Jewish Prophets Research Articles

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Judaism is one of the most mysterious religions in the world. Despite the large number of Jews in the world, people are generally unable to know about Jewish customs and traditions. There are many reasons for this mystery. One of them is that this religion only accepts people of a certain race, due to which other people are generally ignorant of their religious thought, philosophy, and practice. The other reason for their mysteriousness is their different religious calendar system. Their names of months, counting of years, and festivals are neither entirely on the solar calendar nor entirely on the lunar calendar. The books of the People of the Book have been of great importance to the people of Islam because our book, the Holy Quran repeatedly refers to them. Christian literature is easy to obtain as it is available in every language. In contrast, Jewish literature has been available only in Hebrew. And the translations in English are not available to the common man. But for the past two or three years, English translations of Jewish religious books have become available online. The Jewish religious literature is indeed divided into two main parts: the Tanakh and the Talmud. The Tanakh, also known as the Hebrew Bible, is further divided into three sections: the Torah, the Nevi'im (Prophets), and the Ketuvim (Writings). Each section contains various books and writings that are significant to the Jewish faith. The Torah, which is the first part of the Tanakh, consists of the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It contains the foundational laws, commandments, and teachings that guide Jewish religious practice. The Nevi'im, or the Prophets, includes books that contain the messages, prophecies, and narratives of the Jewish prophets throughout history. It provides insights into the moral and spiritual guidance of the Jewish people. The Ketuvim, or the Writings, consists of various books, including Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and others. It contains poetry, wisdom literature, songs, and stories that offer spiritual and practical guidance to Jewish individuals and communities. The Talmud is a compilation of Jewish teachings and discussions that expand upon the laws and principles outlined in the Tanakh. The Talmud is divided into two main parts: the Mishnah and the Gemara. The Mishnah is a collection of oral traditions and teachings of Jewish law, while the Gemara provides commentaries and discussions on the Mishnah. Together, the Tanakh and the Talmud form the foundation of Jewish religious literature, providing guidance, teachings, and insights into the faith and its practices. They are essential sources for understanding Jewish theology, ethics, and legal principles.

Abraham Maslow as a Jewish Prophet

Reading Maslow is alive, like experiencing a dialogue with a text. This article explores this writer’s response to Maslow’s narrative style, as well as to his powerful content. Using a personal narrative style that situates the reader in a Jewish context during the most powerful time of the year, the writer responds to Maslow as a Jewish prophet who prophecizes some of the dead-ends of the mechanistic science that he critiques in “Toward a Humanistic Biology.” His prophecies are startlingly lucid and applicable for what we are seeing in the world today.

Paul and His Letters: Thinking with Josephus. By F. B. A. Asiedu

F. B. A. Asiedu’s stimulating monograph pursues a little-explored but important comparison of two pivotal figures in Second Temple Judaism: the Apostle Paul and the Jewish prophet–historian and apologist, Flavius Josephus. Asiedu claims that Josephus represents ‘an expression of self-consciously post-Pauline Judaism’ from first-century Rome (p. 179; cf. p. xv). The contrast between both thinkers is not structured around common theological themes (i.e. their views of God, Mosaic Law, etc.). Rather, uniquely, it is biographically focused, drawing out similarities between each writer’s life, mostly overlooked by historians and critics (pp. xiii–xiv). The Jewish parameters for the investigation are made clear. Josephus provides important primary evidence for ‘the attested practices . . . for what a first-century Jewish writer affiliated with the Pharisees . . . was likely to do’ (p. xiv). In this regard, Paul and Josephus ‘represented themselves as Pharisees and as former Pharisees and in the company of Pharisees’ (p. xxiii). Asiedu posits that the Judaism of Josephus stands somewhere between Paul and Philo and the rabbis and the Rabbinic tradition (p. xxiii), helpfully setting the similarities and differences between Paul and Josephus in first-century Jewish life (pp. xxiii–xxxv). Nevertheless, Asiedu more gravitates towards the evidence of Paul’s letters than a continuous biographical comparison with Josephus throughout the monograph.

