Reception History Research Articles

Rethinking the Prophethood of Muhammad in Christian Theology

In the modern world, there is an incessant amount of research on religions and interfaith interaction. Yet, too much of our theological activities remain shockingly intramural. Instead of allowing an inherent energy to launch us into the larger reality of global religiosity, we insist on protecting our theology from the threat of contamination. Among many points of agreement, the centrality of Muhammad’s prophethood remains key among the contentious issues between Islam and Christianity. Anna Bonta Moreland’s Reconsidering Muhammad takes us on a journey into the reception of Muhammad in Christian Theology. Engaging Islam from deep within the Christian tradition by addressing the question of the prophethood of Muhammad, Anna Bonta Moreland calls for a retrieval of Thomistic thought on prophecy. Moreland sets the stage for this inquiry through an intertextual reading of the key Vatican II documents on Islam and on Christian revelation. This review will retrace the historical reception of Muhammad in early European tradition and also how Moreland’s work is a pathbreaking introduction to one of the least talked about theological puzzles between Islam and the Christian tradition.

Moby-Dick, American Studies, and the Aesthetic Education of Man (Fall 2018)

Moby-Dick has long served as an index of contemporary events and changing paradigms. Yet despite its long and varied history of interpretation, an analysis of the novel’s reception history demonstrates a striking unanimity of purpose. In nearly every instance, Ahab’s excesses and inhumanities are identified and prohibited in the name of ensuring that the novel can aid in the work of furthering the aesthetic education of man. In the process, the artwork’s integrity, achievement and essential irreducibility are subordinated to the demand that artworks provide essential moral instruction. The present essay reconstructs this common task through a close reading of the novel’s reception history, tracking its development from the time of Melville’s contemporaries to more recent debates between Donald E. Pease and William V. Spanos. Through Theodor W. Adorno’s work on aesthetics and society, this critical reinterpretation of Moby-Dick tries to better understand the “wicked book” its author first recognized, and for whose infernal birth he felt, in his own words, “as spotless as the lamb.”

How the Gospel of Truth Depicts Paul’s Secret Teaching: A Study in Second-Century Reception History

AbstractThis article shows that the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3), dense with allusions to sources now in the New Testament, most often explored for its resonances with Johannine literature, also offers significant evidence for second-century reception of Paul’s letters, while highlighting poetic images often overlooked. Correlating the language and literary structure of such Pauline passages as 1 Cor 1–6 with the opening of the Gospel of Truth shows that the latter implicitly claims to reveal the secret and primordial “wisdom of God” that Paul declares he teaches only orally to initiates (1 Cor 2:6–7). Thus, this text exemplifies a kind of “heretical” reading that heresiologists like Irenaeus deplore, when, for example, he cites this very passage to complain that “each of (the heretics) declares that this ‘wisdom’ is whatever he invents (fictionem videlicet), so that sometimes they claim that the truth is in Valentinus, or in Marcion, or in someone else …” (Haer. 3.2.1). Furthermore, this research suggests that the Gospel of Truth, narrating primordial creation, followed by a dramatic account of Christ’s incarnation and redemption, claims to offer, as the “true gospel,” a spiritual interpretation that far transcends the brief kerygmatic version set forth in 1 Cor 15:1–3. Finally, I suggest, investigating the Gospel of Truth’s interpretation of Paul’s teaching (which here includes echoes of Ephesians and Colossians) invites us to recognize elements of Paul’s letters most often overlooked. For, from patristic times to the present, exegetes who accept Irenaeus’s insistence that Paul had no secret teaching have dismissed the apostle’s emphatic claim that he did. Furthermore, those focused on dogmatic and ethical themes in Paul’s letters often miss poetic and mythological language at play in sources like the Gospel of Truth.

