Showing papers in "Harvard Theological Review in 2000"

Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses

Abstract: Good historical fiction reveals not only the realities of a particular epoch, but also its cultural attitudes. An excellent example is Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, which succeeds in disclosing the nature of Russian anti-semitism by artfully weaving together enduring themes of anti-Jewish Christian mythology—the blood libel and accusations of ritual murder—to illustrate the fabric of Jewish life in early modern Russia. Perhaps almost unnoticed in his work, however, are references to the myth of Jewish male menses. Consider the following passages from The Fixer, in which the Jewish defendant, Yakov Bok, is confronted by this bizarre contention:“You saw the blood?” the Prosecuting Attorney said sarcastically. “Did that have some religious meaning to you as a Jew? Do you know that in the Middle Ages Jewish men were said to menstruate?” Yakov looked at him in surprise and fright. “I don't know anything about that, your honor, although I don't see how it could be.”

“Religion” as the Cipher for Identity: The Cases of Emperor Julian, Libanius, and Gregory Nazianzus

Abstract: In this paper I shall explore how religion functioned as a signifier of identity for Emperor Julian, his friend and teacher, Libanius, and his jealous enemy, Gregory Nazianzus, during the bewildering period of Julian's short reign and sudden death. However, before discussing each man's case, it will be useful to clarify the conceptual boundaries of the discussion. Because the term “religion,” as used in the academic world, is problematic for analyzing fourth-century culture, it is first necessary to isolate the concept of religion from the process of universalization. Drawing on the analyses of several post-colonialist theorists, I shall show why the term requires this disengagement, and why its meaning is best understood in light of the complications of specific historical circumstances. Once this issue has been broached, I shall introduce a theoretical basis for viewing “culture” as a commodity that was used by Christianity and pagan religions from 314–365, when, for the most part, both sides enjoyed a rest from institutional persecution. shall also discuss how the concepts of religion and learning were brokered as cultural commodities by these same social groups. Having established this theoretical framework as the basis of my analysis, I shall turn to the investigation of what religion is for Julian, Libanius, and Gregory Nazianzus, how it fits into their own self-image, and what role each envisions for religion as corporate identity for civilized people of the oikoumene.

Rabbinic Universalism in the Second and Third Centuries

Abstract: In the eye of a protracted political storm, the rabbinic sages of the first centuries of the common era preserved and nurtured their Jewish heritage. This was not a univocal heritage, but one of significant diversity. Although these rabbis were fully aware of the divisiveness that had plagued Jewish religious attitudes over the centuries, they turned debate and dissent into their very trademark. Whether in matters legal, ethical, or theological, differing and even contradictory opinions were the norm. A natural result of this rabbinic posture is that the entire rabbinic corpus is anthological. We do not possess individual works of the rabbis, great as they might have been. We have instead catenae or collections of statements. Sometimes they represent real conversations between sages, but other times they reflect an editorial juxtaposition of opposing views. These characteristics of rabbinic literature create a formidable challenge for those who wish to treat rabbinic thought systematically.

The Disorder of Books: Priscillian's Canonical Defense of Apocrypha

Abstract: Heresy and Apocrypha Historians of ancient Christianity derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that Athanasius of Alexandria, the fervent architect of Nicene Christianity, should also be the first known ecclesiastical authority to "list precisely the twenty-seven books that eventually formed the generally accepted canon of the New Testament.''l This intersection of canon and creed abets the notion that Christianity matured and solidified in the latter half of the fourth century;2 henceforth heresy and

“He who sits in the heavens laughs”: Recovering Animal Theology in the Abrahamic Traditions

Abstract: When I wandered into the “vast ocean of the Talmud” a decade or so ago, unaware of the warning within the same texts that Gentiles who undertake the study of Jewish sacred literature should be put to death, I finally found what I had been seeking for years. Here at last was a glimpse of God's personality–His likes and dislikes, His idiosyncracies, His religious observances. To my delight, I also dis-covered in the tractate 'Abodah Zarah the answer to another mystery. What does God do all day?

Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Greeks and Romans

Abstract: In his influential work, Kyrios Christos, Wilhelm Bousset confessed that he had vacillated and was still vacillating on the question of whether the creation of the title υἱoς θɛo⋯ (“Son of God”) as an epithet for Jesus ought to be attributed to the earliest community of his followers in Palestine. He tentatively took the position that the oldest community of followers of Jesus described him as the παῖς θɛo⋯ (“Servant of God”) in a messianic interpretation of the servant-poems of Second Isaiah. This epithet, he thought, was in considerable tension with the notion of Jesus as the Son of God, making it unlikely that both epithets originated in the same context. He argued that the statement of the divine voice in the scenes of baptism and transfiguration, “You are my Son,” is a tradition that circulated in the earliest community but that this address is a far cry from the title “Son of God.” He was thus inclined to conclude that this title originated “on Greek ground, in the Greek language.” He argued that the confession of Jesus as the Son of God by the Gentile centurion in Mark 15:39 cannot be understood as a recognition of Jesus as the Jewish messiah. Rather, “Son of God” was the formula chosen by the evangelist to express the identity of Jesus Christ for the faith of the Gentile Christian community.

Bodies and Bo(a)rders: Emerging Fictions of Identity in Late Antiquity*

Abstract: In the above passage, Anne Kaplan develops the notion of imagined communities as those "narratives and discourses that signify a sense of 'nationness."'2 This perspective, she contends, enables us to read against the grain of these dominant Elctions of identity.3 Since every story is predicated upon selection and exclusion, the notion of "nation as narration" encourages us to consider those marginalized or rejected by the narrative in the process of creating any given imagined community. Whose story is told, from whose perspective, who is silenced, and who is moved off-stage in order to tell it? Despite the powerful institutions irough which dominant stories are main-

Religion: A Contested Site in Theology and the Study of Religion

Abstract: I first became acquainted with Richard Niebuhr's scholarship and thought in a German graduate seminar on Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch. Niebuhr's book, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, was a required text for the course and was regarded as the most significant study on Schleiermacher. My interest in Karl Rahner's theology had led me to go to Germany for doctoral studies. Once there, I discovered that much of what I had admired in Rahner had already been anticipated a century and a half earlier in Schleiermacher's work. Professor Niebuhr's study on Schleiermacher was the source of this insight. It influenced my decision later to translate into English Schleiermacher's On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lucke. My topic for this article, the theological retrieval of the category of religion, is obviously suggested by Niebuhr's study of Schleiermacher, which sought to overcome the dichotomies associated with the category of religion by the then-dominant Neo-orthodoxy. This topic is also a theme of Niebuhr's ensuing book, Experiential Religion, in which he elaborated his own constructive account of religion and experience. In addition, this topic appropriately relates to Niebuhr's activity at Harvard University, where he helped establish a program of studies in religion within the Committee on the Study of Religion.

Paulinus of Nola, Courtyards, and Canthari *

Abstract: Some of the most elaborate and detailed descriptions of early Christian churches by a Latin writer are given by the nobleman Pontius Meropius Paulinus, who is usually known as Paulinus of Nola, after the city where he became bishop in the latter part of his life. He was born in Bordeaux around 353, of a wealthy family that had extensive properties in Aquitania, Gallia Narbonensis, Latium, and Campania. He received an education appropriate to his noble stature and became the prize student of Ausonius, also a native of Bordeaux, who was the tutor of the (future) emperor Gratian and a celebrated poet at court.

William James on an unseen order.

Abstract: In one of his earliest articles, William James says that the radical question of life is whether this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe: moral or unmoral, not moral or immoral. James is not asking whether the universe is good or bad, but whether i t is coordinate with the inner lives of persons, their desires, and their purposes. The sense of “moral” here is not restricted to ethics, but is the sense in which the moral sciences (comprising what we now call the humanities and the social sciences) were contrasted in the nineteenth century with the natural sciences.