The Kurdish Prophet Nahum and His Attitude Towards Nineveh

Naḥūm was a Kurdish Jewish prophet who lived in northern Syria in the period of the Assyrian conquests and internecine wars over 2,500 years ago. Part of Naḥūm’s long poem, which is in the Kurdish-Persian genre Shāḥnāma has since been included in the canonized Hebrew Bible. The first chapter of the Book of Naḥūm, henceforth Section I is a song of praise (panegyric) introducing the main protagonist – in this case HaShem. Section II and Section III of Naḥūm’s Book carry on with narrative still in the genre Kurdish Shāḥnāma. However, instead of an ensuing lengthy tale, Section III winds up with a few lines of “conclusion,” written by another hand.

Židovski narod između iseljavanja i useljavanja

U ovom članku autor analizira osobitu vezu koja postoji između židovskog naroda i Svete zemlje. Židovski narod preživio je brojna iseljavanja i useljavanja u svojem trajnom hodočašću prema „Obećanoj zemlji”. Ta hodočašća uspjela su izgraditi, oblikovati i održati židovski nacionalni identitet u najtežim trenutcima dugotrajnog egzila. Prvi dio članka sastoji se od općenitog uvoda, nakon kojeg slijedi glavni prikaz iseljavanja i useljavanja u povijesti židovskog naroda. U središnjem dijelu članka raspravljat će se o dvjema glavnim temama. Prva je teološko značenje iseljavanja i useljavanja Židova kao znak božanske providnosti te primjena ideja nagrade i kazne kojima se izražava ispunjenje proroštava iznesenih u Tori i knjigama židovskih proroka (težak izgon, uništenje Obećane zemlje te njezino opustošenje tijekom vremena egzila, ali i povratak izraelskog naroda u nju). Druga tema je ljubav i čežnja židovskog naroda za Cionom, gdje će autor pokazati kako su Biblija i duhovni vođe, rabini, pomogli olakšati bol naroda zbog izgona uvođenjem raznovrsnih blagdana, običaja i molitava kojima su osnažili kolektivno nacionalno pamćenje te održali nadu u okupljanje izgnanih, izgradnju Jeruzalema i Hrama te u dolazak Mesije. Posljednji dio članka obrađuje krize s kojima se židovski narod suočavao tijekom dugog i teškog puta do Ciona. Autor se u radu uz biblijske izvore služi i vrelima iz rabinske literature, od talmudskih vremena preko srednjega vijeka sve do modernog doba. Velik dio literature prvi je put na hrvatski s hebrejskoga i aramejskoga preveo upravo autor.

White Jesus and Antisemitism: Toward an Antiracist and Decolonial Christology

AbstractThis article argues that traditional Christology is intimately bound up with a triumphalist agenda that denies Jesus’ Jewishness and is structurally antisemitic. Taking an antiracist stance, the article argues that systemic rethinking of Christianity’s theological resources is needed, which must be anti‐antisemitic and antiracist. This involves reconfiguring how we take on board Jesus’ Jewishness in a post‐Holocaust context and recognizing Jesus as a Jewish prophet. From this, it is tentatively suggested that rethinking the role of the Messiah involves understanding a Levinasian Messiah who does not come, but rather calls upon us to act in a Messianic role before the Other as an ethical imperative.

