Christian Authors Research Articles

Olives and lighting in Dark Age Europe1

Within a religious milieu that gave little concern to imposing a shared material culture, early medieval Christian authorities sometimes obsessed over the procurement of olive oil for lighting fuel. This article traces the cultural and environmental forces that shaped that demand. By weaving together poetry, hagiography, and inscriptions, it first argues that artificial light itself was central to the creation of a Christian institutional identity, as it allowed the religion to supplant classical/pagan norms of public assembly, moving celebrations indoors and locating them in the crepuscular contexts of dawn, evening, and night. Clerics developed personal prestige through lights, using them to showcase reflective patronage and demonstrate a pious form of conspicuous consumption. The second part of the article then explains why Christian authorities went to great lengths to fuel their lamps with olive oil, despite availability of other combustibles. A praxis of nocturnal interiority, it argues, demanded a scale and use of artificial light that privileged olive oil’s chemical signature, including a long‐burning, smokeless flame.

Alegoryczna interpretacja historii Abrahama. Analiza III, IV i VI Homilii o Księdze Rodzaju Orygenesa

Origen was one of the most important thinkers of early Christianity. In his works on the Old and New Testament, he frequently employed allegorical interpretation. The purpose of this article is to analyze Origen’s Homilies III, IV and VI on Genesis. Allegorical interpretation is for Origen both a hermeneutical and a philosophical problem. Origen’s manner of interpreting Abraham’s story is compared here with the works of other Judeo-Hellenistic and Christian authors, Philo in particular. Origen’s account of Abraham’s story aims to defend Christianity against the charges raised by both pagans and Jews.

How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths

How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths

Synagogenordnungen als Zeichen und Instrumente für eine Neudefinition jüdischer Identität im Mähren des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts

AbstractTakkanot have been an important instrument for the unification of Ashkenazi culture since the Middle Ages. They spread from the Rhineland to the East, to Poland, Bohemia and Moravia. They regulated all areas of Jewish life. Whereas the addressees of the Takkanot were the Jewish communities, the new Synagogenordnungen (Statutes for the Synagogue), developed first in the West and soon followed by Moravia in the East, were directed primarily at the Christian authorities. This change began as early as the mid-18th century when the Austrian empress Maria Theresia asked for a translation of older Takkanot in order to formulate new legal standards for the Jewish life in her lands. The translation of these Jewish regulations into German, brought with it, nolens volens, a Christianization of Jewish technical terms used in their institutions. Soon, the Jewish Neologists and reformers welcomed these translations as useful for their own aspirations to transform Judaism. This was the case in both the West and the East. Among them was Samson Raphael Hirsch, the later leader of the Neo-Orthodox community in Frankfurt am Main and Chief Rabbi of Moravia in Nikolsburg.

Who Is the Man on the Camel?: Historical Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and Christian-Muslim Debate

Abstract This article examines Christian and Muslim exchanges concerning Isaiah 21:7 and Deuteronomy 18:15, biblical texts that Muslims interpreted as referring to the Prophet Muḥammad. The focus of the article is the well-known letter in which the East Syrian Catholicos, Timothy I (d. 823), reports his debate with the Caliph al-Mahdī. In this letter, Timothy draws upon exegetical traditions rooted in Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428) in order to undercut Muslim interpretation of Isaiah 21:7 and Deuteronomy 18:15 by insisting upon a strictly historical interpretation of these verses. The historical approach defended by Timothy received a Muslim rebuttal in the mid-ninth century and continued to be adapted by Christian readers who redacted Timothy’s letter. These sources demonstrate the interreligious transmission of Hebrew Bible exegesis. They show how Muslim biblical interpretation challenged basic principles of Christian exegesis, causing both Muslim and Christian authors to adapt and rearticulate longstanding methods of interpreting scripture.

Horrors of the Inner Chamber: Temples, Homes, and Secret Atrocities in Late Antiquity

This article addresses a pattern in the representation of the spaces of heathen practice in late antique Christian literature and in the conceptualisation of a necessary response to those spaces. I argue that Christian authors came to regard both temple structures and homes as suspicious enclosures, potentially concealing nefarious practices that could harm civic order and fortune. This view developed out of both a progressive suspicion of the domestic sphere in late antique Christian culture as harbouring heathen and heretical devotion, and a broader Roman suspicion of the Near Eastern temple, its architecture, and its secret priestly activities within. Such temples were constructed from early antiquity to exclude outsiders and to privilege a priestly cult within, unlike Roman temples that visibly framed the main cult image.