In Search of Origen's Commentary on Philemon

Abstract: In a letter to Paula, in which he includes a list of Origen's Pauline commentaries, Jerome refers to a commentary on Philemon. There is no extant Greek manuscript tradition of this commentary by Origen. There are also no Greek fragments attributed to Origen in the catena commentary on Philemon edited by Cramer from the eleventh-century codex Parisinus Coislin 204. The Codex von der Goltz, which has provided helpful information on some of Origen's other Pauline commentaries, has only two brief, marginal references to Origen on the textual reading of Philemon at verses 10 and 12. The only known portion of Origen's commentary on Philemon that has been preserved is a fragment of his comments on Philemon 5 in Rufinus's Latin translation of In Apologeticum S. Pamphili.

No Ordinary Lament: Relecture and the Identity of the Distressed in Psalm 22*

Abstract: One of the most significant shifts in Psalms scholarship in recent years has been the emergence of a new interest in tracing how early religious communities interpreted this religious poetry within the context of an emerging scriptural canon. Whereas the form-critical studies that dominated much of the twentieth century concentrate on recovering the original Sitz im Leben (or “life setting”) of the liturgical compositions collected in the Psalter within Israel's religious cult, the recent scholarly turn emphasizes how these prayers and praises came to be reread in light of narratives and other material found elsewhere in the Bible. In point of fact, the earliest evidence for this practice of canonical relecture is preserved within the Book of Psalms itself, where historical superscriptions correlate a number of psalms with specific events in King David's life. Through the addition of superscriptions, the moving penitential prayer found in Psalm 51 becomes “A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba” (compare 2 Samuel 11-12), the lament of an individual surrounded by threatening enemies found in Psalm 3 becomes “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son” (compare 2 Samuel 15-18), and so forth.

Putting ‘Experience’ to the Test in Theological Reflection

Abstract: I discovered religious experience at Harvard Divinity School, in the Sperry lecture hall, sometime in the late 1980s. By that I do not mean to confess that I had a “first religious experience” there; nor do I mean that, somehow through some activity of my own, I laid hold novelly to the notion of “religious experience,” exposing something new to scholarship, some new direction, or some deep, fundamentally new insight. Rather, I mean quite simply that “religious experience,” the idea, the genre for thinking and reflection, came to my attention for the first time in that room in the late 1980s. In retrospect, I must say that it did so momentously, as I have not been able since to expunge it from my habits of thinking.

Thessalonica's Patron: Saint Demetrius or Emeterius?

Abstract: The publication of a revised version of James Skedros's doctoral dissertation on the origin and development of the cult of St. Demetrius at Thessalonica, the alleged site of his martyrdom, during the early and middle Byzantine periods is most welcome in itself, but it also invites renewed attention to an old problem. What was the origin of the cult of St. Demetrius at Thessalonica? It is the purpose ofthis article to offer a fresh solution to this problem.

Fiddling While Rome Burns: The Place of Academic Theology in the Study of Religion

Abstract: Theology, defined specifically as academic theology, belongs as a legitimate area of expertise in ie study of religion.lAcademic theologians, like historianss comparatists, philosophers, and social scientists of religion, should hold a rightful and honorable place as teachers and scholars in the discipline. Like other scholars of religion, academic theologians advance knowledge of religion. As intentional critics and makers of religious symbol systems and as critics of the wider cultures within which such systems flourish, academic theologians make a distinctives valuable contribution to teaching and to scholarship-in non-sectarian liberal education environments, as well as in seminaries and divinity schools. In this essay I seek to represent the contribution of academic theology to private undergraduate institutions of liberal education in particular. First, however, some more general remarks are in order. Contention over whether academic theology properly belongs to the study of religion arises out of longstanding debates over the status of the study of religion (as, for example, a distinct discipline), the precise nature of religious studies as a field, and the meanings of the concepts religion and academic theology. While addressing these wider questions is both necessary and useful to the continued growth and life of the discipline, it is unlikely that scholars will reach consensus on this issue once and for all. To quote Sherwin Nuland speaking to a different set of issues, "In the United States and democratic