Boston Declaration: A Prophetic Appeal to Christians of the United States

Boston Declaration: A Prophetic Appeal to Christians of the United States Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Pamela R. Lightsey, and Christian T. Collins Winn Released November 20, 2017 As followers of Jesus, the Jewish prophet for justice whose life reminds us to, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31) we hear the cries of women and men speaking out about sexual abuse at the hands of leaders in power and we are outraged. We are outraged by the current trends in Evangelicalism and other expressions of Christianity driven by white supremacy, often enacted through white privilege and the normalizing of oppression. Confessing racism as the United States’ original and ongoing sin, we commit ourselves to following Jesus on the road of costly discipleship to seek shalom justice for the least, the lost, and the left out. We declare that following Jesus today means fighting poverty, economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and all forms of oppression from the deepest wells of our faith. Choose life This is a time of heightened racist and patriarchal empire where wealth is concentrated at the top. The Living God asks us to make a decision: “Today I offer you the choice of life and good, or death and evil. … Choose life.” (Deuteronomy 31). Following Jesus today means choosing life, joining the Spirit‐led struggle to fight the death‐dealing powers of sin wherever they erupt. Whenever one of God’s children is being oppressed, we will fight with them for liberation with the power of the Holy and Life‐Giving Spirit. And yet, we live in a moment when death and evil seem to reign supreme in the United States, when those with the power of a uniform or the president’s pen or a position of authority or fame or economic tricks of capitalization and interest or sheer brute force… again and again choose death rather than life. In a moment when too many who confess Christ advocate evil, we believe followers of the Jesus Way are called to renounce, denounce, and resist these death‐dealing powers which organize and oppress our world, not to embrace or promulgate them. We acknowledge the manifold and complicated ways we participate in these systems, even as we are often complicit in them. We confess that the Church, in a variety of forms, has too often failed to follow the way of Jesus and perform the good news. We are people who are still discovering the ways we participate with death and evil, even while we continue to seek the good, to choose life again and again. This declaration is such a choice, hoping and clinging to the God of life and seeking to bear witness to that life in our present moment. Acknowledging our own failures and embracing an appropriate sense of humility should not, however, silence us. While we do not have ready‐made answers for all the problems we face, we know something about the pathway we must follow if we are to find those answers, and this is the pathway of Jesus. Who is our god and what is the Jesus way? We believe in a God who holds all difference within God’s own life and in whom there is no one or no people who are distant from God’s justice, merciful love, and presence (Micah 6:8; Acts 10:34‐35). We affirm the beauty and humanity of all people in their manifold difference—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion—as reflecting God’s image through lives of love and hope. We believe the Jesus Way calls us to the possibility of living in a world where all can love and be loved, and live into joy. The Jesus Way continues through our best, prayerful, honest, and empirical attempts to understand why and how the world has come to be in the shape it is today. This pathway calls us to act in ways that are Spirit‐led and strategic in confronting evil wherever evil exists, to combat ignorance wherever ignorance has led people astray and to place our lives and our bodies on the line with whoever is being threatened, beat down, or oppressed in any way, anywhere. Lamentation As followers of...

Iraqi Jews and Heritage under Threat: Negotiating and Managing an Identity from Afar

This article looks at the case of Ezekiel’s shrine in Kifl, Iraq. The shrine houses the grave of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel and originally consisted of a synagogue and associated buildings. Shiʽa Muslims claim it is a holy site for Muslims. Since Iraq’s Jews largely left Iraq after 1950 as a result of government repression, it is now controlled by the Iraqi Shiʽa Waqf. It has been largely changed into a mosque, with many Jewish elements having been removed. Too few Jews are left in Iraq to challenge this. This article asks how changes to this site play into notions of belonging and identity for Iraqi Jews today, as well as how the effects of pressure from dominant Jewish identities and a general ignorance of Arab Jewish identity interacts with this important site of memory. An analysis of the relationship between the site and Iraqi Jewish identity is conducted via on-site work and thirteen interviews with Iraqi Jews from around the world. It argues for the importance of the site and that heritage sites such as Ezekiel’s shrine are powerful sites for anchoring diasporic identities mnemonically. In the case where those identities are under strain, these sites serve a role to further strengthen and provide historical weight to claims of belonging. However, this relationship changes through generations because of internal and external identity and political pressures. Unchallengeable pressures increase the likelihood that memories are not passed on. The article argues for a dynamic understanding between site, politics, and identity.