The Jerusalem Temple and Emperor Julian’s “Invention of Tradition”

Emperor Julian based his attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem temple in the spring of 363 CE on a version of Judaism that constitutes an “invented tradition” per the theoretical construct developed by Eric Hobsbawm and others in The Invention of Tradition (1983). Julian envisioned the rebuilt temple as a venue for animal sacrifice in honour of the god of the Jews—a god whom Julian identified as one in his Neoplatonic pantheon. He endeavoured to appropriate the ancient tradition of the Jewish cultic rites and their sacred site to fortify his own “Hellene” religious tradition, a combination of elements of ancient Greek and Roman traditions, mystery religions, and fourth-century Neoplatonism that emphasised the efficacy of animal sacrifice. From the point of view of Christian authors, the real motive lay in the emperor’s desire to assail Christianity and its own recently established tradition involving the destruction in 70 CE of the temple, namely that prophecy had been fulfilled and Christians had become the new “chosen people” of God. Julian’s attempt to rebuild the temple thus provides a lens through which to consider a complex interplay of various traditions. I argue that Julian was motivated by his Hellene religious commitment, not necessarily by anti-Christian sentiment—although his Hellenism was in some ways fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. Nor did Julian strive to restore ancient Jewish tradition primarily for the benefit of the Jewish community. Rather, through his “invented” version of their religious tradition, he sought to nurture his own.

Our Inner Custodian

Current approaches to understanding shame are rooted in controversial and even radically contrasting assumptions about shame and its relevance for social interaction and individual well-being. Classical and medieval sources themselves embrace surprisingly various notions about the workings of shame. While the Aristotelian tradition prevails in late antique and medieval philosophical psychology, it is also possible to discern a parallel tradition of shame that adapts and exploits Latin Stoic and eclectic material. This article surveys this largely unexplored Latin tradition (Cicero and Ambrose) and its treatment in later moral-philosophical and pastoral debates (Gregory the Great, Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and William Peraldus). Late antique and medieval Christian authors regard a positive responsiveness to shame as a constructive habit signaling the ability to live a socially harmonious life. The discussion demonstrates the inherent moral value of shame (and other self-reflexive emotions) and the constitutive role of shame for moral agency.

“A Treasure for the Poor”: The Contents of the Temple Treasures according to 2 Macc 3:10 in Light of the Biblical and Ancient Jewish and Christian Traditions

AbstractThe attack of Heliodorus on the temple in 2 Macc 3 is the first of a series of events occupying the narrative core of the book. In the first act of the story, a dispute arises over the actual contents of the temple treasury, with the high priest Onias claiming that they are “deposits of widows and orphans” (3:10). This essay focuses on this detail and shows that it entails an as yet unnoticed connection with a core of biblically ingrained traditions that gain momentum in the Second Temple period and come to the fore afterwards in the works of ancient Jewish and Christian authors: traditions that equate God’s money with money intended for the poor. In order to substantiate my claim, I survey texts in Deuteronomy, Tobit, and the Epistle of Jeremiah in search of hints of this process of “pauperization” of God’s property, and proceed to investigate the history of reception of 2 Macc 3:10 in the Latin translations, among the church fathers, and in the post-Talmudic work Josippon. The aim is to demonstrate that 2 Macc 3:10 became a productive link in the rhetorical formulation of a topos which bore long-lasting literary, theological, and practical fruits.

Reconsidering the Relationship Between (Pseudo-)Didymus’s De Trinitate and Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Julianum

Abstract Cyril of Alexandria’s apologetic treatise Contra Julianum drew upon a wide range of earlier Christian literature, including works by Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Pseudo-Justin Martyr, and others. The literary relationship between Contra Julianum and the De Trinitate attributed to Didymus the Blind is, however, contested. In this article I re-examine the parallel passages between these two works and argue that Cyril drew directly upon the De Trinitate as he composed Contra Julianum, using that prior work in three different ways. In the light of this finding, I argue that this literary dependency sheds some light on the intellectual and perhaps also social milieu out of which Contra Julianum arose, namely the long tradition of Christian authors who appropriated non-Christian sources for apologetic purposes, including such figures as Origen and Didymus.

Stories (novellas) from Arabic chronicles of the 9th–10th cent.

