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Crucified Book - Sacred Writing In The Age Of Valentinus

by Anne Starr Kreps

86,13€ + 10% CARD

 In the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, a crucified Jesus is depicted as wrapped in a scroll and reading aloud the contents of his heart as he dies. This is just one of many strange appearances of the physical book in this text and in the surviving fragments of Valentinus. Through its representations of the written word, Anne Kreps argues, the Gospel of Truth promoted a living document perspective on the holy book, encouraging the generation of religious books as new sources of revelatory authority. The Crucified Book locates the Gospel of Truth in a broader ancient debate about books and their attendant authority. Roman and Jewish texts exhibit similar efforts to equate holy persons with holy texts, while Christian heresiologists exhibit awareness of the phenomenon even as they condemn it. Although the Gospel of Truth is often set apart from mainstream Christianity in scholarship, its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity. Valentinus'' views about the relationship between the oral and the written dovetailed with thinking on the nature of the sacred book that gradually became the trademark of Rabbinic Judaism, Kreps contends. Ultimately, because the Gospel of Truth reflects a mind that was at the center of the discursive debates that formed Judaism and Christianity, her book demonstrates the usefulness of so-called heretical texts for discussions on the parting of the ways between the two traditions.
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Death Of The Desert - Monastic Memory And The Loss Of Egypt''S Golden Age

by Christine Luckritz Marquis

86,13€ + 10% CARD

 In the late fourth century, the world of Christianity was torn apart by debate over the teachings of the third-century theologian Origen and his positions on the incorporeality of God. In the year 400, Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria convened a council declaring Origen''s later followers as heretics. Shortly thereafter, Theophilus banished the so-called Tall Brothers, four Origenist monks who led monastic communities in the western Egyptian desert, along with hundreds of their brethren. In some accounts, Theophilus leads a violent group of drunken youths and enslaved Ethiopians in sacking and desecrating the monastery; in others, he justly exercises his episcopal duties. In some versions, Theophilus'' violent actions effectively bring the Golden Age of desert monasticism to an end; in others, he has shown proper respect for the desert fathers, whose life of asceticism is subsequently destroyed by bands of barbarian marauders. For some, the desert came to be inextricably connected to violence and trauma, while for others, it became a site of nostalgic recollection. Which of these narratives subsequent generations believed depended in good part on the sources they were reading. In Death of the Desert, Christine Luckritz Marquis offers a fresh examination of this critical juncture in Christian history and brings into dialogue narrative strands that have largely been separated in the scholarly tradition. She takes the violence perpetrated by Theophilus as a turning point for desert monasticism and considers how monks became involved in acts of violence and how that violence came back to haunt them. More broadly, her careful attention to the dynamic relations between memory practices, the rhetorical constructions of place, racialized discourse, and language and deeds of violence speak to us in our own time.
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Return Of The Absent Father - A New Reading Of A Chain Of Stories From The Babylonian Talmud

by Haim Weiss e Shira Stav

66,18€ + 10% CARD

 The Return of the Absent Father offers a new reading of a chain of seven stories from tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud, in which sages abandon their homes, wives, and families and go away to the study house for long periods. Earlier interpretations have emphasized the tension between conjugal and scholarly desire as the key driving force in these stories. Haim Weiss and Shira Stav here reveal an additional layer of meaning to the father figure''s role within the family structure. By shifting the spotlight from the couple to the drama of the father''s relationship with his sons and daughters, they present a more complex tension between mundane domesticity and the sphere of spiritual learning represented by the study house. This coauthored book presents a dialogic encounter between Weiss, a scholar of rabbinic literature, and Stav, a scholar of modern Hebrew literary studies. Working together, they have produced a book resonant in its melding of the scholarly norms of rabbinics with a literary interpretation based in feminist and psychoanalytic theory.
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Imitations Of Infinity - Gregory Of Nyssa And The Transformation Of Mimesis

