Why Gods Should Matter in Social Science (Chronicle of Higher Education via the Arts and Letters Daily)

By RODNEY STARK

If it is hard to believe that conceptions of the Gods are ignored in most recently written histories, it is harder yet to understand why Gods were long ago banished from the social-scientific study of religion. But that is precisely why I have devoted two volumes to demonstrating the crucial role of the Gods in shaping history and civilization, and to resurrecting and reformulating a sociology of Gods.

[...]

Unconscious divine essences are unable to issue commandments or make moral judgments. Thus, conceptions of the supernatural are irrelevant to the moral order unless they are beings --�things having consciousness and desires. Put another way, only beings can desire moral conformity. Even that is not sufficient. Gods can lend sanctions to the moral order only if they are concerned about, informed about, and act on behalf of humans. Moreover, to promote virtue among humans, Gods must be virtuous --�they must favor good over evil. Finally, Gods will be effective in sustaining moral precepts, the greater their scope --�that is, the greater the diversity of their powers and the range of their influence. All-powerful, all-seeing Gods ruling the entire universe are the ultimate deterrent.

Two conclusions follow from this discussion. First, the effects of religiousness on individual morality are contingent on images of Gods as conscious, morally concerned beings; religiousness based on impersonal or amoral Gods will not influence moral choices. Second, participation in religious rites and rituals will have little or no independent effect on morality.

[...]

So then, let us finally be done with the claim that religion is all about ritual. Gods are the fundamental feature of religions. That holds even for Godless religions, their lack of Gods explaining the inability of such faiths to attract substantial followings. Moreover, it was not the "wisdom of the East" that gave rise to science, nor did Zen meditation turn people's hearts against slavery. By the same token, science was not the work of Western secularists or even deists; it was entirely the work of devout believers in an active, conscious, creator God. And it was faith in the goodness of that same God and in the mission of Jesus that led other devout Christians to end slavery, first in medieval Europe and then again in the New World.

In those ways at least, Western civilization really was God-given.

Rodney Stark is a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington. This article is adapted from For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, to be published this month by Princeton University Press. Copyright � 2003 by Rodney Stark.

Doctoral candidate: Jesus was 'gay' (WorldNetDaily via Protocols)
Posted: May 28, 2003
5:00 p.m. Eastern


� 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

A doctoral candidate in Australia was paid $51,000 in public funds to research Jesus' sexuality, declaring unequivocally that the founder of Christianity was homosexual.

According to a report in the Adelaide Advertiser, Rollan McCleary, who himself is homosexual, earned $17,000 a year for three years to work on his thesis on homosexual spirituality. The grant came from the University of Queensland.

McCleary will be awarded his doctorate tomorrow and in the future hopes to make "gay spirituality" a separate academic discipline.

[�]

According to the Advertiser, he claims Jesus' astrological chart, clues in the Scriptures to which churches had been blind and accurate biblical translations all played a part in his conclusions.

[�]

McCleary says he is an Anglican and is described by the Advertiser as a "qualified reader of astrological charts."

1900 - Birth of Nelson Glueck, American Jewish archaeologist. Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem between 1932 and 1947, he explored and dated over one-thousand ancient sites in Palestine and the Near East.

What Is Kabbalah, Anyway? (Slate)
By Ed Finn
Posted Monday, June 2, 2003, at 1:39 PM PT

[�]

Kabbalists have been an accepted part of Jewish culture since the 12th century. Though their mystical beliefs, which focused on the individual's direct communion with God through solitary study, sometimes set them apart from their mainstream coreligionists, many Kabbalists were teachers and judges highly respected by all Jews. The emphasis on secret knowledge and mysticism have also long endeared the study of Kabbalah to occultists of other persuasions, kicking off a Kabbalist fad among gentiles in Renaissance Europe�and giving us words like "cabal." In the United States, Kabbalism made a comeback in the '60s, when it was championed by Philip Berg, an American former rabbi who began studying Kabbalah on a visit to Israel in 1962.

Under Berg's leadership, Kabbalah in America has greatly expanded, spawning centers around the country and recruiting celebrity faithful like Madonna and Monica Lewinsky. Berg's version of Kabbalah dispenses with the traditional requirements of an Orthodox lifestyle and the study of ancient texts. Where traditional Kabbalah emphasizes mysticism as a part of devoted Judaism, Berg's new movement focuses on personal improvement and spiritual happiness, targeted to "people of all faiths and no faiths." Berg's centers draw big crowds for meditation, classes, and philosophical study, and his Kabbalah portal offers Kabbalah 101, a class that takes the "once arcane wisdom of Kabbalah and offers it up as [a] user friendly, accessible, self-study program," for $19.95.