Where Scripture and Tradition First Meet: How the Field of the Early Reception of the New Testament May (Re)Shape the Academic Dialogue between Evangelicals and Orthodox—Romania as a Case Study

In recent years, Evangelical scholars in Romania have shown a growing interest in studying the early reception of the New Testament, particularly in the writings of the Pre-Nicene Fathers (c. 90–300 CE). In parallel, a new generation of Romanian Orthodox scholars has come to appreciate the importance of a critical approach to both Scripture and Christian Tradition. As a result, fresh common ground is currently taking shape in academia: a critical approach to the early reception of the New Testament. This presents an opportunity for both Evangelical and Orthodox scholars in Romania to come together and explore certain issues of faith that have not been previously explored in this way. Since there are already several hints that the early reception of the New Testament could lead to a more meaningful dialogue, an innovative project has been initiated to further the hypothesis. The ongoing project involves five Evangelical New Testament scholars and five Orthodox New Testament scholars independently researching the same five obscure passages in the New Testament (Matthew 27.51–53, Romans 9–11, 1 Corinthians 15.29, Hebrews 6.4–6 and 1 Peter 3.18–22). Each passage is analyzed independently by one scholar from each denomination using the same methodology, i.e., a critical dialogue between exegesis and reception history. The forthcoming volume aims to assess not only the value of this approach for academic dialogue between Evangelicals and Orthodox in Romania, but also to estimate other potential gains should this method be applied on a larger scale, such as in various international ecumenical projects. There is one overarching question behind this project that still awaits a response: if the early reception of the New Testament is where Christian Scripture and Christian Tradition first meet, could it also be where Evangelicals and Orthodox finally meet?

Armageddon: A History of the Location of the End of Time

Abstract Rev 16:16 is a textbook case for any reception history analysis. Indeed, its reception has several successive tipping points, as in any reception history. In Revelation, as the text makes clear, it is a Hebrew literary name whose interpretation was not easy: from Tyconius to the most contemporary commentators, Armageddon is understood as a code name whose key remains lost. It was not until the 16th century that the name of a mountain was recognised, har Mageddo, the mountain of Magedon, linked to the fortress of Megiddo in the Jezreel plain. From Joachim of Flora onwards, the location of the eschatological battle is sought geographically. This change of lexical category marks a major interpretive revolution, for if one can locate the place on a map, then the war that takes place there becomes concrete. By virtue of geography, what belonged to myth—and thus to non-time—becomes tangible and is inscribed in a future temporality. From Alexander the Minorite to Hal Lindsey, the battle of Armageddon becomes a mirror of the geopolitics of the Latin and Anglo-American world. This ubiquity of the term over the last forty years has had a paradoxical effect: its withdrawal from geographical considerations. Thanks to the mechanism of antonomasia, the toponym tends to cover, by synecdoche, all the events of the end of time. It thus becomes the proper name of the end of time.

The Subscriptions to Mark's Gospel and History of Reception

AbstractThis article surveys the subscriptions to the Gospel of Mark in 157 Greek manuscripts, noting their gradual development from being identical to the title in the earliest phase to becoming more and more elaborate and significant for the history of interpretation. Early on, as reflected in the title, the Second Gospel was associated with Mark, known to be Peter's disciple and interpreter. In the fourth or fifth century, an editor added the information that it was written (or spoken) by Mark in Latin in Rome as reflected in the Peshitta and later Byzantine manuscripts. At some point between the seventh and ninth centuries, an unknown editor added dates for each of the four Gospels from a source which has been attributed to Hippolytus’ Chronicle, and in the process made a cascading error which resulted in too early dates for Mark, Luke and John. In the archetype of Family 13, these traditions were combined which suggests that the archetype of Family 13 is no earlier than the eighth century. A main factor behind this gradual growth of the subscriptions is authentication and authorisation – in the case of the Second Gospel, the association with Mark and Peter legitimates its claim of apostolicity and orthodoxy. Moreover, the situating of each Gospel in time and space through the subscriptions not only satisfies human curiosity but contributes to the construction of an ancient Christian ‘landscape of memory’, reflecting the collective memory of the early Christians, thus shaping and enhancing their identity.

Shelley's Scattered Words in China

This essay reflects on Percy Bysshe Shelley's peculiar afterlife in twentieth-century China. It first traces Shelley's reception history by discussing his introduction during the late Qing era, the Republican popularisation of Shelley, and Communist China's curious endorsement of him. From this almost undisrupted trajectory of increasingly enthusiastic advocacy, sharply contrasting with Shelley's controversial English critical heritage, the essay argues that Chinese readers of Shelley radically appropriated him. It then attempts to tease out the complex forces at play in this process by proposing two major means of appropriation: reduction and transmission. Reduction was achieved by censoring unacceptable elements in Shelley's poetry, philosophy, and biography. Meanwhile, Shelley was almost exclusively transmitted through an authoritarian critical discourse. Linguistic transmission played a crucial role as well, and Chinese translation often toned down certain quintessential Shelleyan stylistic features. The essay concludes that the uneasy relationship between Shelley's poetics and politics might have encouraged Chinese appropriation which, ironically, was made by an authoritarian state ideology and institution – the very powers that Shelley had so fiercely opposed.

