Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Volume I

Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Volume I
Author: John Reeves
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 019102824X

Across the ancient and medieval literature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, one finds references to the antediluvian sage Enoch. Both the Book of the Watchers and the Astronomical Book were long known from their Ethiopic versions, which are preserved as part of Mashafa Henok Nabiy ('Book of Enoch the Prophet')—an Enochic compendium known in the West as 1 Enoch. Since the discovery of Aramaic fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, these books have attracted renewed attention as important sources for ancient Judaism. Among the results has been the recognition of the surprisingly long and varied tradition surrounding Enoch. Within 1 Enoch alone, for instance, we find evidence for intensive literary creativity. This volume provides a comprehensive set of core references for easy and accessible consultation. It shows that the rich afterlives of Enochic texts and traditions can be studied more thoroughly by scholars of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity as well as by scholars of late antique and medieval religions. Specialists in the Second Temple period-the era in which Enochic literature first appears-will be able to trace (or discount) the survival of Enochic motifs and mythemes within Jewish literary circles from late antiquity into the Middle Ages, thereby shedding light on the trajectories of Jewish apocalypticism and its possible intersections with Jewish mysticism. Students of Near Eastern esotericism and Hellenistic philosophies will have further data for exploring the origins of 'gnosticism' and its possible impact upon sectarian currents in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Those interested in the intellectual symbiosis among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle Ages-and especially in the transmission of the ancient sciences associated with Hermeticism (e.g., astrology, theurgy, divinatory techniques, alchemy, angelology, demonology)-will be able to view a chain of tradition reconstructed in its entirety for the first time in textual form. In the process, we hope to provide historians of religion with a new tool for assessing the intertextual relationships between different religious corpora and for understanding the intertwined histories of the major religious communities of the ancient and medieval Near East.

R.Z

R.Z
Author: William Thomas Lowndes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 992
Release: 1834
Genre: English literature
ISBN:

Remembering Paul

Remembering Paul
Author: Benjamin L. White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190669578

Who was Paul of Tarsus? Radical visionary of a new age? Gender-liberating progressive? Great defender of orthodoxy? In Remembering Paul, Benjamin L. White offers a critique of early Christian claims about the "real" Paul in the second century C.E.--a period in which apostolic memory was highly contested--and sets these ancient contests alongside their modern counterpart: attempts to rescue the "historical" Paul from his "canonical" entrapments. White charts the rise and fall of various narratives about Paul and argues that Christians of the second century had no access to the "real" Paul. Through the selection, combination, and interpretation of pieces of a diverse earlier layer of the Pauline tradition, Christians defended images of the Apostle that were important for forming collective identity.

Newton and the Origin of Civilization

Newton and the Origin of Civilization
Author: Jed Z. Buchwald
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691154783

Reveals the manner in which Newton strove for nearly half a century to rectify universal history by reading ancient texts through the lens of astronomy, and to create a tight theoretical system for interpreting the evolution of civilization on the basis of population dynamics

Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England

Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England
Author: Nicholas Keene
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351901540

The Bible is the single most influential text in Western culture, yet the history of biblical scholarship in early modern England has yet to be written. There have been many publications in the last quarter of a century on heterodoxy, particularly concentrating on the emergence of new sects in the mid-seventeenth century and the perceived onslaught on the clerical establishment by freethinkers and Deists in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century. However, the study of orthodoxy has languished far behind. This volume of complementary essays will be the first to embrace orthodox and heterodox treatments of scripture, and in the process question, challenge and redefine what historians mean when they use these terms. The collection will dispel the myth that a critical engagement with sacred texts was the preserve of radical figures: anti-scripturists, Quakers, Deists and freethinkers. For while the work of these people was significant, it formed only part of a far broader debate incorporating figures from across the theological spectrum engaging in a shared discourse. To explore this discourse, scholars have been drawn together from across the fields of history, theology and literary criticism. Areas of investigation include the inspiration, textual integrity and historicity of scriptural texts, the relative authority of canon and apocrypha, prophecy, the comparative merits of texts in different ancient languages, developing tools of critical scholarship, utopian and moral interpretations of scripture and how scholars read the Bible. Through a study of the interrelated themes of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, print culture and the public sphere, and the theory and practice of textual interpretation, our understanding of the histories of religion, theology, scholarship and reading in seventeenth-century England will be enhanced.

William Whiston

William Whiston
Author: James E. Force
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2002-06-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780521524889

A study of Sir Isaac Newton's successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.