How does this new Kabbalah stack up against the old? Like traditionalists, Berg presents Kabbalah as a way to perceive the inherent order of the universe, the "unseen spiritual laws that govern our lives." The difference is that he simplifies these lessons to make them easily accessible; rather than requiring devotees to learn Hebrew, he publicizes his interpretations of ancient Kabbalist texts nationally in books and speaking engagements. Traditional scholars of the field are careful not to slam the new centers too hard, but the experts do argue that Madonna's new-age spiritualism has little in common with the traditional scholarly mysticism of Jewish Kabbalah.

"In Iraq, reverence for ancient tomb of a Jewish prophet" (Christian Science Monitor)

A Shiite Muslim worships at the tomb of Ezekiel, harking back to Iraq's shared heritage.

By Peter Ford

The bearded worshiper moved slowly round the shrine in his bare feet, uttering Muslim prayers and pausing every few steps to bend his head and kiss the golden cloth that covered the holy tomb.

The dome above him, though, bore the painted floral traces of a very un-Islamic past. And the script running around the walls also bore no relation to the flowing Arabic calligraphy that decorates most mosques in the Middle East.

It was in Hebrew. The body lying in the tomb that this devout Muslim was venerating is that of the prophet Ezekiel. And until just 50 years ago, the building sheltering it - first recorded by a 12th century Jewish pilgrim - was a synagogue.

[...]

"Scholars Who Blog
The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics"
(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

By DAVID GLENN

Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?

[�]

Will the practice of blogging become near-universal in academe? Or is it, as the Invisible Adjunct sometimes imagines, "a temporary trend that will run its course"? Mr. Balkin notes that blogging, like many other phenomena on the World Wide Web, is organized according to a power law. That is, the most popular nodes, like Instapundit, tend to have 10 times more readers than blogs on the next tier, who in turn have 10 times more readers than the third tier. "Is that distribution going to stay fixed?" he asks. "The answer is that we don't know how fluid this economy will be. I would be amazed if in two years' time you went to look at the list of most popular blogs, that the list will be the same -- but it will probably still be organized as a power law."

[�]

RB 2003 T.110-2 (pp. 167-177)

Claudine CAVALIER
Centre Paul-Albert F�vrier
UMR 6125 Textes et documents de la M�diterran�e antique et m�di�vale
MMSH, 5 Rue du Ch�teau-de-l'Horloge
BP 647
13094 Aix-en-Provence cedex 2
cavalierclau@wanadoo.fr
"Le "colophone' d�Esther"

The last verse of the Greek book of Esther in his most widespread form, traditionally called the �Colophon� of Esther, is of a particular interest. It relates the sending, by a priest and his son of a �Letter of the Phrurai�, from Palestine where it has been translated, to Egypt, under the reign of one Ptolemy. Is it a documentary text, giving reliable information on the history of the Greek book of Esther? The article tries to demonstrate that, on the contrary, it is a purely literary text, staging a symbolic history of the feast of Purim.

RB 2003 T.110-2 (pp. 178-196)

Christian GRAPPE
GDRI - Facult� de Th�ologie Protestante
Universit� Marc Bloch
F-67084 STRASBOURG
FRANCE
J�sus exorciste � la lumi�re des pratiques et des attentes de son temps.

Several Jewish documents from the time of Jesus can shed light on his practice as an exorcist. Some of them confirm that casting out demons had an eschatological purport, in the sense that they point to the emergence of the Kingdom of God. Other texts shed light on Jesus being acknowledged as the Son of David because of his exorcist activity, or they supply us with interesting parallels to this practice as it is described in the synoptic gospels.

RB 2003 T.110-2 (pp. 222-248)

Alessandro FALCETTA
Via Croce Rossa, 6
60027 OSIMO (AN)
ITALY
afalcetta@yahoo.com
The Logion of Matthew 11:5-6 par. from Qumran to Abgar

This article develops a proposal made by James Rendel Harris in his testimony studies. I consider the logion of Matthew 11:5-6 as belonging to a tradition which is attested in Jewish literature and continues with the Fathers. The texts taken into account are the Synoptics, 4QMessianic Apocalypse, 11QMelchizedek, Justin's First Apology and Dialogue with Trypho, Irenaeus' Adversus Haereses, the Slavonic addition after Flavius Josephus' Jewish War 1.369, and Abgar's letter to Jesus in The Teaching of Addai. A quick reference is made to Cicero's Laelius de Amicitia. This tradition is reconstructed by employing the source detecting criteria of testimony research. The main conclusions are two. Firstly, the logion is one stage of the life of a literary topos, the healings of the messiah, which crosses chronological and geographical barriers. Secondly, the hypothesis of the use of written testimony collections, though not enough to account for all the literary phenomena considered, is a powerful tool of research.


