Lecture on Qur'anic apocalyptic and the Aramaic Gospels tradition

LECTURE at the Middle East History and Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago:

Dr. Emran El Badawi

Thursday, May 19, 12:00–1:30, Pick 218
Stages of the Apocalypse in the Qur’ān and the Aramaic Gospels Traditions

(HT Abu 'l-Rayhan Al-Biruni.)

New book: Steven D. Fraade, Legal Fictions

NEW BOOK:

Steven D. Fraade, Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages (Brill)

Ancient Jewish writings combine interpretive narratives of Israel’s sacred history with legal prescriptions for a divinely ordered way of life. Two ancient Jewish societies have left us extensive textual corpora preserving interpenetrating legal and narrative interpretive teachings: the sectarian community of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the sage-disciple circles of the early Rabbis. This book comprises studies that explore specific aspects of the interplay of interpretative, narrative, and legal rhetoric with an eye to pedagogic function and social formation for each of these communities … read moreand for both of them in comparison. It addresses questions of how best to approach these writings for purposes of historical retrieval and reconstruction by recognizing the inseparability of literary-rhetorical textual analysis and a non-reductive historiography.

Aramaic DNA Project

ARAMAIC WATCH: There's an Aramaic DNA Project:

A. INTRODUCTION The Aramaic DNA Project hopes to bring together all Aramaic (also known as Modern or Neo-Aramaic) speaking people and people of Aramaic-speaking heritage of the world. For 3000 years, and despite unrelenting strife of every conceivable sort, the Aramaic language has steadfastly retained a continuous presence in the region known as the Fertile Crescent.

The people who retained a form of the Aramaic language as their mother tongue offer a tremendous opportunity to catch a glimpse many centuries, and perhaps even millennia, into the past. The testing of DNA, specifically one's mtDNA and Y-DNA, is ideally suited for discovering one’s deep ancestral roots. This is because mtDNA and Y-DNA remain more or less unchanged for thousands of years. If we wish to understand the origins of the Aramaic-speaking people, it is imperative to undertake this task now. The growing diasporic aspect of many, if not all, Aramaic-speaking communities is at the root of this urgency. If this project were not undertaken, or pursued with sufficient zeal, we may forever squander our ability to peer, with least obstruction, back to the dawn of our civilization.

The Aramaic DNA Project aims to answer questions of interest to Aramaic-speakers regarding their recent and distant origins. It will also delve into the relationships between the different Aramaic-speaking groups with ancestral origins from different geographical regions including, but by no means limited to: Diyarbakir, Hakkari, Harput, Mardin, Mosul, Salamas, Seert, Urfa, Urmia, Tur Abdin, and Zakho.

The Project, in remaining true to standard scientific practices, as well as FTDNA’s terms of agreement, will remain objective and has no affiliations whatsoever. We encourage all Aramaic-speaking people and people of Aramaic-speaking heritage to join our Project regardless of self-designation including, but not limited to: Aramaeans, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Ancient Syrians, and Syriacs. People of Aramaic-speaking heritage who have lost usage of the language due to assimilation are encouraged to join. All participants will be offered the option to identify by their preferred self-designation.

The Project is open to all religious affiliations and not limited to Christian communities. We welcome, with open hearts, Aramaic-speakers among the Jewish and Mandaean communities, and Aramaic-speakers from other religious affiliations. All Aramaic-speakers will be classified according to their self-designation into the appropriate haplogroup categories. We sincerely hope all Aramaic-speaking people tested at Family Tree DNA will consider participating in this very special endeavor. The administrators are more than happy to discuss any questions pertaining to the project. Please refer to our contact details above. Yours truly, Paul Givargidze Jean Fathi Nenos Birko

Thomas Verenna on the fake metal codices

FAKE METAL CODICES WATCH: Thomas Verenna has published an excellent article over at Bible and Interpretation about the metal codices and how they have been handled by the media and bibliobloggers:

Artifacts and the Media: Lead Codices and the Public Portrayal of History

More scandalous is the complete lack of journalistic integrity, honest research, and thorough fact-checking. These codices might never have been heard of if the authors of the reports for BBC and Fox News (among others) had just checked with the academic community before publishing the “find”. At the very least, the journalists might have used less authoritative language, expressed more caution, and exposed the controversy rather than simply stating, as if doing so made it fact, that these codices were “the earliest Christian texts” and that they held “early images of Jesus.”