by Michael A. Motia

92,68€ + 10% CARD

 We do not have many definitions of Christianity from late antiquity, but among the few extant is the brief statement of Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 CE) that it is "mimesis of the divine nature." The sentence is both a historical gem and theologically puzzling. Gregory was the first Christian to make the infinity of God central to his theological program, but how could he intend for humans to imitate the infinite? If the aim of the Christian life is "never to stop growing towards what is better and never to place any limit on perfection," how could mimesis function within this endless pursuit? In Imitations of Infinity, Michael A. Motia situates Gregory among Platonist philosophers, rhetorical teachers, and early Christian leaders to demonstrate how much of late ancient life was governed by notions of imitation. Questions both intimate and immense, of education, childcare, or cosmology, all found form in a relationship of archetype and image. It is no wonder that these debates demanded the attention of people at every level of the Roman Empire, including the Christians looking to form new social habits and norms. Whatever else the late ancient transformation of the empire affected, it changed the names, spaces, and characters that filled the imagination and common sense of its citizens, and it changed how they thought of their imitations. Like religion, imitation was a way to organize the world and a way to reach toward new possibilities, Motia argues, and two earlier conceptions of mimesis—one centering on ontological participation, the other on aesthetic representation—merged in late antiquity. As philosophers and religious leaders pondered how linking oneself to reality depended on practices of representation, their theoretical debates accompanied practical concerns about what kinds of objects would best guide practitioners toward the divine. Motia places Gregory within a broader landscape of figures who retheorized the role of mimesis in search of perfection. No longer was imitation a marker of inauthenticity or immaturity. Mimesis became a way of life.
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Heavenly Stories - Tiered Salvation In The New Testament And Ancient Christianity

by Alexander Kocar

92,68€ + 10% CARD

 Salvation is often thought to be an all-or-nothing matter: you are either saved or damned. In the ancient world some figures, including Paul the Apostle, John of Patmos, Hermas, the Sethians, and the Valentinians, did not think this way, however. For them, there were multiple levels of salvation. Examining the reasons and implications for why these important thinkers believed that salvation comes in degrees, Heavenly Stories offers a fresh perspective on ancient thinking about responsibility, especially as it intersects with concerns such as genealogy and determinism. It shows why Jews and Christians of various kinds—some eventually declared orthodox, others heretical—correlated ethics and soteriology and argued over how this should be done. By constructing a difference between a lower and higher level of salvation, ancient authors devised soteriological hierarchies that could account for ethical imperfections and social differentiation between their communities and outsiders, as well as reinforce idealized portrayals of conduct among members of their own groups. Alexander Kocar asks how these thinkers identified and described these ethical and social differences among people; what commitments motivated them to make such distinctions; what were the social effects of different salvific categories and ethical standards; and what impact did hierarchically structured soteriologies have on notions of ethical responsibility? His findings have repercussions for the study of ancient ethics (especially free will and responsibility), our understanding of orthodoxy and heresy, and scholarly debates surrounding the origins of Christianity as a movement that allegedly transcends ethnic boundaries.
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Godman And The Sea - The Empty Tomb, The Trauma Of The Jews, And The Gospel Of Mark

by Michael J. Thate

112,56€ + 10% CARD

 If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains the case that the study of early Christianity is dominated by an assumption of the force of Jesus''s personality on divergent communities. In The Godman and the Sea, Michael J. Thate shifts the terms of this study by focusing on the Gospel of Mark, which ends when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discover a few days after the crucifixion that Jesus''s tomb has been opened but the corpse is not there. Unlike the other gospels, Mark does not include the resurrection, portraying instead loss, puzzlement, and despair in the face of the empty tomb. Reading Mark''s Gospel as an exemplary text, Thate examines what he considers to be retellings of other traumatic experiences—the stories of Jesus''s exorcising demons out of a man and into a herd of swine, his stilling of the storm, and his walking on the water. Drawing widely on a diverse set of resources that include the canon of western fiction, classical literature, the psychological study of trauma, phenomenological philosophy, the new materialism, psychoanalytic theory, poststructural philosophy, and Hebrew Bible scholarship, as well as the expected catalog of New Testament tools of biblical criticism in general and Markan scholarship in particular, The Godman and the Sea is an experimental reading of the Gospel of Mark and the social force of the sea within its traumatized world. More fundamentally, however, it attempts to position this reading as a story of trauma, ecstasy, and what has become through the ruins of past pain.
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Ancient Christian Ecopoetics - Cosmologies, Saints, Things