Is Brueggemann Really a Pluralist

Abstract: One characteristic of Walter Brueggemann's recently published Theology of the Old Testament that distinguishes it from comparable studies is its author's explicit commitment to hermeneutical pluralism. Whereas the classic works of biblical theology located the enterprise within a univocally Christian framework, Brueggemann's massive and learned volume proposes a “contextual shift from hegemonic interpretation … toward a pluralistic interpretive context.” The transition is not an option but a necessity in a postmodern situation marked by “the disestablishment of the triumphalist church in the West” and the loss of “a consensus authority.” “No interpretive institution,” he writes, “ecclesial or academic, can any longer sustain a hegemonic mode of interpretation, so that our capacity for a magisterial or even a broadly based consensus about a pattern of interpretation will be hard to come by.” For Brueggemann, this loss is a gain, since “the [biblical] texts themselves witness to a plurality of testimonies concerning God and Israel's life with God.” The disintegration of consensus goes hand in hand with “the parallel disestablishment of the institutional vehicles of such interpretation” that have repressed awareness of the rich internal diversity of the Old Testament. In the absence of a hegemonic consensus, enforced by repressive and discriminatory institutions, “the testimony of Israel” will be able to recover its character “as a subversive protest and as an alternative act of vision that invites criticism and transformation.” For Brueggemann, the repressiveness and discrimination of the institutions is reflected in the dominance of the white males within them. In a situation of more diversity of race and gender, he repeatedly tells us, valid alternative visions will blossom.

Response to David Woods

Abstract: The origins of the cult of St. Demetrios are indeed obscure. The earliest indisputable evidence for the existence of the cult of St. Demetrios at Thessaloniki is the large five-aisle basilica built in honor of the martyr and located in the center of this important port city. Based upon archaeological and art historical evidence, the basilica can be dated to the last quarter of the fifth century. However, the written tradition of the cult of St. Demetrios, as preserved in various martyrdom accounts (whose dates remain problematic), places the saint's martyrdom at Thessaloniki during the persecution of Diocletian, that is, during the first decade of the fourth century, some one-hundred and seventy five years before the erection of the saint's basilica. To complicate matters even more, in the earliest surviving martyrologies dating from the fourth and fifth centuries, there is no mention of a martyr Demetrios who was martyred or venerated at Thessaloniki. Given such lack of historical evidence, most scholars, including David Woods, whose article appears in the pages of this journal, have argued that St. Demetrios of Thessaloniki is a fictitious saint and that the origin of his veneration at Thessaloniki is not to be found in a historical individual who was martyred under Diocletian at Thessaloniki, but rather must be sought elsewhere.

A Note on the Variant Form of the Shema in the Writings of Justin Martyr

Abstract: In three places in the extant works of Justin Martyr, Justin quotes the Shema (Deut 6:4–5) in a variant form found in no known Jewish witness to this common Jewish liturgical prayer. In place of the familiar tripartite formula “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength,” Justin preserves the bipartite formula “with all your heart and with all your strength” (⋯ξ ὃλης τ⋯ς καρíας σου καì ⋯ξ ὃλης τ⋯ς ἰσχύος σου). William L. Petersen, in several publications, has suggested that Justin may preserve “the oldest recoverable version of the Shema, a version which deviates from that found in either the present Hebrew Bible (MT or LXX) or the New Testament.” Since Justin's variant form of the Shema occurs in three places in his own works as well as a few other early Christian sources, the bipartite formula cannot simply be a mistake but must preserve an authentic alternate tradition. But is it the “earliest recoverable version” as Petersen suggests? This assertion is problematic on two counts.