RB 2003 T.110-2 (pp. 249-256)

Chaim BEN-DAVID
Jordan Valley Academic College
Identifying Aia and Tharais to the east of the Dead Sea

On the edge of the surviving section of the Madaba Map, east of the Dead Sea, two villages are indicated, �Aia and Tharais. The sites are not mentioned in the Bible, have no connection with early Christianity and do not appear in any other historical sources. We suggest that they were marked on the Madaba map because they are located on the main Roman-Byzantine ascents that led up eastward from the Dead Sea to The Moabite plateau. Aia in the present-day village of Ai is at the top of the well-built known Roman road that ascends from the Zoar area to the Moabite plateau. We propose identifying Tharais with a site known as Medinat ar-Ras or it�s near vicinity. This is based on the discovery of a well-built Roman road ascending from Zoar directly eastwards to a height of 1300 meters over an aerial distance of 8 km.

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Vol. 13 No. 1 (April 2002)

The Testament of Abraham: Which Came First-Recension A or Recension B?
Jared W. Ludlow
Greeks, Eygptians and Jews in the Fragments of Artapanus
Erkki Koskenniemi
The Battle for Isaac: Exploring the Composition and Function of the Aqedah in the Book of Jubilees
Leroy Andrew Huizenga
Purity and Impurity i the Book of Jubilees
Liora Ravid

LEO DEPUYDT, The Date of Death of Jesus of Nazareth

"A blue-capped barbarian untangles a speech problem" (Christian Science Monitor)
By Edward Ordman

[...]

n 1986 I lectured in China, in Jinan and Shanghai. I came back very sympathetic to the problems of Chinese students who had tried to learn English in a country where it had not been taught for many years. That sympathy, and my very few words of spoken Chinese, led me to try to help some of the Chinese computer-science students at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. One requirement for a master's degree in computer science here is the delivery of a seminar in acceptable oral English.

[...]

And then I met XuXin. He was invited to come and speak by the university's Jewish Studies program. Professor Xu teaches English in China, and his friendship with an American Fulbright scholar teaching in China had led him to put together book published in the United States as "Legends of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng" (with Beverly Friend, KTAV Publishing, 1995).

The book contains stories of a group of Jews who arrived in China via the Silk Road about AD 900. They explained to the first emperor of the Sung Dynasty that there was a war in their homeland; it was no longer a good place to live. Could they raise their families in China?

After some discussions I won't recount here (I recommend the book), the emperor agreed that the Jews could settle in China on two conditions: They had to adopt Chinese names, and they could not prohibit their children from intermarrying. (Someone had told him what had happened once before, in Egypt.)

The Jews thrived in Kaifeng. A cemetery there has Hebrew inscriptions dating from the 900s to the 1900s. They were first noticed by Westerners in the 1600s, when Christian missionaries reported the existence of Chinese Jews to the Vatican.

There was a great controversy in Europe at the time: How accurately had the old Bible texts been copied, over the centuries? The Jews had arrived in Kaifeng with a handwritten Torah (the first five books of the Bible), and it had been hand copied, as it wore out, for 700 years, without a chance to check it against another copy. The Vatican sent an expert to China to compare the Kaifeng Torah to Torah scrolls in Europe - and found it agreed, letter for letter!

"Baghdad's Baptizers
Revering John the Baptist, these Iraqis sustain an ancient religion" (USNews.com)

[...]

Source of life. With John the Baptist as the Mandeans' most important teacher, baptism is, unsurprisingly, their most important rite. (The name Sabaean Mandean means one who is baptized and has knowledge of God.) Religious leaders must wash themselves three times in water to purify the body and soul before performing any religious rites. Weddings are also conducted almost entirely submerged in water. And followers must participate in several baptisms a year, usually in running water, which reflects their belief that living water is the source of life.

When they pray, Mandeans face north, using the North Star to orient themselves. This way, they believe they are facing God and the forces of light. Many of their beliefs center on purity, both in spirit and body. Religious leaders must marry only virgins and must be free from any kind of disease. Before a leader assumes the church's top position, other leaders trace his family history back seven generations to ensure his history is pure.

For the Mandeans in Baghdad today, life is still full of uncertainty. The annual Golden Day of Baptism celebration usually draws three times the number of people as this year, but gas shortages and security fears kept many away. And there are new concerns. Many are unsure whether Iraq's new government will carve out a place for them. "We are now getting afraid because maybe Islamic fanatics will take power," says Sheik Majid. "Maybe they will make us close this temple." Even after some two millenniums, their faith is carried on a day at a time.