As Tom concludes, "Perhaps blogging isn’t enough; but it is something."

Background here and just keep following those links.

BMCR reviews

BMCR REVIEWS:

Jordan D. Rosenblum, Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv, 223. ISBN 9780521195980. $85.00.

Reviewed by Matthew Kraus, University of Cincinnati (tthew.kraus@uc.edu)

Preview

Planning a dinner party for scholars of food, Classics and rabbinics would present a formidable challenge for any chef. Jordan Rosenblum assumes this task in Food and Identity in Rabbinic Judaism, a respectable attempt to serve fare both edible and satisfying to all. By examining the Tannaim's innovative adaptation of Jewish and non-Jewish customs, Rosenblum claims to develop a methodology for cross-cultural and trans-historical food studies. Rosenblum demonstrates how tannaitic texts establish a discrete rabbinic identity through the discursive construction of culinary and commensal practices. This essential thesis is not difficult to swallow, but it should be noted that the size of the portions vary. The rabbinics scholar has the most to digest, albeit abundantly seasoned with contemporary food theory. Classicists might enjoy the tastes, but will depart still hungry.

[...]


Anders-Christian Jacobsen, Jörg Ulrich, David Brakke (ed.), Critique and Apologetics: Jews, Christians, and Pagans in Antiquity. Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity 4. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009. Pp. 327. ISBN 9783631580110. $64.95.

Reviewed by Danielle Slootjes, Radboud University Nijmegen (d.slootjes@let.ru.nl)

The volume under review presents the results of a conference, held in 2007, which marked the final stages of a larger research project at the University of Aarhus in Denmark that had started in 2000, called ‘Jews, Christians and Pagans in Antiquity – Critique and Apologetics’. This project examined the dialogues and conflicts between religious groups in the period between circa 100 B.C. and A.D. 500 in order to acquire a deeper understanding of apologetic literature (whereby they also included those texts that traditionally might not have been regarded as apologetic). The project has taken three phases into account: the pre-Constantine epoch, the Constantinian revolution, and the post-Constantinian era. The thirteen contributions in the volume focus for the most part on issues that deal with the concept and genre of the apologetics, as well as the writings that can be connected to these three phases.

[...]

Lexicon news

LEXICON NEWS:

• First, Lane's multi-volume Arabic-English Lexicon is now available online at the Perseus Digital Library. I have the set of bound volumes on my bookshelf, but it will be handy to have this for reference when I'm away from my office. (Via Abu 'l-Rayhan Al-Biruni.)
  
  
• Second, a massive new dictionary of medieval Latin is being completed at Oxford University and is slated to be published online in 2014. Press release:

  Unique dictionary nears completion
  
  12 May 11
  
  A huge number of students ranging from linguists to those studying coins and family ancestry are benefiting from a 100 year project to compile the world’s most comprehensive dictionary of Medieval Latin.
  
  Work started on the unique Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources 50 years ago but experts began collecting material early in the 20th century.
  
  Now the initiative is nearing completion and Professor Tobias Reinhardt, Corpus Christi Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Oxford University is responsible for seeing it through.
  
  “It will be an achievement of international importance, serving as a primary and essential reference volume to a very wide range of scholars, students, and interested members of the public,” Professor Reinhardt, who is based in the Faculty of Classics says. “Bringing it to completion in the current difficult funding environment will be a symbol of the resilience of the humanities in Britain.”
  
  The dictionary has drawn on the largest collection of literary and epigraphic sources of any similar project. Words used in Classical Latin and Late Latin – up to AD 600 – and the Middle Ages – from the sixth century to the 16th - are included. It details headwords – under which related entries appear – definitions, quotations and each word’s history. It follows the style of the Oxford English Dictionary.
  
  It is being used by students of philosophy, music, those studying names and even topography as well as language and literature students
  
  Entries range from words used in high literature to those common in day to day speech, many of which did not appear in text for hundreds of years.
  
  The dictionary also incorporates words from Greek, Celtic, Semitic, Germanic and Romance languages. “It is being used by students of philosophy, music, those studying names and even topography as well as language and literature students,” Professor Reinhardt adds.
  
  The dictionary is due be published fully online in 2014, a target he is confident will be met. The dictionary, which is a British Academy research project as well as a research project in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford, has recently won $800,000 from the Packard Humanities Institute enabling its completion.
  