by Virginia Burrus

92,68€ + 10% CARD

 In our age of ecological crisis, what insights—if any—can we expect to find by looking to our past? Perhaps, suggests Virginia Burrus, early Christianity might yield usable insights. Turning aside from the familiar specter of Christianity''s human-centered theology of dominion, Burrus directs our attention to aspects of ancient Christian thought and practice that remain strange and alien. Drawn to excess and transgression, in search of transformation, early Christians creatively reimagined the universe and the human, cultivating relationships with a wide range of other beings—animal, vegetable, and mineral; angelic and demonic; divine and earthly; large and small. In Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, Burrus facilitates a provocative encounter between early Christian theology and contemporary ecological thought. In the first section, she explores how the mysterious figure of khora, drawn from Plato''s Timaeus, haunts Christian and Jewish accounts of a creation envisioned as varyingly monstrous, unstable, and unknowable. In the second section, she explores how hagiographical literature queers notions of nature and places the very category of the human into question, in part by foregrounding the saint''s animality, in part by writing the saint into the landscape. The third section considers material objects, as small as portable relics and icons, as large as church and monastery complexes. Ancient Christians considered all of these animate beings, simultaneously powerful and vulnerable, protective and in need of protection, lovable and loving. Viewed through the shifting lenses of an ancient ecopoetics, Burrus demonstrates how humans both loomed large and shrank to invisibility, absorbed in the rapture of a strange and animate ecology.
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Apocalypse Of The Alien God - Platonism And The Exile Of Sethian Gnosticism

by Dylan M. Burns

91,93€ + 10% CARD

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 Apocalypse of the Alien God shows that the fundamental break between the Platonic tradition and Judeo-Christianity began when the mystic Plotinus rejected the teachings of the Sethians, an influential group of Gnostics who operated at the intersection of Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian thought.
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The Death Of A Prophet - The End Of Muhammad'S Life And The Beginnings Of Islam

by Stephen J. Shoemaker

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 Stephen J. Shoemaker investigates contradictory traditions about the end of Muhammad's life in the Islamic and non-Islamic sources of the seventh and eighth centuries.
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&Quote;Sefer Yesirah&Quote; And Its Contexts - Other Jewish Voices

by Tzahi Weiss

86,06€ + 10% CARD

 In "Sefer Yesirah" and Its Contexts, Tzahi Weiss explores anew the contested history of Sefer Yesirah, in the process extending our knowledge of Jewish intellectual traditions excluded from rabbinic canon.
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Between Christ And Caliph - Law, Marriage, And Christian Community In Early Islam

by Lev E. Weitz

99,31€ + 10% CARD

 In the conventional historical narrative, the medieval Middle East was composed of autonomous religious traditions, each with distinct doctrines, rituals, and institutions. Outside the world of theology, however, and beyond the walls of the mosque or the church, the multireligious social order of the medieval Islamic empire was complex and dynamic. Peoples of different faiths—Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Jews, and others—interacted with each other in city streets, marketplaces, and even shared households, all under the rule of the Islamic caliphate. Laypeople of different confessions marked their religious belonging through fluctuating, sometimes overlapping, social norms and practices. In Between Christ and Caliph, Lev E. Weitz examines the multiconfessional society of early Islam through the lens of shifting marital practices of Syriac Christian communities. In response to the growth of Islamic law and governance in the seventh through tenth centuries, Syriac Christian bishops created new laws to regulate marriage, inheritance, and family life. The bishops banned polygamy, required that Christian marriages be blessed by priests, and restricted marriage between cousins, seeking ultimately to distinguish Christian social patterns from those of Muslims and Jews. Through meticulous research into rarely consulted Syriac and Arabic sources, Weitz traces the ways in which Syriac Christians strove to identify themselves as a community apart while still maintaining a place in the Islamic social order. By binding household life to religious identity, Syriac Christians developed the social distinctions between religious communities that came to define the medieval Islamic Middle East. Ultimately, Between Christ and Caliph argues that interreligious negotiations such as these lie at the heart of the history of the medieval Islamic empire.
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Jesus, Mary, And Joseph - Family Trouble In The Infancy Gospels

