I just discovered another discussion of JANT, by Walter Russell Mead - Faith Matters Sunday: The Jewish Discovery of Jesus. He doesn't, however, review it, because he hasn't gotten it yet from Amazon. I'll be curious to hear what he thinks of it once he has a chance to read the commentaries and essays.
And here's some more:
From the JPS Blog - Rachel Broder discusses the book.
Joe Winkler on Jewcy again mentions the book, but hasn't read it yet.
A discussion on Project Quinn by Jessica Youseffi.
A very nice review of the book at Ancient Hebrew Poetry (John Hobbins).
Monday, November 28, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
More reviews of JANT
Messianic Jewish Musings has just published a review of JANT - Jewish Annotated New Testament.
An anti-semitic review of the book at Maurice Pinay Blog: Anti-Christ "New Testament" published. His perspective seems to be extreme traditionalist Catholicism (which rejects the Second Vatican Council); he also advertises books by Michael Hoffman, a notorious Holocaust denier.
Discussion forum at the Center for Inquiry presents a range of interesting perspectives - Here comes the Jewish Jesus.
Jim West of Zwinglius Redivivus mentions the book favorably, but doesn't have a full review.
An anti-semitic review of the book at Maurice Pinay Blog: Anti-Christ "New Testament" published. His perspective seems to be extreme traditionalist Catholicism (which rejects the Second Vatican Council); he also advertises books by Michael Hoffman, a notorious Holocaust denier.
Discussion forum at the Center for Inquiry presents a range of interesting perspectives - Here comes the Jewish Jesus.
Jim West of Zwinglius Redivivus mentions the book favorably, but doesn't have a full review.
New York Times article on the Jewish Annotated New Testament
Good New York Times article on A Jewish Edition of the New Testament.
Some highlights:
Some highlights:
The book she [A.J. Levine] has just edited with a Brandeis University professor, Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press), is an unusual scholarly experiment: an edition of the Christian holy book edited entirely by Jews. The volume includes notes and explanatory essays by 50 leading Jewish scholars, including Susannah Heschel, a historian and the daughter of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel; the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, who teaches ancient Judaism at Harvard....And yours truly, who wrote the article on Divine Beings.
So what does this New Testament include that a Christian volume might not? Consider Matthew 2, when the wise men, or magi, herald Jesus’s birth. In this edition, Aaron M. Gale, who has edited the Book of Matthew, writes in a footnote that “early Jewish readers may have regarded these Persian astrologers not as wise but as foolish or evil.” He is relying on the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, who at one point calls Balaam, who in the Book of Numbers talks with a donkey, a “magos.”
Because the rationalist Philo uses the Greek word “magos” derisively — less a wise man than a donkey-whisperer — we might infer that at least some educated Jewish readers, like Philo, took a dim view of magi. This context helps explain some Jewish skepticism toward the Gospel of Matthew, but it could also attest to how charismatic Jesus must have been, to overcome such skepticism.
Monday, November 21, 2011
My response to panel on Religious and Mystical Experience at SBL
I participated in a panel jointly sponsored by the Religious Experience and Esotericism and Mysticism sections of the SBL, giving a response to three papers - by Frances Flannery, Istvan Czachesz, and Jim Davila.
If you would like to read my paper, it's after the jump.
I would like to begin by offering my thanks to all three authors for their thought-provoking articles. My discussion will consider each paper in turn, while also making comments drawing the papers together. I am starting with Jim’s paper, “Ritual Praxis in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mysticism.”
Jim’s paper is a lucid discussion of the issues involved in discovering the relationships between ancient instructions for ritual practice and mystical experiences. His survey of the sources for these rituals surveys texts that provide explicit directions, first-hand accounts of mystical experiences, fictional accounts, and architecture and artifacts. His discussion of how to glean rituals from first-hand or fictional accounts is very useful. I would emphasize that the Hekhalot literature, as discussed later in the paper, also contains many ritual instructions intended to bring angels down from heaven (for example, the Sar ha-Panim or Prince of the divine Countenance) and instructions for travel to the heavenly throne room. The instructions for invoking angels, in particular, include many details of ritual practice that are similar to some of those in Sefer ha-Razim. As for the Babylonian incantation bowls, I question whether in most cases we can regard the rituals accompanying their use as mystical in nature. As Jim points out, most of them are protective and exorcistic, intended to protect those named on them from demonic attacks. It is also difficult to discern exactly what rituals would have accompanied the use of these bowls, because we do not possess any kind of accompanying ritual handbook which explains how they were used once they were written. In terms of methodology, Jim’s work and the work of others has demonstrated amply how useful cross-cultural comparisons are, either within the closer culture area of Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern societies or farther afield, for example his own comparison with the Hekhalot rituals and shamanistic traditions from Siberia, North and South America, and Japan. Jim’s most intriguing suggestion for comparison is his last, with modern ceremonial magic. I think this suggestion is well worth following up, and there are anthropologists who have already written ethnographies of a number of groups using the various techniques of ceremonial magic, whether or not derived from the Golden Dawn – for example T. M. Luhrmann’s study, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, and Felicitas Goodman’s Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences. Other comparative possibilities also suggest themselves – to the meditative and ritual techniques of medieval and early modern Jewish mystics, among them Abraham Abulafia and Isaac Luria (via Luria’s disciple, Hayyim Vital). J. H. Chajes’ study Between Worlds is a useful entry into the world of Safedian Kabbalah, where these techniques were developed and elaborated. The proposals that Jim makes in his paper have the potential to be very useful in helping us to understand the experiences of ancient Jewish and Christian mystics.