The publication offers academic translations of fifteen stories from the major chronicles of the 9th–10th cent. AD written in Arabic and arranged after the ruling dynasties. These two centuries witnessed the genesis and further development of this very popular genre of historical narrative. The so-called “dynastic” chronicles display the events of the history of the Muslim Community by dividing it following the times of the rule of the Muslim sovereigns, the Caliphs. Such chronicles were authored by the Muslim as well as by the Christian authors. Concerning the composition of historical works, their texts can be described as “amalgamated” and comprise along with other information a certain type of stories, which are written in a “genre” of “belles-lettres”. They usually comprise dialogues and rather vivid descriptions of historical characters and their deeds. The chronicles, which these stories are extracted from are written by ad-Dinawari (d. 891), al-Ya‘kubi (d. 897), Eutichius (d. c. 940) and al-Muqaddasi (d. end X c.)2 . The translations are arranged in the chronological order and supplied with roman numerals. The publication is followed by a detailed commentary.The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Maronite writer Jibri`il Jarmanus Farhat (1670–1732) and his attempts to include the works of Christian Arab authors in the “virtual catalogue” of Arabic Muslim literature

The article deals with the activities of the Maronite patriarch Gabriel German Farhat (1670–1732) in the field of the Arab bibliography. The author argues that by the 18th century AD in the Arabic-speaking literature of the Middle East, were used two types of introductions to the written texts, the Muslim and the Christian. The metalanguage, which was employed by Muslim authors in the introductions to their texts, was very convenient for constructing book-titles that by themselves built the “data base” of the so-called the Arabic Islamic “virtual catalogue”. The metalanguage used by Christian authors was different, and therefore in the library world of the Middle Ages two traditions were incompatible and therefore existed without intersecting. The Maronite Patriarch Gabriel German Farhat, being a bibliophile and a librarian, in his writings proposed organizing introductions to Christian texts in a Muslim manner, however, preserving their Christian content.The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Vanier & L’Arche: Defying the Tyranny of Distance

Spink’s (1990) narrative of Jean Vanier’s life confirms his academic education by key French personalists and Greig’s (2017) robust and cogent analysis of French Catholic personalism demonstrates how it influenced Catholic Social Teaching and Vanier’s personalist anthropology. Greig’s (2017) discussion on time qua time is exciting, innovative and highly relevant to persons who wish to live authentic Christian lives and invites exploration on many topics including human dignity. Human dignity is the fulcrum to personalism and Catholic Social Teaching and this paper uses a mixed methodological approach to explore its nexus with Gabriel Marcel (1963), Vanier, and the wider corpus of L’Arche.

Islamic Law on the Provincial Margins: Christian Patrons and Muslim Notaries in Upper Egypt, 2nd-5th/8th-11th Centuries

Abstract This article examines the interaction of Coptic Christians with Islamic legal institutions in provincial Egypt on the basis of a corpus of 193 Arabic legal documents, as well as relevant Coptic ones, dating to the 2nd-5th/8th-11th centuries. I argue that around the 3rd/9th century Islamic Egypt’s Christian subjects began to make routine use of Islamic legal institutions to organize their economic affairs, including especially inheritance and related matters internal to Christian families. They did so in preference to the Christian authorities and Coptic deeds that had been their standard resource in the first two centuries of Muslim rule. The changing character of the Egyptian judiciary encouraged this shift in practice, as qāḍīs who adhered to fiqh procedural rules increasingly filled judicial roles formerly held by administrative officials. By eschewing and nudging into disuse a previously vital Coptic legal tradition, Christian provincials participated in the Islamization of ʿAbbāsid and Fāṭimid Egypt.

MEARCSTAPA: Ten Years of Teratology

MEARCSTAPA: Ten Years of Teratology

Converging and Diverging Themes: A Synthesis of Contemporary Theological Literature on Disability

This paper will engage contemporary theological literature and the prevalent views articulated by contemporary Christian authors regarding disability. The themes will be drawn from the writings of numerous authors and will be disability as God’s purpose, disability and social stigma, disability in relation to intimacy and hospitality, and disability in relation to a biblical ideal. These themes will be analyzed based on their prevalence in Christian thought as well as their positive and negative impact upon Christian praxis most apparent in the Church.

