Antiquitopia

I just saw on Jim Davila's blog that Geza Vermes has passed away.  I only met him once, when he spoke at Barnard College at the invitation of Alan Segal.  He was immensely polite and, while a bit quiet, was very engaging. He will be best known for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially his affordable English translation, which was my own introduction to the Scrolls, as well as his extensive work on Christian origins and the historical Jesus. UPDATE (5/8/2013):  I just saw that Mark Goodacre has some reflections here , including some important notes on his contributions to the study of Jesus.  He has more here  and here . UPDATE (5/9/2013):  James Tabor has further reflections here . UPDATE (5/10/2013):  I just saw that James Crossley has some provocative thoughts on how Jesus and NT scholars more generally have been both profoundly impacted by Vermes (even when we don't know) and have in many ways failed to learn the lessons Vermes teac...

I just saw the Frank Moore Cross died .  As anyone even barely acquainted with biblical studies knows, he was a giant in the field.  While he specialized in Hebrew Bible, his influence rippled and reverberated throughout biblical studies.  My copy of Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic , which has become a classic in the field, is so worn out that the cover has fallen off.  I remember the first time I read his analysis of the "Song at the Sea," I was mesmerized. Jim Davila, who was Cross's student, has a nice reminiscence here . The New York Times also has an obituary here . Photo from HDS .

I have just heard of the passing of Marvin Meyer from a melanoma.  He was an influential scholar on those religious movements that so often fall through the cracks of history (most notably "Gnosticism" and "magic"), popularizing and publicizing them to make them more widely known in several scholarly and trade publications.  Several people more intimate with Marvin Meyer have noted his passing.  Please see their comments here , here , and, here . 

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 .

This morning as I read Jim Davila’s blog , my heart sank. I saw that my advisor, friend, and colleague had passed away yesterday. I felt the wind being knocked out of me. Reading April DeConick’s moving blog post later, I felt appreciation and grief over the brilliant fragility of a life who was known to most of us as an important scholar, but who was also known as a father, husband, son, and friend. April’s posting took me back to his last published book, Life after Death . She quotes the last full paragraph, but it was the penultimate paragraph that caught my eye: Besides being intellectual adventurers, our ascending souls serving as symbols of our lives’ journey, we are all also martyrs as mortality eventually defeats us. Shakespeare tells us what our religious imagery tells us: the victories of our life outlives its difficulties. The effort to transcend ourselves is all. “The rest is silence.” That his final published book was on Life after Death takes on an appropriatene...

Jim Davila has reported that my advisor, Alan Segal, passed away yesterday. April DeConick has a very beautiful remembrance of him here . I will write more later, but for now my thoughts are with his family and the many friends who knew him.

The New York Times has a nice obituary on Yosef Yerushalmi, who passed away earlier this week: Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 77 and lived in Manhattan. .... An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his generation’s foremost Jewish historians by plumbing eclectic subjects like the history of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, messianism, the intellectual history of modern German Jewry and Freud’s relationship with his religion. In 1982, Dr. Yerushalmi, then the Salo Wittmayer Baron professor of Jewish history, culture and society at Columbia University, published perhaps his most influential work, “Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory,” a slim volume whose title bore the...

I just received news that the esteemed and highly influential Columbia Professor of Jewish Studies, Yosef Yerushalmi, passed away yesterday. I particularly enjoyed his book on history and memory, Zakhor .

The very famous and highly influential anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, has just died at the ripe age of 100, just a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. Frankly, I had not realized that he had been still alive all this time. The AP has his obituary: November 3, 2009 French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Dies at 100 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:22 p.m. ET PARIS (AP) -- Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100. The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing the concept of structuralism -- concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system. During ...