Becoming god: Interpreting Pauline soteriology as deification

In the past five decades, the doctrine of deification has experienced a renaissance within the Protestant West. While biblical scholars have exhibited greater reticence to ascribe explicitly deiform intentions to Scripture than their theologian counterparts, this article traces the recent emergence of interest in interpreting Pauline soteriology as deification. Intriguingly, scholars within this burgeoning line of inquiry of scholarship represent a host of interpretative schools (e.g. apocalyptic, new perspective on Paul) and methodological approaches (exegetical, history-of-religion, reception history, theological interpretation), yet nevertheless affirm broadly similar portrayals of the deiform contours and content of Paul’s doctrine of salvation.

The First and Lowest Operation of Pain: C.S. Lewis and His Image of ‘God’s Megaphone’ for Human Suffering

C.S. Lewis’s metaphor of ‘God’s megaphone’, an image he employed to illustrate an idea about human suffering, appears at a certain stage of his argument in the central chapter (ch. 6) of his first work of popular theology, The Problem of Pain (1940). Among the numerous images invoked throughout his writings, none perhaps is more widely known than this. From the earliest book-length study of Lewis (1949) onward, numerous quotations, allusions, and discussions that include the image of the megaphone can be found in the literature on Lewis and elsewhere; in 1957 the Dutch translation of Lewis’s book was published under the title Gods megafoon. While it would take a comprehensive reception history of The Problem of Pain for any definitive claims to be possible, the history of the ‘megaphone’ as cited in the literature suggests that this image has dominated perceptions of the book’s overall argument. The present essay will attempt to show that this dominance is a fact, and argues that this dominance finds no support in Lewis’s original argument.

From the history of Spanish translations of Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” made at different times.

The article discusses some publication features of the Spanish translations of Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina”, made at different times in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The novel “Anna Karenina” has been translated into Spanish numerous times. To date, there are many translation versions that are of great interest in terms of their study and analysis, since each of the versions is a reflection of its historical era, allowing us to explore various linguistic phenomena. The Spanish reception of the novel “Anna Karenina” is considered within the framework of the history of Leo Tolstoy's oeuvre reception as a whole. This paper traces how the historical context and relations between Russia and Spain influenced the perception of Tolstoy in Spain. Particular attention is paid to the specifics of the first translations of the novel into Spanish, which became the starting point in popularizing one of the greatest Russian writer’s work in Spain. We also consider the role of popularizers of Russian culture in Spain, and its significant impact not only on the emergence of new translations of Tolstoy’s works, but also on the establishment and strengthening of Russian-Spanish literary connections.

The “Thingness” of the American Middlebrow:

In this paper, I examine the ways in which Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby both critique and engage with materialism and consumerism as middlebrow texts. Bill Brown’s discussion of the power and meaning of “things” of literature (2003; 16-17) serves as a framework through which I analyze the double “thingness” of the middlebrow as depicted in these novels—that is, the simultaneous investment in and critique of consumer objects. To that end, I analyze both the print culture histories and content of Blondes (which is widely considered a middlebrow text in academic scholarship) in conversation with Gatsby (which is not always thought of as a middlebrow text). I argue that, rather than view middlebrow within a high/low brow paradigm, we should instead consider the ways in which the middlebrow operates with and within mass consumer culture as well as provides a critique of that culture. Because the American middlebrow has a distinct socioeconomic history, I demonstrate how these novels also grapple with the “thingness” of American identity and the Americanness of “things” by centering the protagonists’ engagement with material objects in the construction of their identities. Gatsby and Blondes demonstrate the middlebrow American quality of things through their narrative content, and the novels’ histories as print objects reflect their circulation as commercial things themselves. This article challenges understandings of the “middlebrow” as a genre unto itself by examining the historical situatedness of the term and its evolving definitions. This article also invites renewed conversation around the middlebrow by proposing a new perspective and an alternative approach to the understanding of middlebrow literature. I argue that these novels present an ideal re-entry into discussion of the middlebrow because of their disparate print culture histories and the cultural capital (or lack thereof) they signify in the present day. This article thus traces the print histories of these two novels alongside analyses of their reception histories and critiques the concept of a middlebrow literature, turning again to contradictory definitions of the term to suggest a more fluid understanding of the middlebrow in scholarship should be able to account both for the continuing appeal of early twentieth-century middlebrow literature and the ways in which the middlebrow itself as an aspirational aesthetic and consumerist ethic has evolved and is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Elijah’s Blackbirds