by Christopher A. Frilingos

59,56€ + 10% CARD

 What was it like in the household of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? The extracanonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Protogospel of James offer some answers. In stories of household conflict, as well as in scenes of courage and love, ancient Christians learned about human ignorance, divine omniscience, and the worth of family life.
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A Traveling Homeland - The Babylonian Talmud As Diaspora

by Daniel Boyarin

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 In A Traveling Homeland, Daniel Boyarin makes the case that the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto producing and defining the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study.
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Jews, Gentiles, And Other Animals - The Talmud After The Humanities

by Mira Beth Wasserman

99,31€ + 10% CARD

 In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human.
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Jews, Gentiles, And Other Animals - The Talmud After The Humanities

by Mira Beth Wasserman

81,11€ + 10% CARD

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 In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human.
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Virgin In Song - Mary And The Poetry Of Romanos The Melodist

by Thomas Arentzen

92,68€ + 10% CARD

 In The Virgin in Song, Thomas Arentzen explores the characterization of Mary in the songs of Romanos the Melodist, one of the greatest liturgical poets of Byzantium. Romanos's hymns shaped a figure, Arentzen argues, who related intimately to her flock in a formative period of Christian orthodoxy.
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Pious Irreverence - Confronting God In Rabbinic Judaism

by Dov Weiss

112,56€ + 10% CARD

 Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age (70 CE-800 CE).
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Spiritual Taxonomies And Ritual Authority - Platonists, Priests, And Gnostics In The Third Century C.E.

by Heidi Marx-Wolf

99,38€ + 10% CARD

 Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority recounts how philosophers of the late third century C.E. organized the spirit world into hierarchies, positioning themselves as high priests in the process. By establishing themselves as experts on sacred matters, they fortified their authority, prestige, and reputation.
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Violence And Belief In Late Antiquity - Militant Devotion In Christianity And Islam

by Thomas Sizgorich

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 Focusing on the shared vocabulary of images and ideas with which late ancient Christians and Muslims imagined the past, present, and future, this book seeks to understand why violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries.
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Writing And Holiness - The Practice Of Authorship In The Early Christian East

by Derek Krueger

36,49€ + 10% CARD

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 Drawing on comparative literature, ritual and performance studies, and the history of asceticism, Derek Krueger explores how early Christian writers came to view writing as salvific, as worship through the production of art.
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Scripture And Tradition - Rabbi Akiva And The Triumph Of Midrash

by Azzan Yadin-Israel

125,88€ + 10% CARD

 Analyzing the layers of interpretation in the Sifra and the transformation of Rabbi Akiva's portrayal in rabbinic literature more broadly, Azzan Yadin-Israel traces an ideological shift toward scriptural authority and away from received traditions.
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Slandering The Jew - Sexuality And Difference In Early Christian Texts

by Susanna Drake

86,06€ + 10% CARD

 This book explores the sexual slander of Jews in Christian texts from the first through fifth centuries. These early Christian representations of Jewish sexuality reveal how Church fathers used accusations of fleshliness, bestiality, and licentiousness as strategies to differentiate the "spiritual" Christian from the "carnal" Jew.
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Memory Of The Temple And The Making Of The Rabbis

by Naftali S. Cohn

105,93€ + 10% CARD

 Naftali S. Cohn provides an innovative understanding of the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah and their intense focus on the Temple. He contends that the memory of the Temple served a political function for the rabbis, arguing for their own importance within the complex social landscape of Jewish society in Roman Palestine.
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Christianity, Empire, And The Making Of Religion In Late Antiquity

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Christianity, Empire, And The Making Of Religion In Late Antiquity

by Jeremy M. Schott

99,31€ + 10% CARD

 In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E.
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