I now turn to Istvan’s and Frances’ papers. My expertise is in the study of mysticism in late antiquity, not in cognitive neuroscience. My comments here will center what I think is useful in Istvan’s and Frances’ papers for the study of mysticism, and on questions I have about whether, and how, the insights of neuroscience can be applied to the study of mysticism in late antiquity.
Let us begin first with basic definitional questions raised by both Istvan’s and Frances’ papers – how can we define both religion and mysticism? Is mystical experience necessarily religious? Frances’ definition assumes this, when she says that mysticism is a “sub-category of religious experiences that entails experiences rooted in personal bodily expressions of an epistemological revelation.” Questions of definition have bedeviled the study of religion for many decades, and there is no unified definition that all or even most scholars would agree upon. The same is true for the study of mysticism, perhaps even more acutely. Earlier definitions of mysticism saw mystical experience as “union with the divine,” but this definition excludes religious communities whose practitioners deny the possibility of such unions, non-theistic religions, nature mysticism, mystical experiences by people who do not belong to a particular religious community, and probably others that I am not thinking of. One of the great virtues of William James’ discussion of mysticism in his Varieties of Religious Experience is that he attempted to collect a very wide range of testimonies of mystical experience and then present them on a spectrum of experiences. He does come up with a well-known synthetic definition but does not deny the mystical aspects of experiences that do not fit the full definition. Istvan’s paper would appear to agree with this approach (when it says that “mystical experience should include sensations of being near to superhuman, absolute, ultimately significant, hidden, or overwhelming things and beings,” p. 3) but to take it back when it says “Mystics maintain elaborated philosophical and exegetical traditions and emphasize the importance of a sustained, long-term engagement with them” (p. 11). This is certainly not true of all mystics. I think that there needs to be much more careful attention paid to exactly what mystical experiences are being studied through neurological testing, in order to end up with results that will be meaningful for understanding mystical experiences. And if we want the results to be relevant to mysticism in late antiquity, following a definition such as that offered by April DeConick in Paradise Now would be helpful, as Frances says. DeConick’s definition “identifies a tradition within early Judaism and Christianity centered on the belief that a person directly, immediately, and before death can experience the divine, either as a rapture experience or as one solicited by a particular praxis.”
Istvan’s paper surveys a range of neurological studies that attempt to determine the parts of the brain activated by a variety of activities that the researchers consider religious or potentially religious – meditation by Tibetan Buddhists or Franciscan nuns, glossolalia, Bible reading, and rhythmic dance and music engaged in by Pentecostal Christians. He says, however, that “It is important to note that simply observing that a certain brain area plays some role in a certain kind of experience is not yet a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon,” because “one has to keep in mind that any real-life cognitive and behavioral phenomena depends on the cooperation of a network of brain areas.” Therefore discovering what part of the brain is active when a certain activity is done is an interesting fact, but does not necessarily explain the phenomenon. One question I would have about these findings is whether they tell us anything about how the practitioners themselves would explain their own experiences? One advantage that researchers of contemporary religious activity have over studies of ancient religion is that they can observe and even take part in religious performances, as well as ask people directly what their experiences are. Has this been done? I think it would be interesting to see if the neurological findings align with the practitioners’ reports of their own experiences.
Finally, I would like to ask how these studies of contemporary practitioners of various religions can apply to the study of ancient religious texts? As Jim has pointed out, the way we learn about ancient mystical experiences is by interpreting texts that may be first-person accounts, or fictional accounts, or ones that correlate certain ritual activities with experiences such as visionary dreams – but we cannot ask ancient people what their experiences were. Nor do we know how close the written accounts are to what people actually experienced. It is much easier for us to figure out what ritual activities people engaged in. Perhaps by making a catalog of ritual activities that the ancient texts refer to, and then testing people today who engage in those ritual activities, we might be able to learn something about the areas of the brain that would have been activated in ancient people who did those same rituals. Frances’ paper, it seems to me, is making the first steps towards trying to do something like this in her examination of the Testament of Abraham.