The Ministering Critic: Kierkegaard’s Theology of Communication

This paper analyzes Kierkegaard’s scattered writings on communication to foreground the distinctively theological dimension of Kierkegaard’s rhetorical theory. “Indirect communication” needs to be understood as a strategy to address a specific theological problem, namely, the tendency for readers who think they are already Christian to dismiss or domesticate rhetoric that summons them to authentic Christian existence. Since Christianity is an “existence-communication,” the questions of what it means to be a Christian and how one can faithfully communicate Christianity are integrally linked for Kierkegaard. Contemporary apologists, activists, and preachers who rely on more direct modes of communication to express the Christian gospel have much to learn from Kierkegaard’s grappling with the illusions that beset Christian witness.

Identity, mixed unions and endogamy of the Moriscos: the assimilation of the new converts revisited

Recently, new testimonies and analyses have come to light calling into question historians’ long-held and nearly unanimous assumption that the Morisco community was decidedly endogamous. The aim of the present study is to examine different cases and texts indicating that mixed unions between Moriscos and Old Christians may have been more frequent, more desired (despite evident geographical and social differences), and more widespread than previously assumed. These unions created certain social groups in which traditionally accepted religious boundaries became blurred. On the other hand, the Christian authorities afforded this type of mixed unions an importance that far outweighs the scant attention paid to them in the literature. Such marriages were supported and promoted by the monarchy throughout the sixteenth century, and the expulsion orders from the early seventeenth century always provided for exceptions arising from mixed unions and their descendants. These data indicate a social reality which may have been more significant and influential at the local and regional level than has previously been assumed.

“Salvation through socialism”: Conversion in the Work of Jack London and Upton Sinclair

“Salvation through socialism”Conversion in the Work of Jack London and Upton Sinclair Andrew J. Ball (bio) The most common motif in early twentieth-century radical literature is the conversion narrative. Walter Rideout has observed that the conversion story is a central element in one-third of all the labor novels written in the first three decades of the twentieth century. A variation on the bildungsroman, these works feature techniques used by evangelical revivalists and depict conversions to socialism or to the labor movement that are modeled on religious experience. Here, a character’s salvation is achieved through the acquisition of class consciousness, which is described as a kind of rebirth, awakening, or recognition of revelation.1 The most widely read and emblematic radical authors to consistently employ this trope were Jack London and his protégé Upton Sinclair. Not only did London and Sinclair use the conversion story in their fiction and nonfiction time and again, but they also both described their own discovery of socialism as a religious conversion. In their work, both authors seek to conflate Christianity and socialism, to prove that the two are compatible, and that authentic conformity to Christian principles demands the endorsement of socialism. London and Sinclair use their writing as an instrument of evangelism that aims to convince their audience that socialism is a religious enterprise and a means to salvation. Evangelists for the Church of the Revolution Jack London’s fervent devotion to socialism is well known, but he is not typically remembered as a Christian socialist. However, in both his essays and his fiction, as Jay Williams [End Page 219] puts it, “socialism and Christianity” run “in the same stream bed.”2 Though London’s “deeply spiritual” interpretation of socialism is most overt in the work he produced from 1899 to 1906, “the religious element in London’s rhetoric is never lost” and remained “a constant for him throughout his life.”3 “Christian imagery and rhetoric abounds” in London’s early essays, where he first begins to present socialism as a religion that is synonymous with authentic Christianity.4 Biographer Carolyn Johnston argues that London not only believed he had found “salvation through socialism” but that it “could provide salvation” for all Americans as well.5 London’s identification of Christianity and socialism can be traced back to his early tutelage under Frederick Irons Bamford, a reference librarian at the Oakland public library and proponent of the Social Gospel who endorsed the Christian socialism of minister-activists George Herron and Walter Rauschenbusch. Bamford acted as a mentor to young London in the 1890s, guiding the reading that would ultimately lead London to champion socialism and to persistently interpret it through the lens of Christianity. Joan London writes that her father’s early acquaintance with Bamford “was destined to dictate the course of his life,” and Williams notes that while “London was too radical to be called a Social Gospeler, he did agree with its major tenets.”6 The sustained influence of this early study of the Social Gospel is evident in that in the years to come, after he had long outgrown Bamford and become increasingly versed in Marxist theory and scientific socialism, London, like his friend Upton Sinclair, continued to approach socialism as a moral imperative. The period of London’s most fervid interest in socialism, 1899–1908, coincides with the time when he was engrossed in the study of Christianity and the figure of Jesus in particular. Throughout this period, he publicly represented the socialist cause as a religious endeavor and privately compiled notes and research for the grand “Christ novel” he planned to write. Johnston explains that London was both “a socialist minister” and an “evangelist for socialism” who engaged in a tireless “crusade” to spread the “revolutionary gospel,” effectively making him “the Charles Finney” or “the Billy Sunday of the socialist movement.”7 Prior to his famous 1905–6 lecture tour, London’s “preaching” was confined to print.8 In 1899, London entered Cosmopolitan editor John Brisbane Walker’s essay contest and won with his essay “What Communities Lose by the Competitive System.” Walker, a millionaire and would-be preacher “who wrote Christian sociological essays...

