Download or read book Mystery and Secrecy in the Nag Hammadi Collection and Other Ancient Literature Ideas and Practices written by Christian H. Bull and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide array of sources, this anthology sets out to analyze the concepts of mystery and secrecy that occur in the ritual and rhetoric of antique Mediterranean religion, with an emphasis on Gnosticism, Christianity, and Paganism.
Download or read book Mystery and Secrecy in the Nag Hammadi Collection and Other Ancient Literature Ideas and Practices written by Christian H. Bull and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystery and secrecy were central concepts in the ritual, rhetoric, and sociological stratification of antique Mediterranean religions. That the ultimate nature and workings of the divine were secret, and either could not or should not be revealed except as a mystery for the initiated, was widely accepted among Pagans, Jews, and then Christians, both Gnostic and otherwise. The similarities and differences in the language of mystery and secrecy across religious and cultural borders are thus crucial for understanding this important period of the history of religions. The present anthology aims to present and analyze a wide selection of sources elucidating this theme, reflecting the correspondingly wide scholarly interests of Professor Einar Thomassen in honor of his 60th birthday.
Download or read book Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism written by Michael E. Stone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secret societies in ancient Judaism -- "Esoteric", mysteries, and secrecy -- Esoteric as a social category -- The social organization of secrecy -- Initiation and graded revelation -- Other secret Jewish groups and traditions -- The social setting of esoteric tradition
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy written by Hugh B. Urban and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrecy is a central and integral component of all religious traditions. Not limited simply to religious groups that engage in clandestine activities such as hidden rites of initiation or terrorism, secrecy is inherent in the very fabric of religion itself. Its importance has perhaps never been more acutely relevant than in our own historical moment. In the wake of 9/11 and other acts of religious violence, we see the rise of invasive national security states that target religious minorities and pose profound challenges to the ideals of privacy and religious freedom, accompanied by the resistance by many communities to such efforts. As such, questions of secrecy, privacy, surveillance, and security are among the most central and contested issues of twenty-first century religious life. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy is the definitive reference source for the key topics, problems, and debates in this crucial field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising twenty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts: Configurations of Religious Secrecy: Conceptual and Comparative Frameworks Secrecy as Religious Practice Secrecy and the Politics of the Present Secrecy and Social Resistance Secrecy, Terrorism, and Surveillance. This cutting-edge volume discusses secrecy in relation to major categories of religious experience and individual religious practices while also examining the transformations of secrecy in the modern period, including the rise of fraternal orders, the ongoing wars on terror, the rise of far-right white supremacist groups, increasing concerns over religious freedom and privacy, the role of the internet in the spread and surveillance of such groups, and the resistance to surveillance by many indigenous and diasporic communities. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, comparative religion, new religious movements, and religion and politics. It will be equally central to debates in the related disciplines of sociology, anthropology, political science, security studies and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices written by Hugo Lundhaug and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2015-10-19 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott offer a sustained argument for the monastic provenance of the Nag Hammadi Codices. They examine the arguments for and against a monastic Sitz im Leben and defend the view that the Codices were produced and read by Christian monks, most likely Pachomians, in the fourth- and fifth-century monasteries of Upper Egypt. Eschewing the modern classification of the Nag Hammadi texts as “Gnostic,” the authors approach the codices and their ancient owners from the perspective of the diverse monastic culture of late antique Egypt and situate them in the context of the ongoing controversies over extra-canonical literature and the theological legacy of Origen. Through a combination of sources, including idealized hagiographies, travelogues, monastic rules and exhortations, and the more quotidian details revealed in documentary papyri, manuscript collections, and archaeology, monasticism in the Thebaid is brought to life, and the Nag Hammadi codices situated within it. The cartonnage papyri from the leather covers of the codices, which bear witness to the monastic culture of the region, are closely examined, while scribal and codicological features of the codices are analyzed and compared with contemporary manuscripts from Egypt. Special attention is given to the codices’ scribal notes and colophons which offer direct evidence of their producers and users. The study ultimately reveals the Nag Hammadi Codices as a collection of books completely at home in the monastic manuscript culture of late antique Egypt."--
Download or read book The Occult World written by Christopher Partridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents students and scholars with a comprehensive overview of the fascinating world of the occult. It explores the history of Western occultism, from ancient and medieval sources via the Renaissance, right up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary occultism. Written by a distinguished team of contributors, the essays consider key figures, beliefs and practices as well as popular culture.