Istvan’s discussion, however, leaves out a crucial element in the study of experience, whether ancient or contemporary, whether religious, mystical, or another kind of experience – the role of culture and language in determining experience – both the experience itself and how it is later interpreted. Steven Katz has famously stated that, “There are no pure experiences … it is not just a question of studying the reports of the mystic after the experiential event but of acknowledging that the experience itself as well as the form in which it is reported is shaped by concepts which the mystic brings to, and which shape, his experience.” The virtue of Katz’s position is that it strives to deal with the differences in mystical experiences across cultures and religions, rather than eliding them. Frances modifies Katz somewhat, saying that “the brain simultaneously processes religious or mystical experience as stimuli of various neurological regions of the brain along with cultural matrices of interpretation, and that these are inseparable even on a neurological level of processing.” Frances’ account of mystical experience is sensitive to the particular cultural matrix of a particular account of mystical experience, even if she would not go as far as Katz does.
Despite my hesitation to identify all mystical experiences as religious, there are several aspects of Frances’ definition of mystical experience in antiquity that I think are quite interesting and useful, especially her insistence on paying attention to the body. Ancient accounts of mystical experience do often include bodily descriptions – for example, a passage in the Hekhalot literature refers to the experience of standing in limitless space with one’s feet cut off [need to find exact reference]; in the Apocalypse of Abraham, Abraham finds himself prostrate, clutching at the rolling floor of heaven; and Paul is taken up to the third heaven “whether in the body or out of the body.” And various ritual practices involving the body are often a requirement to achieve specific mystical experiences – for example, again in the Hekhalot literature, in order to encounter an angel and speak with him, the practitioner typically has to fast for a certain number of days, eating only bread he has baked and water he has drawn, isolating himself from all other people in a room, and reciting prayers and adjurations – all physical, bodily activities.
The question I asked earlier – about how the neurological studies can be useful for the study of mystical experience in antiquity – is answered in an interesting way by Frances, when she says that “when we marginalize the body in our discussions of mysticism in antiquity, we miss the one sure bridge we have to antiquity…. it is our embodiment that is the one sure window into those persons who composed, heard, and/or circulated the mystical texts.” She then focuses on details that Jim also addresses in his paper from the point of view of ritual studies – the bodily expressions in mystical texts. The texts describe body postures, the senses, affective changes in the body, etc. These insights are easy to apply to Frances’ discussion of the Testament of Abraham, which includes many physical actions that correlate with affective experiences – for example, when Abraham washes the stranger’s feet, his “heart was moved and he wept over the stranger.” Her discussion of the Testament of Abraham also accords well with the cross-cultural approach that she and Jim both advocate, when she compares the activities in the Testament with those typically engaged in by someone who engaged in dream incubation at a temple of Asclepius. It will be interesting to see Frances’ full exploration of the Testament of Abraham in the light of cross-cultural studies of mystical experience and ritual and the findings of cognitive neuroscience.
If you would like to read my paper, it's after the jump.
I would like to begin by offering my thanks to all three authors for their thought-provoking articles. My discussion will consider each paper in turn, while also making comments drawing the papers together. I am starting with Jim’s paper, “Ritual Praxis in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mysticism.”
Jim’s paper is a lucid discussion of the issues involved in discovering the relationships between ancient instructions for ritual practice and mystical experiences. His survey of the sources for these rituals surveys texts that provide explicit directions, first-hand accounts of mystical experiences, fictional accounts, and architecture and artifacts. His discussion of how to glean rituals from first-hand or fictional accounts is very useful. I would emphasize that the Hekhalot literature, as discussed later in the paper, also contains many ritual instructions intended to bring angels down from heaven (for example, the Sar ha-Panim or Prince of the divine Countenance) and instructions for travel to the heavenly throne room. The instructions for invoking angels, in particular, include many details of ritual practice that are similar to some of those in Sefer ha-Razim. As for the Babylonian incantation bowls, I question whether in most cases we can regard the rituals accompanying their use as mystical in nature. As Jim points out, most of them are protective and exorcistic, intended to protect those named on them from demonic attacks. It is also difficult to discern exactly what rituals would have accompanied the use of these bowls, because we do not possess any kind of accompanying ritual handbook which explains how they were used once they were written. In terms of methodology, Jim’s work and the work of others has demonstrated amply how useful cross-cultural comparisons are, either within the closer culture area of Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern societies or farther afield, for example his own comparison with the Hekhalot rituals and shamanistic traditions from Siberia, North and South America, and Japan. Jim’s most intriguing suggestion for comparison is his last, with modern ceremonial magic. I think this suggestion is well worth following up, and there are anthropologists who have already written ethnographies of a number of groups using the various techniques of ceremonial magic, whether or not derived from the Golden Dawn – for example T. M. Luhrmann’s study, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, and Felicitas Goodman’s Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences. Other comparative possibilities also suggest themselves – to the meditative and ritual techniques of medieval and early modern Jewish mystics, among them Abraham Abulafia and Isaac Luria (via Luria’s disciple, Hayyim Vital). J. H. Chajes’ study Between Worlds is a useful entry into the world of Safedian Kabbalah, where these techniques were developed and elaborated. The proposals that Jim makes in his paper have the potential to be very useful in helping us to understand the experiences of ancient Jewish and Christian mystics.