  “People will be able to search for words online when they have an internet connection, using their iPhones and of course laptops. As a medieval Latin dictionary it is the leading publication in its field.”

Footnote

PROFESSORS OF TALMUD are the central characters in the indie film Footnote:

CANNES REVIEW | “Footnote” Finds the Comedy in a Talmudic Feud

by Eric Kohn (Updated 23 hours, 31 minutes ago) [indiewire.com]

Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar’s last feature, the Oscar-nominated “Beaufort,” was a tense war movie about the 2000 South Lebanon conflict. His latest effort, “Footnote,” involves a much more personal war, in which the opposing sides are a father and his grown son. In Cedar’s dark comic fable, bookish eccentrics pit their egos against each other on a shrewdly composed battlefield where the only potential casualty is self-esteem.

Cedar’s screenplay follows a tale two of Shkolniks: The aging Eliezer (Israeli comic Shlomo Bar Aba), a veteran Talmud professor at Hebrew University, and his middle-aged son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), a more established researcher in the same field. From the first scene, Eliezer sulks in his son’s shadow, as the younger Skolnick accepts an award while his father watches from the audience. Cedar quickly explains the context with an introductory bit that surveys both of their backgrounds, aided by words on the screen and a deadpan voiceover seemingly imported from Woody Allenville. Like Allen’s best creations, Eliezer and Uriel harbor neuroses that run deep.

[...]

Magdala Synagogue Gala

MAGDALA SYNAGOGUE GALA:

Religious, political luminaries gather to raise money for Magdala Center in Israel

By Electa Draper
The Denver Post
Posted: 05/12/2011 05:21:17 PM MDT

A Holy Land archaeological discovery will bring together some of Denver's biggest names in politics and religion for a Galilee Gala June 8 at The Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

A first-century synagogue, uncovered in 2009 in Magdala — Mary Magdalene's hometown in the region of Galilee — holds the oldest known depiction in stone of a menorah.

Jesus lived most of his life, conducted most of his ministry and performed most of his miracles in the region of Galilee. And so the area was chosen by the Legionaries of Christ, a Catholic order of priests seeking to promote Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, as the site for a $100 million building project.

Plans encompass a 300-bed hotel, educational center dedicated to Jesus called "Walk With Me," and, acknowledging the Mary Magdalene connection, a cultural center for women.

The project began purchasing land in Magdala in 2006, eventually acquiring more than 20 acres on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

As providence would have it, project spokesman Father Eamon Kelly said, workers soon discovered, in the very footprint set aside for an ecumenical chapel for Christians, a 2,000-year-old Jewish place of worship.

[...]

This is not "the most important archaeological discovery ever related to the 2nd Temple," and I kind of doubt that that's exactly what the IAA said, but it is an important site and I wish them well in their fundraising.

Background here.

Latest on the fake metal codices

FAKE METAL CODICES WATCH: Another article in a small local press: Are rusty books Christ's chronicle? by Sholeh Patrick in the Coeur d'Alene Press. The piece summarizes the misinformation already circulated by the media. I have written to the author. We'll see if anything comes of that.

Background here.

NT job at University of Edinburgh

JOB AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY:

Divinity: Lecturer in New Testament and Christian Origins

We are seeking an outstanding researcher/lecturer to join the Biblical Studies subject area in the School of Divinity (New College). The candidate can be a specialist in any area of NT study, but applicants whose field is Pauline studies or the use of the Old Testament in the New are particularly encouraged to apply.

The successful candidate will be expected to engage actively in research, teaching and administration and play a full part in the collegiate life of the Biblical Studies subject area and the School of Divinity.

Candidates are expected to have a relevant doctoral degree, and to have demonstrable achievements in research, publication, and teaching. The School has plans to develop PGT programmes delivered via distance learning, experience and/or an interest in this area would be advantageous.

The post is available from 1st September 2011, however the start date is negotiable.

The deadline is 29 June. Follow the link for full details.

UPDATE: Bad link now fixed. Sorry about that!

Blogger down

BLOGGER WAS DOWN all day, so I and many others had an enforced blogging fast. Glad to be getting back to it.

UPDATE: I did put up a post on Thursday, but the Blogger debacle seems to have eaten it. They say deleted posts will come back. We'll see.

Isaac Casaubon as a Hebraist

BMCR BOOK REVIEW on the 16th/17th-century Christian Classicist and Hebraist Isaac Casaubon:

Anthony Grafton, Joanna Weinberg, "I have always loved the holy tongue": Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. x, 380. ISBN 9780674048409. $35.00.