Abstract Commentators have long struggled to make sense of the role that ravens play in the story of Elijah, questioning why these predatory birds with a reputation for cruelty would be recruited to share their food during a time of scarcity. This essay takes up the reception history of biblical ravens, considering how various interpreters have drawn upon observational knowledge of ravens to explain the mysterious role ravens play in the feeding of Elijah in 1 Kings 17 and Noah’s commission of the raven in the wake of the flood in Genesis 8. The essay both recalls and reenacts this interpretive tradition by assembling together pieces of this reception history together with the work of modern ornithologists on the corvus corax to provide some insights for how we might understand the particular significance of ravens in the care and feeding of Elijah.

С. Джонсон в России: вопросы рецепции

The aim of the research is to assess the state of Johnson studies in Russian philology. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the following: the author believes that the history of reception of S. Johnson’s creative heritage on the Russian soil has not been adequately investigated. The paper traces the main stages of the translation and historical-literary reception of S. Johnson’s creative work in Russia. The periods of active scientific study of S. Johnson’s creative activities and personality from the mid-eighteenth century to the 2020s have been established. It is suggested that the joint activities of the British Slavist and bibliographer John Simon Gabriel Simmons (1915-2005) and the outstanding Russian literary historian Yuri Davidovich Levin (1920-2006) undertaken in the 1950s-1960s represent the initial and main stage of the bibliographic work on the search and attribution of the Russian translations of Johnson’s writings made in the XVIII century. The next, modern, stage of studying Johnson’s legacy in Russia covers the period from the late 1990s to the early 2020s. As a result, an assessment of the current state of Johnson studies has been given, the peculiarities of reception of Johnson’s heritage during different historical periods have been revealed, a conclusion about the relevant aspects of Johnson studies and the prospects for their development has been made.

Pleasure’s Swerve: Philology among Lucretius, Derrida, and Deleuze

Abstract In the 1983 article “My Chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” Jacques Derrida gives philological questions massive philosophical significance by reading the long âgon between idealist and materialist philosophy through a philological crux in the text of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). Tracing philological debates that have surrounded Lucretius from the Renaissance onward, this article argues that Lucretius’s poetic theory of interlinked atomic and textual swerves and the philological history that has mediated them were important touchstones for both Derrida and the other major twentieth-century philosopher of difference, Gilles Deleuze. Additionally, the article argues that for both Derrida and Deleuze, the clinamen offers a theory not only of how atoms or alphabetical letters swerve or even split, but also of how a philosophical tradition such as materialism refuses to run in a straight, unitary line. This is a question of how to understand reception history: either as an unbroken tradition of faithful imitation and replication (a family genealogy, grouped under the name of the father, “Lucretius” for example), or else as something less patriarchal, less heteronormative, less faithful. Read this way, the swerve offers a rethinking of the methods of reception history itself.

E.E. Cummings's Shakespeare and the Modernist Middlebrow Sonnet

Abstract: As a popular experimental poet, E.E. Cummings embodied the intersection between "middlebrow" and "elite" cultural arenas as well as their competing claims to cultural institutions, such as the early-twentieth-century "Shakespeare industry" in the United States. Archival documents from Cummings's education at Harvard University and middlebrow studies together help to contextualize Cummings's conventional Shakespearean sonnets against middlebrow culture's emergence in the US. Cummings's Harvard notes show how the formal experimentation for which he is best known mirrors his readings in Shakespeare. These parallels signal the Shakespearean foundation of his own modernism and Cummings's participation in contemporary efforts to designate Shakespeare as an early modern modernist. Historicizing Cummings's conventional verse in this way also reveals how Cummings's Shakespeareanism, which blurs cultural hierarchy, has been obscured in the history of Cummings's reception as a middlebrow modernist by the mid-century "Battle of the Brows" and the cultural stratification it entailed.