I now turn to Istvan’s and Frances’ papers. My expertise is in the study of mysticism in late antiquity, not in cognitive neuroscience. My comments here will center what I think is useful in Istvan’s and Frances’ papers for the study of mysticism, and on questions I have about whether, and how, the insights of neuroscience can be applied to the study of mysticism in late antiquity.
Let us begin first with basic definitional questions raised by both Istvan’s and Frances’ papers – how can we define both religion and mysticism? Is mystical experience necessarily religious? Frances’ definition assumes this, when she says that mysticism is a “sub-category of religious experiences that entails experiences rooted in personal bodily expressions of an epistemological revelation.” Questions of definition have bedeviled the study of religion for many decades, and there is no unified definition that all or even most scholars would agree upon. The same is true for the study of mysticism, perhaps even more acutely. Earlier definitions of mysticism saw mystical experience as “union with the divine,” but this definition excludes religious communities whose practitioners deny the possibility of such unions, non-theistic religions, nature mysticism, mystical experiences by people who do not belong to a particular religious community, and probably others that I am not thinking of. One of the great virtues of William James’ discussion of mysticism in his Varieties of Religious Experience is that he attempted to collect a very wide range of testimonies of mystical experience and then present them on a spectrum of experiences. He does come up with a well-known synthetic definition but does not deny the mystical aspects of experiences that do not fit the full definition. Istvan’s paper would appear to agree with this approach (when it says that “mystical experience should include sensations of being near to superhuman, absolute, ultimately significant, hidden, or overwhelming things and beings,” p. 3) but to take it back when it says “Mystics maintain elaborated philosophical and exegetical traditions and emphasize the importance of a sustained, long-term engagement with them” (p. 11). This is certainly not true of all mystics. I think that there needs to be much more careful attention paid to exactly what mystical experiences are being studied through neurological testing, in order to end up with results that will be meaningful for understanding mystical experiences. And if we want the results to be relevant to mysticism in late antiquity, following a definition such as that offered by April DeConick in Paradise Now would be helpful, as Frances says. DeConick’s definition “identifies a tradition within early Judaism and Christianity centered on the belief that a person directly, immediately, and before death can experience the divine, either as a rapture experience or as one solicited by a particular praxis.”
Istvan’s paper surveys a range of neurological studies that attempt to determine the parts of the brain activated by a variety of activities that the researchers consider religious or potentially religious – meditation by Tibetan Buddhists or Franciscan nuns, glossolalia, Bible reading, and rhythmic dance and music engaged in by Pentecostal Christians. He says, however, that “It is important to note that simply observing that a certain brain area plays some role in a certain kind of experience is not yet a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon,” because “one has to keep in mind that any real-life cognitive and behavioral phenomena depends on the cooperation of a network of brain areas.” Therefore discovering what part of the brain is active when a certain activity is done is an interesting fact, but does not necessarily explain the phenomenon. One question I would have about these findings is whether they tell us anything about how the practitioners themselves would explain their own experiences? One advantage that researchers of contemporary religious activity have over studies of ancient religion is that they can observe and even take part in religious performances, as well as ask people directly what their experiences are. Has this been done? I think it would be interesting to see if the neurological findings align with the practitioners’ reports of their own experiences.
Finally, I would like to ask how these studies of contemporary practitioners of various religions can apply to the study of ancient religious texts? As Jim has pointed out, the way we learn about ancient mystical experiences is by interpreting texts that may be first-person accounts, or fictional accounts, or ones that correlate certain ritual activities with experiences such as visionary dreams – but we cannot ask ancient people what their experiences were. Nor do we know how close the written accounts are to what people actually experienced. It is much easier for us to figure out what ritual activities people engaged in. Perhaps by making a catalog of ritual activities that the ancient texts refer to, and then testing people today who engage in those ritual activities, we might be able to learn something about the areas of the brain that would have been activated in ancient people who did those same rituals. Frances’ paper, it seems to me, is making the first steps towards trying to do something like this in her examination of the Testament of Abraham.