Reviewed by Pieter W. van der Horst, Utrecht, The Netherlands (pwvdh@xs4all.nl)

This is an extraordinary book about Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), a man who is well known for his fine editions of and commentaries on classical Greek and Latin authors (Theophrastus, Strabo, Diogenes Laertius, Persius, among others). What is little known, however, and what is revealed in this book by Grafton and Weinberg, is that, apart from his work as a classical philologist, Casaubon was also an ardent student of ancient and medieval Jewish literature in Hebrew and Aramaic. The evidence for this is found not so much in his published work as in the copious marginal notes Casaubon jotted down in the books he read, in his separate notebooks, in his diary, in his many letters, and in other material most of which is unpublished. ...

The longest chapter of the book (almost 70 pages) deals with the conflict between Casaubon and Baronio, a conflict that dominated the last decade of his life. Between 1588 and 1607, cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538-1607) had published his multivolume work Annales Ecclesiastici, in which he tried to demonstrate on historical grounds that the Roman Catholic Church was exactly the kind of institution that Jesus had wanted to found. Casaubon wrote a devastating review that expanded into a manuscript of more than 800 pages (it was unfinished at his death but was published posthumously as De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI). In it he concentrated on the historical circumstances of the life of Jesus, whom he saw as a pious Jew, and he gloatingly and at great length exposed the cardinal’s glaring lack of knowledge of Jewish life and thought in first-century Palestine. Here Casaubon demonstrated that, besides being a classicist, he was also a Judaist, whose aim it was to use his Judaic knowledge for as exact as possible a historical reconstruction of the origins of Christianity. That gave him the opportunity to argue that “Baronio’s failings as a Hebraist mattered as much as his defects as a Hellenist, and that both made it impossible for him to write a scholarly study of the early church” (183). For all his hidden Calvinist agenda, Casaubon shows himself here to be a formidable philologist.

[...]

Isaac Casaubon also established that the Hermetic corpus consisted of late (i.e., Hellenistic-era) compositions and likewise reinforced the earlier conclusion by Johannes Opsopoeus that the Sibylline Oracles were Hellenistic. Earlier posts on Casaubon are here and here.

Polish translations of Jewish texts

TRANSLATIONS of Torah, Talmud excerpts, and other Jewish texts into Polish:

Gained In Translation: Sacred Texts For Poles

Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Steve Lipman (The Jewish Week)

A Croatian-born college student in Prague in the late 1980s, Sacha Pecaric became interested in traditional Judaism, but no Jewish texts were available in Serbo-Croatian or Czech. He turned to English and Hebrew books.

As an Orthodox rabbi doing outreach to Krakow’s small Jewish community in the first decade of this century, he found few Jewish texts in Polish. Again, he used English and Hebrew.

Rabbi Pecaric, now 45 and a resident of Teaneck, decided to fill the literary-linguistic void. The rabbi, who moved to New Jersey with his wife Ksenija, an artist, and two young sons, in 2005, has written, edited and translated some 30 classical Jewish texts in Polish during the last decade.

[...]

His most ambitious project was his translation of the Talmud (chapters from the often-studied tractates of Berachot, Kiddushin and Baba Kama), which includes the standard Aramaic text as well as a translation, ArtScroll-style explanations, and a commentary in the guise of a teacher-student dialogue.

[...]

Apocryphal gospels in the Blogosphere

APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS in the Blogosphere:

Reports on the Secret Mark Symposium at York University:

Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 1 (Ryan D. Wettlaufer)
Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 2 (Ryan D. Wettlaufer, to be continued)
Thoughts on the Secret Gospel of Mark Conference (Sarah Veale)
Secret Mark in Toronto ("the_cave")
Secret Mark Symposium: A Student’s View (Calogero A. Miceli)

It seems there is no consensus on whether Secret Mark is a forgery.

Alin Suciu has identified a Coptic fragment of the Garshuni Lament of the Virgin: The Identity of a Coptic Apocryphal Fragment in the British Library (Layton no. 100).

UPDATE: Also, April DeConick has a post on Digital images of Nag Hammadi collection. The images include the apocryphal gospels in the Nag Hammadi library. Last summer I linked to the same site for an image of some Psalms material inscribed on a cave wall.