Download or read book Networks and the Spread of Ideas in the Past written by Anna Collar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Networks and the Spread of Ideas in the Past: Strong Ties, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange gathers contributions from an international group of scholars to reconsider the role that strong social ties play in the transmission of new ideas, and their crucial place in network analyses of the past. Drawing on case studies that range from the early Iron Age Mediterranean to medieval Britain, the contributing authors showcase the importance of looking at strong social ties in the transmission of complex information, which requires relationships structured through mutual trust, memory, and reciprocity. They highlight the importance of sanctuaries in the process of information transmission, the power of narrative in creating a sense of community even across geographical space, and the control of social systems in order to facilitate or stifle new information transfer. Networks and the Spread of Ideas in the Past demonstrates the value of searching the past for powerful social connections, offers us the chance to tell more human stories through our analyses, and represents an essential new addition to the study and use of networks in archaeology and history. The book will be useful to academics and students working in the Digital Humanities, History, and Archaeology.
Download or read book Sanctifying Texts Transforming Rituals written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanctifying Texts, Transforming Rituals: Encounters in Liturgical Studies explores the dynamics of Christian ritual practices in their relation to a broader cultural framework. The nineteen essays, written in honour of the liturgist Gerard A.M. Rouwhorst (Tilburg University), study liturgical developments in times of transition, in which religious and cultural changes set the development of worship practices in motion. The chapters in the first part (Texts) concentrate on the close connection between narrative texts and liturgical practice. In part two (Rituals), the focus shifts to the significance of liturgy as it expresses itself in rituals, and to the understanding of ritual acting. This section includes a variety of ritual aspects of liturgy, including the performance of the sacraments and the persons involved, as well as the relation between the liturgical ritual and material objects, such as images and relics. Section three (Encounters) crosses the borders of the discipline of liturgical studies. This final section of the book studies (ritual) relations between Christians and non-Christians through history, and includes contributions that study the dialogues between different liturgical languages and media. Contributors are: Elizabeth Boddens Hosang, Paul Bradshaw, Harald Buchinger, Charles Caspers, Paul van Geest, Bert Groen, Martin Klöckener, Bart Koet, Clemens Leonhard, Ruben van Luijk, Gerard Lukken, Daniela Müller, Willemien Otten, Marcel Poorthuis, Paul Post, Ilia Rodov, Els Rose, Joshua Schwartz, Louis van Tongeren, and Nienke Vos.
Download or read book Mystery and the Making of a Christian Historical Consciousness written by T. J. Lang and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In general, theological terms this study examines the interplay of early Christian understandings of history, revelation, and identity. The book explores this interaction through detailed analysis of appeals to "mystery" in the Pauline letter collection and then the discourse of previously hidden but newly revealed mysteries in various second-century thinkers. T.J. Lang argues that the historical coordination of the concealed/revealed binary ("the mystery previously hidden but presently revealed") enabled these early Christian authors to ground Christian claims - particularly key ecclesial, hermeneutical, and christological claims - in Israel's history and in the eternal design of God while at the same time accounting for their revelatory newness. This particular Christian conception of time gives birth to a new and totalizing historical consciousness, and one that has significant implications for the construction of Christian identity, particularly vis-à-vis Judaism.