The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist by R. Nir

Reviewed by: The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist by R. Nir Barrie A. Wilson Nir, R. 2019. The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1910928554. Pp. 342. $90. Rivka Nir is noted for meticulous, careful dissection of ancient texts, having established an excellent reputation with her Destruction of Jerusalem and the Idea of Redemption in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (2003) and Joseph and Aseneth: A Christian Book (2012). This book follows in that vein with a detailed literary analysis of Josephus and the relevant biblical texts. Her thesis is straightforward: . . . I have attempted to prove that the figure of John the Baptist, as reflected in all our available sources, is filtered through a Christian prism. He is depicted not as a Jewish prophet, apocalypticist or ascetic but as a Christian who speaks for the ideas and beliefs of Christian theology and its core faith in the messiah Jesus. (258) Her arguments are impressive and well worth consideration in this yet another quest for the historical personage behind a received narrative. She contends that we cannot now know the John the Baptist of history: Christian theology has intervened and John is presented as a Christian witnessing to Jesus. John is not a Jew working out of the conceptual matrix of Second Temple Judaism. So his baptism is not a form of a [End Page 411] Jewish mikvah nor that of the immersion ritual of the Dead Sea Scroll community at Qumran. His was different. Nir’s methodology is that of detailed historical literary analysis, examining key ideas and situating them in the context of what we know of Second Temple Judaism and emerging Christianity of the late first century, the period that the Gospel writers reflect. Her major evidence has to do with the concept cluster in which the Gospels present John the Baptist. The conceptual landscape is Christian. Ideas such as “repentance,” “kingdom of heaven,” “the coming one,” “baptism,” “forgiveness of sins,” “holy spirit,” “the wrath to come” and “fruit worthy of repentance” are all interpreted in accordance with evolving Christian belief. The Jewish and Christian understanding of these concepts differ and Nir outlines the contrasts clearly. Repentance, in its Jewish sense, for instance, as a return to the covenant with God as expressed in Torah, is just not present in the Gospel accounts of John the Baptist. Similarly Josephus’s description of John the Baptist’s water ritual makes it clear that his ritual is not a Pharisaic baptism but an early Christian one. Nir carefully analyses the text, pointing out that the action is “a collective mass baptism under the administration of one person, which must be preached and proclaimed to be administered.” This along with “its characterization as an initiatory baptism into an elect group” (258) are hallmarks of the Christian rite of baptism. Moreover, John’s baptism “combines physical purification with inner moral spiritual purification, in which the latter constitutes a prerequisite for the former” (258). This contrasts with a Jewish Pharisaic baptism, which is a different ritual in which immersion signifies cleansing the body from various states of impurity. The contexts differ, significantly. This, in turn, argues for the view that Josephus’s account of John the Baptist is “not from the hand of the Jewish historian but a late interpolation written by a Christian or a Jewish Christian” (259). That finding is bound to be controversial but it adds to the suspicion that the passages about Jesus and James, brother of Jesus, have all been inserted into Josephus’s text by later Christian hands. Thus Josephus is not an independent witness to the subject matter of the Gospels. Nir’s meticulous study has implications for the larger question concerning “the parting of the ways.” The distinctions she draws out carefully delineate lines between the beliefs and practices of Second Temple Judaism and its early rabbinic modifications on the one hand and [End Page 412] developing Christian theology on the other hand. There are important boundaries which should not be blurred. Nir’s findings that John the Baptist is portrayed in neither the canonical Gospels nor in Josephus as a mysterious...

Reflections of Lev Shestov on the essence of freedom in the context of theology, philosophy and modern science

In his reflections on freedom, Lev Shestov considered any definition of freedom insufficient, which excludes the concept of arbitrariness, causeless action. Although he raises the source of the idea of freedom as arbitrariness (an arbitrary desire of a person violating the laws of nature) to the Jewish prophets, in reality it was taken by him from the reasoning of the hero of the novel by F. Dostoevsky, “Notes from the Underground.” The article proves that in the words of his hero, Dostoevsky objects to A. Schopenhauer in the concept of which all human actions are subject to strict causal laws, and freedom refers to the transcendental act of “choosing” one’s character, which determines the actions and remains unchanged throughout life. However, recognizing the strict regularity of all phenomena (and actions) within the world,one can see the highest human freedom in the ability to arbitrarily change the world as a whole. This is precisely what the hero of Dostoevsky, “not reconciling” with the laws of nature, has in mind, and it is precisely to this concept of freedom that Shestov comes to. The article shows that such an understanding of freedom has parallels in theology (in Kabbalah, in Sufism and in Christian Gnosticism), and also has some foundations in modern science: the quantum theory claims that the macroscopic world is the result of many acts of observation made jointly by all people.