Istvan’s discussion, however, leaves out a crucial element in the study of experience, whether ancient or contemporary, whether religious, mystical, or another kind of experience – the role of culture and language in determining experience – both the experience itself and how it is later interpreted. Steven Katz has famously stated that, “There are no pure experiences … it is not just a question of studying the reports of the mystic after the experiential event but of acknowledging that the experience itself as well as the form in which it is reported is shaped by concepts which the mystic brings to, and which shape, his experience.” The virtue of Katz’s position is that it strives to deal with the differences in mystical experiences across cultures and religions, rather than eliding them. Frances modifies Katz somewhat, saying that “the brain simultaneously processes religious or mystical experience as stimuli of various neurological regions of the brain along with cultural matrices of interpretation, and that these are inseparable even on a neurological level of processing.” Frances’ account of mystical experience is sensitive to the particular cultural matrix of a particular account of mystical experience, even if she would not go as far as Katz does.
Despite my hesitation to identify all mystical experiences as religious, there are several aspects of Frances’ definition of mystical experience in antiquity that I think are quite interesting and useful, especially her insistence on paying attention to the body. Ancient accounts of mystical experience do often include bodily descriptions – for example, a passage in the Hekhalot literature refers to the experience of standing in limitless space with one’s feet cut off [need to find exact reference]; in the Apocalypse of Abraham, Abraham finds himself prostrate, clutching at the rolling floor of heaven; and Paul is taken up to the third heaven “whether in the body or out of the body.” And various ritual practices involving the body are often a requirement to achieve specific mystical experiences – for example, again in the Hekhalot literature, in order to encounter an angel and speak with him, the practitioner typically has to fast for a certain number of days, eating only bread he has baked and water he has drawn, isolating himself from all other people in a room, and reciting prayers and adjurations – all physical, bodily activities.
The question I asked earlier – about how the neurological studies can be useful for the study of mystical experience in antiquity – is answered in an interesting way by Frances, when she says that “when we marginalize the body in our discussions of mysticism in antiquity, we miss the one sure bridge we have to antiquity…. it is our embodiment that is the one sure window into those persons who composed, heard, and/or circulated the mystical texts.” She then focuses on details that Jim also addresses in his paper from the point of view of ritual studies – the bodily expressions in mystical texts. The texts describe body postures, the senses, affective changes in the body, etc. These insights are easy to apply to Frances’ discussion of the Testament of Abraham, which includes many physical actions that correlate with affective experiences – for example, when Abraham washes the stranger’s feet, his “heart was moved and he wept over the stranger.” Her discussion of the Testament of Abraham also accords well with the cross-cultural approach that she and Jim both advocate, when she compares the activities in the Testament with those typically engaged in by someone who engaged in dream incubation at a temple of Asclepius. It will be interesting to see Frances’ full exploration of the Testament of Abraham in the light of cross-cultural studies of mystical experience and ritual and the findings of cognitive neuroscience.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Jewish Voice for Peace at AAR/SBL
I spent the morning going through the book exhibit, and came upon a booth for Jewish Voice for Peace, where I argued with them for a long time. Not much enlightenment on either side - we were really talking past each other (not that I expected anything else). They are here trying to get people to support their divestment from TIAA-CREF campaign. I argued that punitive measures like this are guaranteed to alienate most Jews both in the U.S. and in Israel, but they kept saying that divestment had an effect on getting rid of apartheid in South Africa. I objected to the comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa, and we disputed over the issue of Israeli Arab representation in the Knesset. They issued a rejoinder that even in the Iranian parliament has one token Jewish representative. I didn't bother arguing that Israel is nothing like Iran. I agreed with them on some of their diagnoses of the problems (settlement building, Bibi's intransigence, the perverse map of the separation wall which shuts whole Palestinian towns off by surrounding them with a wall - Kalkiliya and Walaje spring to mind) - but not on the solution. It was frustrating, and I felt angry that they were even here at AAR/SBL. I've been going to annual meetings since 1985, and I don't remember ever seeing a both on political issues - even in the heyday of anti-apartheid campaigns or protests against the Iraq War.
Jon Haber of Divest This! has many times described the disruptive effect of groups like JVP, which try to bring Middle Eastern politics into organizations that basically have nothing to do with them, in order to push their own agenda. They drag their own agenda into unrelated groups, and cause nothing but discord and bad feelings. This is in sharp contrast to groups like J Street or the American Task Force for Palestine, which work openly to persuade people of their political views in the political arena. They lobby Congress or the President, they hold conferences of various kinds, they organize local chapters that engage in letter-writing or citizen lobbying. They do not try to take over groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East to further their own ends.