Roundtable on Michael J. Hollerich, Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021)

Few topics are more germane to this journal than the writing of ecclesiastical history, and no figure has had greater influence on the development of this genre than the bishop and scholar, Eusebius of Caesarea. In his masterful study of Eusebius and his readers from the late ancient to the modern era, Michael Hollerich has done a great service to all historians of Christianity. A work of reception history, the book begins with a chapter on Eusebius's life and work, focusing on his Ecclesiastical History and its relation to his Chronicle as well as other historical and non-historical genres with which he engaged. Subsequent chapters examine the reception of his work in the Christian Roman Empire of late antiquity, the non-Greek East, the medieval Latin West, and Byzantium, before turning to the rediscovery of Eusebius in diverse early modern contexts and his reception in modern scholarship including the implications of his historiographical work for future historians. The essays that comprise this roundtable, followed by the author's response, continue this important conversation about Eusebius and his legacy.

1 Timothy 1:3–4 in the Memory of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, and Chrysostom

In this article, I discuss reception history, its place within the history of historical critical methods, and social memory theory. I apply a reception historical lens buttressed by social memory theory to 1 Timothy 1:3–4. I show that the historical circumstances of this passage’s reception problematize using early understandings of it to reconstruct the referent behind “myths and endless genealogies”. I first show how the phrase “myths and endless genealogies” is ambiguous in the historical setting of the author. Then, I demonstrate that Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, and Chrysostom use this phrase against very different groups; however, all of these authors use 1 Timothy 1:4 for a (perceived) problem against their present group.

Shakespeare and the New Palace of Westminster (1834–1927)

ABSTRACT This article explores how the art and architecture of the New Palace of Westminster (home to the UK’s Houses of Parliament) evoke a theatrical experience underpinned by ‘Shakespearean’ aesthetics. Over a series of artistic commissions from the 1840s to the 1920s, artists instrumentalised Shakespeare both explicitly and implicitly as part of the wider schemes within which they worked. Doing so, they visualised and even theatricalised the political and artistic aims of their commissioners and sought to project a unified sense of national history and contemporary aesthetic taste. The three case studies from within the Palace discussed here therefore offer a concentrated reception history of Shakespeare. This reading of the Palace’s visual arts thereby sharpens our understanding of Shakespeare’s developing roles in British national conception. It brings together print, theatrical, and art history with attention to architecture and design, as well as archival details, to offer an interdisciplinary analysis of Shakespeare’s role in constitutional expressions of British identity – not least during a major period of imperial activity and at the very seat of parliamentary power.

Anatomical Analysis of Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb and Corresponding Theological Commentary

Approaching Hans Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521/22) this paper combines the expertise of anatomical analysis and the perspective of theology and philosophy in order to address some of the well-rooted assumptions about Holbein in the historical reception of his Dead Christ. The authors propose a balanced conclusion about the hypothesis of a drowned man from the Rhine being a model for the painting, pointing out that the body of the man from Holbein’s painting, according to anatomical details, could not have previously been in water. Furthermore, the absence of an Adam’s apple on Christ’s body is interpreted in the light of New Testament texts, rather than as a result of Holbein’s lack of anatomical precision. Similarly, the fact that Holbein painted a corpse deprived of all signs of divinity is seen in connection with the theological notion of kenosis. Ultimately, the authors conclude that the results of the anatomical analysis reflect the key elements of the hermeneutics of Gospel reports of Christ’s passion and death.

Harry Stack Sullivan and Stephen Mitchell in Italy – A historical and a personal account

Having introduced readers to the history of the reception of psychoanalysis in Italy, the author reconstructs the history of the Italian reception of the work of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) and Stephen A. Mitchell (1946–2000). Sullivan’s work played a fundamental role in adding to the “new Italian psychiatry,” founded by Franco Basaglia (1824–1980), the psychodynamic dimension it lacked, creating a new convergence between the social and psychological dimensions of psychiatry. Mitchell’s work played a fundamental role in the development of the Italian tradition of psychoanalytic psychotherapy originally articulated by Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013) and Pier Francesco Galli, following their reception of Sullivan’s work. This phenomenon coincided, from an institutional point of view, with the emergence of a network of Italian institutes and societies affiliated to the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, which had been originally cofounded by the William Alanson White Institute – the institute founded by Sullivan in 1943, where Mitchell himself trained as a psychoanalyst at the end of the 1970s. Interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis also ended up finding a place in the work of several colleagues of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, as well as allowing the foundation of several institutes and societies affiliated to the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. The author reconstructs this chapter of Italian psychoanalysis from both a historiographical and a personal point of view.