Reading religions through words: Israel

İsrail ifadesi, tarihten günümüze Yahudileri tanımlamak için kullanılan en önemli kelimelerden birisidir. Bu çalışmada İsrail terimi merkeze alınarak, Yahudi tarihinden ve Yahudi peygamberlerinden örneklerle kelime, tarihi, teolojik ve filiolojik açılardan incelenmeye çalışılacaktır. İsrail adı, İbranilerin atalarından biri sayılan Hz.Yakub’a verilen bir isim veya lakaptır. Yahudi Kutsal kitabı Tevrat’ın (Tora) Tekvin bölümünde anlatıldığına göre bu isim ona Tanrı Yehova tarafından verilmiştir. Kelime İbranicede, Tanrı’yla güreşen veya Tanrı’yla mücadele eden anlamına gelmektedir. Bu anlamdan hareketle bir kısım araştırmacılar, Yahudilerin tarih boyu, Tanrı’yla, insanlar ve diğer toplumlarla yaptıkları mücadeleye işaret ettiği şeklinde yorumlamışlardır. Hz. Yakub, bazı noktalarda Yahudilerden farklı olarak değerlendirilse de, İslam açısından da bir peygamber olarak kabul edilmiştir. İsrail kelimesi Kur’an’da, hem Yakub’un kendisini, hem de onun soyundan gelen İsraioğullarını ifade etmek için kullanılmıştır. Yahudi tarihi boyunca da kelime, bütün Yahudileri ifade ederken, Hz. Yakub’un ölümünden sonra ise hem Hz. Süleyman’dan sonra Kuzeyde kurulan İsrail Krallığı’nın, hem de bu günkü İsrail Devleti’nin adı olmuştur.

The origin of the idea of personality, freedom of thought and conscience in the era of antiquity

The article is devoted to the origin of the idea of freedom of conscience, which, according to the author, appeared in the era of classical antiquity. Earlier, in the primitive community and in the era of early antiquity, where mythological consciousness prevailed, humanity had not yet thought of freedom. At the same time, in ancient epochs of different ethnos, f.ex. the Bible and other historical sources, we find facts that demonstrate an insurmountable human desire for independence, freedom: manifestations of doubt, disobedience, free-thinking and actions that contradict traditions, established rules and norms, as well as a desire to be free from the influence of the past. Doubts, free thought, are a profound expression of the "freedom of spirit" that is, according to St. Augustine, "freedom itself." Already in the ancient epoch of human existence in the religious-mythological consciousness formed the idea that the human essence itself provides for the possibility of disobedience, social deviation, that the "obedience" of a free man is different from absolute and unconditional submission.
 In a certain period, the “axial time” period, almost simultaneously (in historical dimension), Zarathustra (VI BC), Buddha (564-483 BC), Confucius (551-479 BC) declared themselves; in the Middle East, in Palestine, the Jewish prophets preached, in Greece in those years appeared philosophers Thales, Parmenides, Socrates and Protagoras. The demythologization of consciousness violates the traditional connection of a person with the traditions of the tribe, race, with various prescriptions and norms of a religious nature. It is time for reflection: a person's understanding of his own actions, the specifics of his spiritual world. It is a transition from the ritual-mythological consciousness of the primitive man to self-reflective, abstract, speculative and analytical thinking. Man begins to become aware of his being and himself, sprouts and develops an individual consciousness, an important hypostasis of which is the desire of the individual for freedom.
 In ancient Greece, as early as this day, the individual “I” was taking the first steps to stand out from the community-generic “We”. Individual philosophers emerge who, contrary to tradition, preach new ethical and religious ideas, new knowledge, contribute to the transformation of human consciousness, demonstrating and affirming their desire for freedom, so far without conceptual understanding of it.
 The article reveals the stages of the unfolding of ideas of freedom and conscience, analyzes the thoughts of Greek philosophers, in particular Socrates and Aristotle, explains the origin of these ideas precisely during the heyday of the polis, which democratic principles of organizing community life formed a free man, citizen, freedom of thought, freedom of thought and speech. Antiquity laid the foundation for all Western consciousness of freedom - both the reality of freedom and its idea (Jaspers), in particular the idea of freedom of conscience, which found its further development in Christianity.

Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance by Sarah Elliott Novacich

Reviewed by: Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance by Sarah Elliott Novacich Daniel Sawyer sarah elliott novacich, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 97. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 214. isbn: 978–1–107–17705–5. $99.99. How did medieval people perceive the labor of history? How did they perceive, that is, not the past itself, but the processes of understanding the past and of gathering together information about it? In this imaginative and engaging book, Sarah Elliott Novacich explores these questions via three episodes in sacred history: the stories of Eden, Noah, and the Harrowing of Hell. Each episode involves the creation, selection, or recollection of what might be called, in the modern theoretical sense of the term, [End Page 110] ‘an archive.’ Mystery plays portraying these stories are central to the book, but the study also travels through an eclectic range of other primary texts. The first chapter proposes that there is a contradiction baked into the idea of the Garden of Eden, a location in space and time which serves both as a lost original which the postlapsarian world copies, badly, and as something recorded, re-recorded, and so to some extent summoned up through the creative exercise of imagination in that same postlapsarian world. Novacich identifies a blurring of the two understandings in the mystery plays’ struggle to stage the Garden. In the second chapter, Novacich considers treatments in romances and chronicles of Noah’s Ark and other seafarers (including Brutus) whose medieval stories resonate with that of Noah. These stories, she suggests, orbit uneasily around the processes of selection and exclusion involved in stocking a boat, but also, analogously, involved in compiling a record or history. The third chapter extends this thread into an examination of the character of Noah’s wife in the mystery plays. In Noah’s wife, a previously minor figure who plays an expanded role in later medieval English dramatic versions of the Ark narrative, Novacich finds a speaker who points out the losses and problems implied by Noah’s selection activity, in ways analogous to some moves in the history of modern feminist literary criticism. The fourth chapter turns to the Harrowing of Hell and other medieval narratives which might recall it, such as Sir Orfeo and the St Patrick’s Purgatory tradition. Novacich proposes that these texts (and images: the figures contain several startling hell mouths from medieval manuscripts), presenting the return of the past through people observed in or rescued from an underworld, show us both the power and the risk inherent in the act of looking back at the past and inviting it into the present. The final chapter explores the accounts of the Harrowing in the mystery plays, where Novacich identifies tensions between the Harrowing’s finality, as a moment when Jewish prophets and patriarchs are shuffled into place in a new Christian history, and the necessarily repetitious, rehearsed, and enduring nature of the plays themselves. Overall, the book depicts a culture which was keenly conscious both of the past and of the processes by which it might be ordered and preserved. The considerable range of both this book’s primary texts and its theoretical armory could invite objections: as an extreme example, about three centuries separate the thought of Hugh of St Victor (discussed pp. 59–66) and the manuscripts of the York and N-Town plays—in other words, roughly the same time as separates us from Daniel Defoe—so finding both being taken as grist in the same monograph, without intervening diachronic passages, might surprise. This range is really, however, the mark of an alternative approach which thrives on mirroring, resonance, and what Novacich calls ‘imagined adjacency’ (p. 163). The book does not attempt a conclusive or comprehensive study of archival thought in later medieval England, but rather presents an invigorating series of readings with much to offer other researchers. The book will be of interest to specialists in early English drama, but, precisely because of its much wider range, it will also have value for a broader readership: Novacich’s work on sacred...

Понятие индивидуальности как социокультурная парадигма (эволюция взглядов)

<p>В статье рассматриваются два процесса, идущие параллельно, — тенденция развития индивидуальности и философское осмысления этой тенденции в разные эпохи. Предполагается, что динамика представлений о сущности и изменении индивидуальности имеет парадигмальную основу, т. е. транслируется от эпохи к эпохе и зависит от угла зрения наблюдателя.</p><p>Понятие индивидуальности закладывается в осевое время в античной культуре, понимающей человека как меру всех вещей. Динамика развития индивидуальности — от еврейских пророков и греческих философов до великих христианских мыслителей и деятелей XVI–XVIII вв. — раскрывается в западной культуре. Аристотелевская индивидуальность характеризуется через понимающее познание как внутреннее устремление души к постижению истины. У римских стоиков появляется предчувствие воли как особой самостоятельной способности души. Христианская индивидуальность, первоначально осознающая свою целостность через веру в Абсолют, в конце Средневековья приходит к ощущению дуальности тела и духа, из которой рождается активный субъект Нового времени. Он предстает как индивидуальность, нацеленная на завоевание сущего, — природы и человека. Первоначально, у Канта, познание мира и самопознание имеют одинаковую природу, но позже, у Хайдеггера, научно-техническое понимание мира противопоставляется самораскрытию человека.</p><p>Констатируется, что каждый новый виток понимания индивидуальности открывал новый парадигмальный ракурс развития культуры, способствуя оформлению ее новых отраслей: в Античности — философии, в Средневековье — религии, в Новое время — науки.</p><p>cience. </p>