UPDATE: Tony Burke, the organizer of the Secret Mark symposium, has posted his own account at Apocryphicity:

Reflections on the Secret Mark Symposium, part 1
Reflections on the Secret Mark Symposium, part 2

Also, there's more on the images of those Nag Hammadi codices at AWOL.

UPDATE (11 May): Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 3 (Ryan Wettlaufer)

Publisher's Weekly on AAR/SBL reunion

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION AND THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE ARE TOGETHER AGAIN and Publisher's Weekly is delighted.

For religion publishers who do academic publishing, the November 19–22 concurrent meetings this year in San Francisco of two major professional groups of religion scholars is a felicitous remarriage after an expensive three-year divorce.

Background here.

Robert Cargill on Simcha's nails

ROBERT CARGILL ON SIMCHA'S NAILS: A Critique of Simcha Jacobovici’s Secrets of Christianity: Nails of the Cross (Bible and Interpretation).

Simcha makes two bold claims to say the least: the first is that the lost nails of Jesus’ crucifixion have been recovered, and the second is an implicit assertion that the IAA covered it up. Unfortunately for Simcha, his theory has a problem, and its name is Legion, for they are many. Any one of these problems renders Simcha’s theory impossible, and their aggregate renders the theory preposterous.

Background here.

Davila on "The Golb Affair"

"THE GOLB AFFAIR," my article covering the story of Raphael Golb's sock puppetry, his identity-theft trial, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, has been published in Religion in the News.

Jim Caviezel interview on The Passion of the Christ

JIM CAVIEZEL is interviewed by Scott Ross about playing the role of Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ:


This via an article by Aisling Redican in IrishCentral.com: Actor rejected from Hollywood for playing Jesus in Gibson’s ‘The Passion’ - VIDEO. Excerpt:

A lot of the criticism the film garnered revolved around the portrayal of Jews as being principally responsible for Christ's death. Caviezel responded to the accusations saying "we are all culpable in the death of Christ. My sins, your sins put Him on that cross. I want my Jewish brothers to see this film. I want people in my own faith who think it's anti-Semitic to see this film."

Though Caviezel praises the film for its portrayal of the last moments in Christ's life, he admits that it has hindered his career in many respects. Despite the negative effects, he asserts that he would do it again if given the chance: "This is what I feel. I believe I was called to play this role...I'm still an actor. I'll always be one, whether I get another job or not."

Sands, Invention of the Jewish People, reviewed in Al Ahram

SHLOMO SAND'S THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE gets a long cheerleading review by Gamal Nkrumah in Al Ahram:

Scriptural non-sequitur
The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand. Translated by Yael Lotan (2009). Verso, London

Complacency and political convenience have conspired to blur the vision of Israeli historians and biblical scholars to gross factual errors unearthed by contemporary archaeology since the inception of the Zionist state. Israel is today repeating that folly. The Zionist entity is continually reinventing the wheel. Its politicians and academicians, historians and archaeologists monotonously sound like a scratched gramophone when they insist that the Jews of the world are simultaneously a race, an ethnicity and a religious community.

In harking about exile and return they do not exude a positive message about either Zionism or Judaism. Their ideas are outdated and antiquated no matter how much high-tech they smear on the ultra-modern veneer. There is a paradox in hearing this from an Israeli academician.

[...]

That gives you a sense of the tone and the political orientation. Some critical reflection about aspects of the book (e.g., theories about the Khazars or the relevance of recent developments in genetics) would have been welcome as well. For earlier reviews, etc., some of which do better on the critical reflection front, go here and follow the links back.

Review of Manning, The Last Pharaohs, 305-30 BC

BOOK REVIEW:

Scholia Reviews ns 20 (2011) 8.

J. G. Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. xvi + 264, incl. 18 black-and- white illustrations. ISBN 978-0-691-14262- 3. UK£27.95. Further Details.

John Atkinson
School of Languages and Literatures, University of Cape Town

Manning, with numerous previous publications in the field of Ptolemaic studies to his credit, here plunges straight into the issues which he proposes to address, and dispenses with the customary historical survey of the Ptolemaic period. His brief historical introduction is entitled 'Egypt in the First Millennium BC’ (pp. 19-28), and picks up the story from the end of the New Kingdom, giving more space to Persian rule than to the period of Alexander and Ptolemy. This is appropriate as he identifies with the trend in scholarship over the last three decades to lay greater stress on Egyptian culture in the Ptolemaic era, and on Persian administrative practices (p. 2).

[...]