Experientia, Volume 2
Experientia, Volume 2

Author: Colleen Shantz

Publisher: Society of Biblical Lit

Published: 2012-08-17

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1589836707

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This collection of essays continues the investigation of religious experience in early Judaism and early Christianity begun in Experientia, Volume 1, by addressing one of the traditional objections to the study of experience in antiquity. The authors address the relationship between the surviving evidence, which is textual, and the religious experiences that precede or ensue from those texts. Drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, social memory theory, neuroscience, and cognitive science, they explore a range of religious phenomena including worship, the act of public reading, ritual, ecstasy, mystical ascent, and the transformation of gender and of emotions. Through careful and theoretically informed work, the authors demonstrate the possibility of moving from written documents to assess the lived experiences that are linked to them. The contributors are István Czachesz, Frances Flannery, Robin Griffith-Jones, Angela Kim Harkins, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, John R. Levison, Carol A. Newsom, Rollin A. Ramsaran, Colleen Shantz, Leif E. Vaage, and Rodney A. Werline.

From Jesus to his First Followers: Continuity and Discontinuity
From Jesus to his First Followers: Continuity and Discontinuity

Author: Adriana Destro

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-02-06

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 9004337660

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From Jesus to His First Followers examines to what extent early Christian groups were in continuity or discontinuity with respect to Jesus. Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce concentrate on the transformation of religious practices. Their anthropological-historical analysis focuses on the relations between discipleship and households, on the models of contact with the supernatural world, and on cohabitation among distinct religious groups. The book highlights how Matthew uses non-Jewish instruments of legitimation, John reformulates religious experiences through symbolized domestic slavery, Paul adopts a religious practice diffused in Roman-Hellenistic environments. The book reconstructs the map of early Christian groups in the Land of Israel and explains their divergences on the basis of an original theory of the local origin of Gospels’ information.

Angels Associated with Israel in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Angels Associated with Israel in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Author: Matthew L. Walsh

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Published: 2019-12-16

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 3161553039

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A well-known characteristic of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls are their assertions that membership in the Qumran movement included present and eschatological fellowship with the angels, but scholars disagree as to the precise meaning of these claims. To gain a better understanding of angelic fellowship at Qumran, Matthew L. Walsh utilizes the early Jewish concept that certain angels were closely associated with Israel. Moreover, these angels, which included guardians and priests, were envisioned within apocalyptic worldviews that assumed that realities on earth corresponded to those of the heavenly realm. A comparison of non-sectarian texts with sectarian compositions reveals that the Qumran movement's lofty assertions of communion with the guardians and priests of heavenly Israel would have made a significant contribution to their identity as the true Israel.

The Psalms of Solomon
The Psalms of Solomon

Author: Eberhard Bons

Publisher: SBL Press

Published: 2015-05-31

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1628370432

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A fresh analysis of that sheds new light on the Psalms of Solomon Researchers whose work focuses on the Psalms of Solomon, experts on the Septuagint, and scholars of Jewish Hellenistic literature take a fresh look at debates surrounding the text. Authors engage linguistic, historical, and theological issues including the original language of the psalms, their historical setting, and their theological intentions with the goal of expanding our understanding of first-century BCE Jewish theology. Features: New methods applied to open questions of authorship and historical context Focusd scholarly attention on a work of theological and literary importance Revised essays originally presented at the First International Meeting on the Psalms of Solomon

Cognitive Science and the New Testament
Cognitive Science and the New Testament

Author: István Czachesz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0198779860

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Over the last few decades, our knowledge of how the human mind and brain works increased dramatically. The field of cognitive science enables us to understand religious traditions, rituals, and visionary experiences in novel ways. This has implications for the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. How people in the ancient Mediterranean world remembered sayings and stories, what they experienced when participating in rituals, how they thought about magic and miracle, and how they felt and reasoned about moral questions--all of that can be now better understood with the help of insights from cognitive science. Istvan Czachesz argues that the field of New Testament Studies witnesses the beginning of a cognitive turn. He surveys relevant developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion and explores the field of cognitive and behavioral sciences in search of opportunities of gaining new insights about biblical materials. Czachesz presents some methodological tools and initial steps, together with a large number of examples of applying the cognitive approach to the New Testament and related ancient literature.

Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism
Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism

Author: Michael E. Stone

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0190842385

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Secret societies in ancient Judaism -- "Esoteric", mysteries, and secrecy -- Esoteric as a social category -- The social organization of secrecy -- Initiation and graded revelation -- Other secret Jewish groups and traditions -- The social setting of esoteric tradition

Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible
Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible

Author: Reed Carlson

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-01-19

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 3110670038

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Spirit possession is more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament than it is with the Hebrew Bible. In Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible, however, Reed Carlson argues that possession is also depicted in this earlier literature, though rarely according to the typical western paradigm. This new approach utilizes theoretical models developed by cultural anthropologists and ethnographers of contemporary possession-practicing communities in the global south and its diasporas. Carlson demonstrates how possession in the Bible is a corporate and cultivated practice that can function as social commentary and as a means to model the moral self. The author treats a variety of spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible, including spirit language in the Psalms and Job, spirit empowerment in Judges and Samuel, and communal possession in the prophets. Carlson also surveys apotropaic texts and spirit myths in early Jewish literature—including the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this volume, two recent scholarly trends in biblical studies converge: investigations into notions of evil and of the self. The result is a synthesizing project, useful to biblical scholars and those of early Judaism and Christianity alike.

Scripture as Social Discourse
Scripture as Social Discourse

Author: Todd Klutz

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0567684997

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Throughout the last several decades professional biblical scholars have adapted concepts and theories from the social sciences – particularly social and cultural anthropology – in order to cast new light on ancient biblical writings, early Jewish and Christian texts that circulated with the Scriptures, and the various contexts in which these literatures were produced and first received. The present volume of essays draws much of its inspiration from that same development in the history of biblical research, while also offering insights from other, newer approaches to interpretation. The contributors to this volume explore a wide range of broadly social-scientific disciplines and discourses – cultural anthropology, sociology, archaeology, political science, the New Historicism, forced migration studies, gender studies – and provide multiple examples of the ways in which these diverse methods and theories can shed new and often fascinating light on the ancient texts. The fruit of scholarly work that is both international in flavour and truly collaborative, this volume provides fresh perspectives not only on familiar portions of Jewish and Christian Scripture but also on select passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library and previously untranslated French texts.

The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible
The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible

Author: Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-09-11

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9004381619

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In The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible: An Analysis of Josephus and 4 Ezra, Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow examines the thorny question of when, how, and why the collection of twenty-four books that today is known as the Hebrew Bible was formed. He carefully studies the two earliest testimonies in this regard—Josephus’ Against Apion and 4 Ezra—and proposes that, along with the tendency to idealize the past, which leads to consider that divine revelation to Israel has ceased, an important reason to specify a collection of Scriptures at the end of the first century CE consisted in the need to defend the received tradition to counter those that accepted more books.

The Valentinian Temple
The Valentinian Temple

Author: Matthew Twigg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-12

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1000568687

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Is the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Paul a Valentinian text? Many would say no, few would say yes. The Valentinian Temple brings together all the available evidence to produce a systematic argument in favour of the Apocalypse of Paul’s Valentinian origins. From Valentinus himself to the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip, this book traces one of the most neglected trajectories in Valentinian Christianity, namely the pursuit of mystical experiences oriented around a heavenly temple. Starting with the divine Name in the fragments of Valentinus, the development of a high-priestly Christology is uncovered across a range of primary sources, culminating in the Gospel of Philip’s temple-based rituals of initiation. The Valentinian Temple argues that it is against this intellectual background that the Apocalypse of Paul ought to be understood. This book will be of interest to experts and students in Gnosticism, Valentinianism, early Christianity, Coptic and biblical literature, and Pauline studies.