The history, origin, and meaning of Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality

While it is uncontroversial that the slave revolt in morality consists in a denial of the nobles as objects of value, Nietzsche’s account in the Genealogy’s first essay invites ambiguities concerning its origin, ressentiment’s relationship to value creation, and its meaning. In this paper, I address these ambiguities by analyzing the morality of good and evil as an historical artifact of Judeo-Christian tradition, and I argue for a two-stage, non-strategic interpretation of the slave revolt, according to which Judaism and Christianity each made essential and different contributions. The inversion of values began with the Jewish prophets, who claimed the poor were holy and ‘good’ and the rich ‘evil’ (BGE 195), and it was sustained throughout the Second Temple period by the Jewish priests in relation to a ‘priestly-noble’ (GM I 7) conception of the virtuous person as holy and pure. Christ, through his espousal of egalitarianism (A 27), negated the pathos of distance essential to noble values, thus beginning the second phase of the slave revolt where goodness became associated with a distinctly slavish conception of virtue.

Religia w służbie polityki. Mistyka syjonizmu religijnego

The aim of this article is to present the contribution of Religious Zionism to the strategy and ideology of Zionism. This contribution consisted in conferring a halo of sanctity upon Zionism, nation, state and the territory of Palestine, by means of quotes from the Torah, Jewish prophets, poets and mystics. Thanks to the efforts of Religious Zionists, Zionism as a whole gained its nationalist-religious specificity and later imparted these traits to the state Israel.

“We Have the Prophets”: Inspiration and the Prophets in Athenagoras of Athens

Abstract:In contrast to those who argue simply that Athenagoras’s discussion of the prophets and inspiration is Hellenic, sourced in Philo as well as in Plato and Plutarch, this paper claims that there are other sources to consider that are equally informative. Athenagoras manifests alliance and dependence upon the Septuagint, other Jewish sources, the New Testament and second-century Christian sources, especially Ignatius and Justin. Athenagoras is a Christian philosopher. We would expect to see such a broad-based platform of resources for his theological construction. A simple classification of Greek, Hellenistic or Philonic for his notion of the inspired prophets is incomplete, unreflective of his own ingenuity, and fails to adequately account for his Judaeo-Christian heritage. It also minimizes the elegance of this early Christian attempt to theologize about the Jewish prophets in a gentile world. In Athenagoras we have an explanation of the prophets and inspiration that (1) clearly positions them preeminently as rational, doctrinal Christian authorities above the poets, philosophers, and human opinions; (2) constructs his community’s theology with an artistic flair that selectively and critically weaves together both pagan and Judaeo-Christian sources; so that (3) he might win a hearing from both his imperial and ecclesiastical audience.

Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake (review)