Rainbow Body and Resurrection: Spiritual Attainment, The Dissolution Of the Material Body, and the Case of Khenpo a Chö by Francis V. Tiso

Reviewed by: Rainbow Body and Resurrection: Spiritual Attainment, The Dissolution Of the Material Body, and the Case of Khenpo a Chö by Francis V. Tiso Thomas Cattoi RAINBOW BODY AND RESURRECTION: SPIRITUAL ATTAINMENT, THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MATERIAL BODY, AND THE CASE OF KHENPO A CHÖ. By Francis V. Tiso.. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2016. 393 pp. In recent years, the growing popularity of comparative theology as an academic discipline has led to the proliferation of academic studies exploring the points of contact between different religious traditions, bringing into conversation authors and texts that address analogous themes or question, without however postulating any historical or conceptual link between the strands of the tradition in question. For instance, Francis Clooney's Hindu God Christian God (2001), Divine Mother Blessed Mother (2003), or Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Sri Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God (2008) set out an ambitious road map for an intellectual exchange between two vastly different religious traditions. These monographs, however, focus on speculative and conceptual echoes between Hindu and Christian authors from different eras and never claim any instance of reciprocal influence. In a similar way, a work like John Keenan's I Am/No Self: a Christian Commentary on the Heart Sutra (2011) may highlight unexpected echoes between the well-known Mahāyāna text and the Gospel of John, but it certainly does not venture any hypothesis about historical exchanges of ideas. At this stage in the history of interreligious dialogue, to embrace an alternative approach would seem a throwback to the Campbellian world of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), where a sort of perennialism for the masses presents all religions as culturally determined expressions of the same tradition. Francis Tiso's Rainbow Body and Resurrection is not a neo-perennialist work in the vogue of Campbell or Guenon: Tiso is certainly not interested in erasing the peculiarities of different religious traditions or in turning Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity into masks of the divine. At the same time, Tiso makes a number of daring claims, namely he affirms that there are peak mystical experiences in Buddhism and Christianity that share intriguing similarities, even if no one can actually affirm their identical character. In addition, he affirms that the interpretation of such experiences in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism was actually influenced by certain theological strands of Syriac Christianity that were largely erased from the historical consciousness of Western, and to a great extent Byzantine Christianity, but were able to spread to the East via the Silk Road, until they encountered the [End Page 467] Buddhist world on the Tibetan plateau and in Western China. Tiso is well aware of the fact that most scholars will question his reconstruction of the history of Tibetan thought and that many readers will be startled at his acceptance of the truth of seemingly "paranormal" phenomena. Even this reviewer, while sympathetic to Tiso's enterprise, is ultimately reluctant to accept the full import of his claims. At the same time, whether or not one chooses to follow the author in his search for the ever-elusive historical contact between Buddhism and Christianity, this monograph has the distinctive merit of trying to challenge established academic conventions and reset the terms of the comparative conversation. Perhaps, Tiso appears to suggest, there is more to comparative theology than the mere juxtaposition of texts; it may be high time to go back to fieldwork, let go of our enlightened prejudices, and seek out the extraordinary phenomena that religious traditions—at least in the past!—routinely acknowledged as possible. In the introduction, Tiso observes that the resurrection of the dead in Christianity is associated with the notion of a transcendent God returning his creation to fullness of being, while such an eschatological perspective is not universally present in Buddhism. At the same time—he claims—this teleological thrust can be found in later strands of the Tibetan tradition of Dzogchen, where the emphasis on the interrelatedness of all phenomena coexists with the conviction that human experience can have a direction or purpose. What would this be? According to many Dzogchen authors, then, the purpose of human experience is to break...