterates these differences, and, in the comments of that post, Tony Siew pointed out another striking usage of the sword-in-mouth in Rev. 19:15, coming from the word of God (19:13). Here they all are: And the Lord of Spirits upon the throne of his glory, and the spirit of righteousness was poured upon him. And the word of his mouth will slay all sinners, and all the unrighteous will perish from his presence. (1 Enoch 62:2) The all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of they a...

As I continue to work through my chapter on Hebrews, I am always struck by a certain productive ambiguity the homilist often exploits. One ambiguity is in a passage that I often just pass over in chapter 11. Indeed, the style of hall of faith of Hebrews 11 often makes my eyes glaze over, although I recognize the rhetorical effectiveness of its genre. Nonetheless, this time I was struck by the following line (11:27): πίστει κατέλιπεν Αἴγυπτον μὴ φοβηθεὶς τὸν θυμὸν τοῦ βασιλέως, τὸν γὰρ ἀόρατον ὡς ὁρῶν ἐκαρτέρησεν. By faith he left Egypt not fearing the anger of the king, for as seeing the invisible he endured. Immediately, I read this in two ways. Because of Moses' paradoxical vision of the invisible (i.e., God), he endured Pharaoh's anger. The vision gave him the strength or ability to endure. The other reading is that he endured the rare and frightening vision of God, the very sight of whom kills (since one cannot see God and live). Indeed, in Hebrews, as far as I have...