Reviewed by: Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake Andrew S. Jacobs Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts Susanna Drake Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 176. ISBN 978–0-8122–4520–2 Susanna Drake’s elegant first book, based on her Duke University dissertation, poses serious questions. “How did the figure of the ‘carnal Jew’ come to function as a topos of early Christian literature?” she asks at the outset, asking as well about the chronology of this topos (“when did it first appear?”), its function (“how did the stereotype … serve Christian leaders as they forged boundaries?”), and its larger contexts (“ancient understandings of gender and sexuality”). The chapters that follow outline a troubling discursive genealogy whose material traces have long outlived their late ancient context. In her introduction Drake stakes out a broad terrain. She evokes themes of “Bible,” “asceticism,” “heresies,” and “empire” (2), any one of which could be the subject of a rich monograph. Drake also makes clear her theoretical perspectives: the ways in which language, inflected by power, can produce and reproduce multiple possibilities of subjecthood (assujetissement is Foucault’s term, processed here through Judith Butler’s feminist philosophy and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial criticism). Throughout, Drake remains attentive to the intersecting discourses of gender, power, and body. Drake begins with the apostle Paul, who “like many Jewish polemicists before him, conceived of porneia and idolatry as the paradigmatic sin of Gentiles” (19). According to Drake, Jewish carnality first acquires its sinister shadows in two second-century texts: the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Helplessly mired in their own sinful bodies, Jews misread their sacred Scriptures in a bodily manner: they insist on the literal interpretations of food laws, festivals, and circumcision. This textual/sexual “tautology” structures future slanders against Jews: “Jewish misunderstanding of scripture is rooted in Jewish lust; simultaneously, Jewish lust is rooted in and authorized by Jewish (mis)understanding of scripture” (33). A [End Page 187] vast repertoire of negative sexual rhetoric is available to these early authors, drawn from Roman moral discourse as well as the Jewish prophets. What was nascent in Barnabas and Justin comes to full flower in the writings of Origen. Drake touches on several texts of Origen, but the basic message is consistent: “In his rhetorical production of Jewish literalism and his argument for Christian interpretive superiority, Origen formulated a certain ‘discourse of sexuality’ that characterized Jews as more fleshly and sexually depraved than their Christian counterparts” (40). Origen’s most lasting (and perhaps insidious) contribution to this “discourse of sexuality” is the “importation” of Paul’s flesh/spirit dichotomy into anti-Jewish discourse. What had been for Paul language that distinguished the “old man” from the “new man” now articulates the moral and exegetical boundary between Jews and Christians. Drake is clear that Origen is “misreading” and “misrepresenting” Paul (40, 44, 49), such that Origen’s innovative reading of the apostle actually becomes an unfortunate turning point in the history of Christian anti-Jewish discourse. Origen’s twisted Paul becomes the originator and authorizer of an ascetic and allegorical Christian way of being (as Drake notes, for Origen reading Paul, “allēgoria is askēsis” [52]), shaped in opposition to the profligate and literal-ist Jews. That Jews are not only textually and sexually corrupted, but are corrupters as well, emerges in Christian interpretations of the Susanna story from the Greek book of Daniel. Hippolytus allegorizes the innocent Jewish heroine into “the Church” who remains faithful to her husband (Christ) even in the face of trial (martyrdom). Hippolytus transforms the Jewish “elders” who threaten Susanna into those who persecute Christians—notably, both Jews and Gentiles. For Origen, the story once more reinforces the textual and sexual barriers between Jews and Christians: the “elders” who lusted after Susanna are no different than the Jews who, in Origen’s day, remain “duplicitous and corruptive” with respect to the Bible (69). The effect of these interpretations is not just to create a moral boundary between Jew and Christian, but to elicit the social danger of that boundary: “the relationship...

Peuple prophetique et nation temoin: Le peuple juif dans le Contra Faustum manichaeum de saint Augustin. By Alban Massie.

This hefty volume, as its subtitle indicates and its bulk implies, is a highly detailed contextual analysis of the role played by the Jewish people within the theological debate between St Augustine and Faustus as that is revealed and prosecuted in the 33 books of the Contra Faustum. This means, however, not simply the role which the Jews play for St Augustine in salvation history—the topic of chapters 4 and 5 which, comprise the second half of the book. It includes the role given to the Jews within the Manichaean attack upon Catholic Christianity in late antiquity, and the negative appraisal of the Jewish prophets in a Manichaean theology of revelation. Furthermore, the first half of the book examines Augustine’s writings on the Jews before the Contra Faustum. Given the sharp criticism sometimes levelled against Augustine for his teachings on Judaism, with the grave charge that he is largely responsible for the theological foundations of later anti-Semitism, this is a welcome if cumbersome book to be read alongside Paula Fredriksen’s 2010 work, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. Alban Massie requires us to take full account of the polemical circumstances in which Augustine’s teaching was formulated: what the bishop had to argue against shaped what he argued for. Faustus presented the Jews as enslaved to the evil principle opposed to the God of Light by a religion wholly without value in arriving at the truth. Its biblical heroes were really villains whose vices were indicative of their religion. Augustine defended a positive role for the Jews in salvation history, not only, nor primarily, by defending the moral character of the patriarchs, but by arguing for the prophetic nature of their lives and laws, and of the Jewish people itself. Augustine recognized God’s blessing on Israel, through the law and the prophets, defended Jewish worship of the one God, and the role which the Jews played as witnesses to Christianity. Though Augustine also argued that the refusal of the Jews to believe in Christ constituted a moral blindness which necessarily enslaved them to sin or carnal desire, it was not the Jews but the Manichees whom he accused of perfidy.

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks