THE PHILADELPHIA SEMINAR ON CHRISTIAN ORIGINS will be meeting as usual on Friday evening at the SBL convention. Bob Kraft e-mails on the PSCO list:

Sorry for the delay of the notice. Some last minute details are still not in place, but we will meet, at 7:30 pm (not 7:00) in the Regency B room at the Loews Hotel (1200 Market -- #10 on the Conference Hotel map).

Here is the context for discussion, as laid out by the co-chairs:

The topic of the 43rd year of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins is "Redescribing the Holy Man: Theoretical Frameworks and Specific Applications." We envision this topic as providing a focus for an ongoing discussion about the analytical and explanatory possibilities of recent reassessments or developments of Peter Brown's Holy Man typology. When Peter Brown published his seminal essay, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity" (1971), he introduced an analytical concept immediately lauded by specialists in a number of academic subfields. In the decades since then this concept has been deployed to make sense of various figures and events in Late Antiquity and beyond across the range of religious traditions of the ancient Mediterranean basin. Whether Neoplatonic diadochai, Christian saints, Jewish rabbis, or the priests, healers, and prophets of the diverse local religious cultures of Late Antiquity, the methods and descriptions employed by modern scholars all speak of this shared imaginaire.

Recently, however, Anita Kolenkow and David Frankfurter have each independently suggested developments or refinements of the heuristic concept to focus more closely on the various social roles performed by ritual experts in their communities, grounding the general type in more specific sub-types and social dynamics, and thereby pushing the academic community to a new stage of theoretical reflection and critique. In order to generate an conversation throughout the year's sessions, it is our hope that each presenter will engage to some degree with David Frankfurter's essay, "Dynamics of Ritual Expertise In Antiquity and Beyond: Towards a New Taxonomy of 'Magicians.'" [in Mirecki, Paul and Marvin Meyer, eds. Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World. Brill, 2002. Pages 159-178.] as a starting point for their presentation. By doing so, we can take a second look at the Holy Persons who populated various areas of focus and examine the possibilities and constraints offered by this development from Peter Brown's typology. The question is whether the utility of the comparative taxon "Holy Man" to elucidate data can be increased by refining the concept and, in some cases, employing a more thoroughly comparative method (between traditions, between individuals, between time periods, and between cultures).

Co-Chairs:
T.J. Wellman (University of Pennsylvania) twellman@sas.upenn.edu
Harry Tolley (Univ. of Pennsylvania) tolleyhw@ccat.sas.upenn.edu

Details to follow. Hope to see you there!

Bob

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Robert A. Kraft, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
227 Logan Hall (Philadelphia PA 19104-6304); tel. 215 898-5827
kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/rak/kraft.html