Jon Haber of Divest This! has many times described the disruptive effect of groups like JVP, which try to bring Middle Eastern politics into organizations that basically have nothing to do with them, in order to push their own agenda. They drag their own agenda into unrelated groups, and cause nothing but discord and bad feelings. This is in sharp contrast to groups like J Street or the American Task Force for Palestine, which work openly to persuade people of their political views in the political arena. They lobby Congress or the President, they hold conferences of various kinds, they organize local chapters that engage in letter-writing or citizen lobbying. They do not try to take over groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East to further their own ends.
"Reconstructing Practice from Texts" - Esotericism and Mysticism session at SBL
Yesterday morning I went to the fabulous first panel sponsored by the Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity section of the SBL (we used to be called the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism section), where the presentations were fascinating and very wide-ranging. The two I found the most interesting were April DeConick's, “'The road for souls is through the planets': The Mysteries of the Ophites Diagrammed" and Cordula Bandt's "The Tract 'On the Mystery of Letters' in Context of Late Antique Jewish, Gnostic and Christian Letter Mysticism."
Here are the abstracts:
April's paper
I'll post more about them later. In a few minutes I'm heading over for our second session, which we are doing together with the Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity section.
Here are the abstracts:
April's paper
This paper will reexamine the Ophite Diagram presented by Origen in his treatise against Celsus (6.21-40). I will make a detailed reading of the text and argue that the Diagram is exactly what Celsus and Origen claimed it was, a map of the soul’s journey through the planets. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the prayers correlate to a Neopythagorean ascent pattern. I will conclude with the argument that Origen has preserved for us a piece of an Ophite initiatory handbook, that is the map, prayers and seals used in the intermediate initiatory rite when the soul practiced the death journey through the heavenly realms.Cordula's paper
Speculations on letters play an important role within Late Antique mystical and magical tradition. Letters are regarded as smallest units of speech, but on a more esoteric level they are also understood as tools to gain spiritual progress or even influence reality. Names of angels and heavenly powers which are nonsense clusters of letters, composed by combining them according to certain rules, occur as prominent means of protection and power in early and later Jewish mysticism as well as in Gnostic texts, which are preserved in original or as quotations in polemical writings by the Church fathers. However, in orthodox Christian tradition references and responses on the symbolism of letters are rather rare, despite Christ's famous saying in the Book of Revelation "I am the Alpha and the Omega" (Rev. 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). Nevertheless, exactly this cryptic dictum inspires the remarkable tract "On the mystery of Letters" which was composed probably by a Christian monk in mid-6th century Palestine. This tract is thoroughly rooted in orthodoxy, but presents an astonishing variety of interpretations of the Greek alphabet, revealing hidden secrets by close examination of certain features of the letters like name, shape, numerical value, position in alphabet, pronunciation etc. In 2007, I published the editio princeps of this unique work, accompanied by a German translation and analysis of its content. In order to give a wider public access to this still quite little known text, I am currently preparing an English version of my book. My paper at the SBL Annual Meeting 2011 will focus on similarities between Jewish and Gnostic letter mysticism in the first centuries of the Christian era and the tract "On the mystery of letters". I will show how the author transforms rather heterodox ideas into a truly orthodox approach towards the alphabet. I will also discuss why mainstream Christianity at this time seems to be reluctant to involve into mystical letter speculations.Bandt has also published her dissertation "On the Mystery of Letters" and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review has a very laudatory review of the book. (The title is Der Traktat "Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben," Kritischer Text mit Einführung, Übersetzung und Ammerkungen. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 162. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).
I'll post more about them later. In a few minutes I'm heading over for our second session, which we are doing together with the Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity section.
Friday, November 18, 2011
I'm in San Francisco for the SBL
I arrived in San Francisco earlier this evening for the AAR/SBL conference. I just noticed that both April DeConick of Forbidden Gospels and Jim Davila of Paleojudaica had blogged on their attendance at the conference. We are part of the Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity section, which has two meetings at the SBL this year, one at 9:00 tomorrow morning, the second on Sunday at 1:00. Tomorrow's session is on the theme of Reconstructing Practice from Texts (in Convention Center 2011). Sunday's session is on Praxis and Experience in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mysticism (in Convention Center 2018). I'll be responding to the papers on Sunday. Jim just wrote that he's going to be participating in another panel tomorrow, S19-212b - Engaging the "Wired-In Generation": Knowledge and Learning in the Digital Age. It's from 1:00-2:30 in Convention Center 3002.
This is the first time in several years that the AAR and the SBL are meeting together - I'm looking forward to going to some AAR sessions as well as SBL sessions, especially those sponsored by the Study of Judaism section of AAR.
This is the first time in several years that the AAR and the SBL are meeting together - I'm looking forward to going to some AAR sessions as well as SBL sessions, especially those sponsored by the Study of Judaism section of AAR.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Strange places in China
Noah Schachtman of Wired's Danger Room has called attention to a bunch of strange structures out in the Chinese desert. After the jump, there are some pictures of them.
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Größere Kartenansicht
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Größere Kartenansicht
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Saturday, November 12, 2011
Stephen Sizer's debate with Calvin Smith
Joseph W reports on Rev. Stephen Sizer's debate with Dr. Calvin Smith last night, in particular focusing on Sizer's closeness to the Iranian regime: Stephen Sizer on his links with Iran’s Khomeinists: “I’ll go anywhere to share the gospel”.
Dr. Smith has just written to let me know that the recorded debate has now been uploaded to Vimeo - here is the link.
Has the Church Replaced Israel? (TV debate) from Calvin Smith on Vimeo.
A rather opinionated assessment of the debate by Moriel Archive.
Gev of the Rosh Pina Project has some harsh words for Rev. Sizer's performance at the debate -
Dr. Smith has just written to let me know that the recorded debate has now been uploaded to Vimeo - here is the link.
Has the Church Replaced Israel? (TV debate) from Calvin Smith on Vimeo.
A rather opinionated assessment of the debate by Moriel Archive.
Gev of the Rosh Pina Project has some harsh words for Rev. Sizer's performance at the debate -
Stephen Sizer is a master at speaking a different way with a different message to different audiences. A prime example is last night’s debate he had on Revelation TV with Calvin Smith, Principal of King’s Evangelical Divinity School, UK. Sizer conceded most of the theological ground to Smith and sought to seem as reasonable and as nice as possible. I just felt like he was grooming his audience for some nefarious purpose.
Last night he concluded that he wanted to “learn from his Messianic brothers” however to an audience of largely non-Christian Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporters he called Israeli Messianic Jews, who support their country, an abomination! He later issued an “apology” when he was caught out, but blamed the naughty Zionists who filmed him for putting him under-pressure and hence he came out with that howler....
Sizer couldn’t keep to the theological topic that was billed in the debate and launched a tirade against Israel’s injustices but ignores, and sometime worse, he rationalises the violence and minimises the murderers of Jews by calling them political prisoners, as we reported here.
Sizer’s elastic-sided ethics stretch so far as to allow him to promote a new blog site as if he had nothing to do with it, when it fact he started it. We reported this here.
In conceding to Calvin Smith that the Jews were still God’s chosen people and God has not finished with them, Sizer sang a different tune to the one he sang in Malaysia for a Viva Palestina meeting he addressed. He said in an interview to Shahanaaz Habib of the Star Newspaper that the idea that the Jews were God’s Chosen people was “absolute rubbish”. We reported this here.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Who tarnished Penn State's reputation?
I wondered whether there might be student response at Penn State last night to Paterno's firing. Well, there was, and it turned into a riot. Penn State Students in Clashes After Joe Paterno Announcement.The New York Times reports -
After top Penn State officials announced they had fired Joe Paterno on Wednesday night, thousands of students stormed the downtown area to display their anger and frustration, chanting the former coach’s name, tearing down light poles and overturning a television news van parked along College Avenue.One student said:
The Board "started this"? They "tarnished a legend"? How about - Joe Paterno's turning a blind eye to hideous crimes started this? How about Joe Paterno tarnished his own "legend."“We got rowdy and we got maced,” Jeff Heim, 19, said rubbing his red, teary eyes. “But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend.”
I look forward to the day when colleges and universities, along with the NFL, decide that it has to run its own farm system, rather than relying on American colleges and universities. Somehow baseball has managed to succeed without this kind of massive subsidy from our supposed higher education system.
TV Debate between Calvin Smith and Stephen Sizer
Dr. Calvin Smith has a brief report on his debate last night with Rev. Stephen Sizer on his blog - Calvin L. Smith: That TV Debate. He will be uploading video of the debate eventually to his website. If anyone would like to comment on the debate, I'd be interested to hear it. (I did not hear it, since I'm in the US and was at work when it occurred).
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Violence and sex, money, and war
Some random thoughts, in no particular order -
The scandal at Penn State is really unbelievable. When I read the story yesterday about how graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary had caught assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in the act of anally raping a 10 year old boy in the locker room, I was appalled - and then even more appalled to learn that McQueary did nothing to stop the rape, left, called his father, then reported it to Joe Paterno, the head coach, who sent the report up the line, with no one calling the police, or apparently even learning the name of the young victim. Today, the university's president, Graham Spanier, stepped down from his job, and Joe Paterno was fired by the Board of Trustees of the university.
Students at the university have been holding large rallies at Paterno's home, in support of him. Why? Apparently, football, the American religion, can't be questioned, even if the sainted head coach covers up the grotesque crime of child rape.
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Is the world economy about to go into freefall again? Now it's Italy's turn to totter at the abyss. And maybe France's.... When will the EU leaders get their act together?
Iran apparently is much closer to getting a nuclear weapon. Should we do anything about it? Should Israel do something about it? An Israeli attack on Iran would very probably lead to a regional war, with thousands of missiles being launched from Lebanon and Gaza at Israel. I hope there's not a war - I'm going to Israel in January for seven months (I'm on sabbatical), and I'd rather not spend the time in a bomb shelter!
The scandal at Penn State is really unbelievable. When I read the story yesterday about how graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary had caught assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in the act of anally raping a 10 year old boy in the locker room, I was appalled - and then even more appalled to learn that McQueary did nothing to stop the rape, left, called his father, then reported it to Joe Paterno, the head coach, who sent the report up the line, with no one calling the police, or apparently even learning the name of the young victim. Today, the university's president, Graham Spanier, stepped down from his job, and Joe Paterno was fired by the Board of Trustees of the university.
Students at the university have been holding large rallies at Paterno's home, in support of him. Why? Apparently, football, the American religion, can't be questioned, even if the sainted head coach covers up the grotesque crime of child rape.
----------------------------
Is the world economy about to go into freefall again? Now it's Italy's turn to totter at the abyss. And maybe France's.... When will the EU leaders get their act together?
Italy, a central member of the euro zone and its third-largest economy, struggled to find a new government as anxious investors drove Italian bond rates well above 7 percent and the markets tumbled worldwide. And although critics have warned of just such an escalation for months, European leaders again were caught without a convincing response....---------------------------
And of course the fear in Paris is that France will be next. Mr. Sarkozy’s government just announced another set of budget cuts and tax increases in the face of lower growth, to keep to its promises to cut its own budget deficit. But on Wednesday, the spread of 10-year French government bonds over their German equivalent rose to a euro area high of around 140 basis points. “Contagion” is not just a movie.
Iran apparently is much closer to getting a nuclear weapon. Should we do anything about it? Should Israel do something about it? An Israeli attack on Iran would very probably lead to a regional war, with thousands of missiles being launched from Lebanon and Gaza at Israel. I hope there's not a war - I'm going to Israel in January for seven months (I'm on sabbatical), and I'd rather not spend the time in a bomb shelter!
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Another Gaza flotilla
At this moment, two boats are in international waters in the Mediterranean heading to Gaza. One boat, the Saoirse from Ireland, includes parliamentarians among its passengers. The other, the Tahrir, carries representatives from Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Palestine. The U.S. Representative on the Tahrir, Kit Kittredge, was a passenger on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope mission in Athens in July. A journalist from Democracy Now is on the Tahrir also. Civil society organizations in Gaza await their arrival, and look forward to the delivery of letters collected from thousands of U.S. supporters in the To Gaza With Love campaign.It appears to me that this time around, they kept the sailing completely quiet before the boats reached international waters, in order to prevent what happened this summer from happening again, when the boats were basically stuck in Greek ports, under heavy pressure from Israel and the US. (I hope Israeli intelligence knew they were sailing!) Also, the boats sailed from Turkey, which supports the attempt to break the Israeli embargo on Gaza. (See article from Haaretz, which confirms that they kept the plan quiet so they wouldn't be stopped; apparently the Turkish authorities insisted that they send fewer people on the boats than they had originally planned).
Reuters reports:
The Israeli navy will prevent two yachts carrying pro-Palestinian activists which left Turkey on Wednesday from breaching an Israeli blockade and reaching the Gaza Strip, an Israeli military official said. Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich, speaking to reporters by telephone, would not say how the boats might be stopped, saying only "we will have to assess and see if we are facing violent passengers."There is, apparently, an unidentified boat following the Canadian one, about which @PalWaves says, "The
Israel was aware two yachts had set sail carrying Irish, Canadian and U.S. activists, Leibovich said. Describing their journey as a "provocation," she said they were still far from the Israeli and Gazan coast. Israel would offer to unload any aid supplies on board and deliver them to Gaza, Leibovich said. Israel blockades the Gaza coast to prevent the smuggling of weapons to Palestinian gunmen in the territory, she added.
UPDATE: apparently it was *not* the Turkish Coast Guard, and the Israeli Navy intercepted them yesterday (Nov. 4) and led them to Ashdod port.
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