Download or read book Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Mysteries have long attracted the interest of scholars, an interest that goes back at least to the time of the Reformation. After a period of interest around the turn of the twentieth century, recent decades have seen an important study of Walter Burkert (1987). Yet his thematic approach makes it hard to see how the actual initiation into the Mysteries took place. To do precisely that is the aim of this book. It gives a ‘thick description’ of the major Mysteries, not only of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, but also those located at the interface of Greece and Anatolia: the Mysteries of Samothrace, Imbros and Lemnos as well as those of the Corybants. It then proceeds to look at the Orphic-Bacchic Mysteries, which have become increasingly better understood due to the many discoveries of new texts in the recent times. Having looked at classical Greece we move on to the Roman Empire, where we study not only the lesser Mysteries, which we know especially from Pausanias, but also the new ones of Isis and Mithras. We conclude our book with a discussion of the possible influence of the Mysteries on emerging Christianity. Its detailed references and up-to-date bibliography will make this book indispensable for any scholar interested in the Mysteries and ancient religion, but also for those scholars who work on initiation or esoteric rituals, which were often inspired by the ancient Mysteries.
Download or read book The Use of Scripture in the Apocryphon of John written by David Creech and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Creech explores at length the Apocryphon of John's ambivalent treatment of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Although Moses is explicitly corrected at five points in the text, Genesis' account of creation is nonetheless the basis for the Apocryphon's cosmogony and anthropogony. Its uneven treatment of the biblical text is the result of a dispute between the authors of the Apocryphon and other early Catholics. At the earliest stage of the text the Christians who wrote and read the Apocryphon worshiped alongside other early catholic Christians without any sense of contradiction or inconsistency. The key shift in the Apocryphon occurred after Irenaeus of Lyons' assault on "Knowledge Falsely So-Called." In response to his concerted effort to bring the church under the authority of early catholic bishops, the framers inserted corrections to Moses. The corrections are primarily rhetorical and used to refute early catholic identity markers.
Download or read book Silent Statements written by Michal Beth Dinkler and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even a brief comparison with its canonical counterparts demonstrates that the Gospel of Luke is preoccupied with the power of spoken words; still, words alone do not make a language. Just as music without silence collapses into cacophony, so speech without silence signifies nothing: silences are the invisible, inaudible cement that hold the entire edifice together. Though scholars across diverse disciplines have analyzed silence in terms of its contexts, sources, and functions, these insights have barely begun to make inroads in biblical studies. Utilizing conceptual tools from narratology and reader-response criticism, this study is an initial exploration of largely uncharted territory – the various ways that narrative intersections of speech and silences function together rhetorically in Luke’s Gospel. Considering speech and silence to be mutually constituted in intricate and inextricable ways, Dinkler demonstrates that attention to both characters’ silences and the narrator’s silences helps to illuminate plot, characterization, theme, and readerly experience in Luke’s Gospel. Focusing on both speech and silence reveals that the Lukan narrator seeks to shape readers into ideal witnesses who use speech and silence in particular ways; Luke can be read as an early Christian proclamation – not only of the gospel message – but also of the proper ways to use speech and silence in light of that message. Thus, we find that speech and silence are significant matters of concern within the Lukan story and that speech and silence are significant tools used in its telling.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature written by John Joseph Collins and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2014 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalypticism arose in ancient Judaism in the last centuries BCE and played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity. It is not only of historical interest: there has been a growing awareness, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, of the prevalence of apocalyptic beliefs in the contemporary world. To understand these beliefs, it is necessary to appreciate their complex roots in the ancient world, and the multi-faceted character of the phenomenon of apocalypticism. The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature is a thematic and phenomenological exploration of apocalypticism in the Judaic and Christian traditions. Most of the volume is devoted to the apocalyptic literature of antiquity. Essays explore the relationship between apocalypticism and prophecy, wisdom and mysticism; the social function of apocalypticism and its role as resistance literature; apocalyptic rhetoric from both historical and postmodern perspectives; and apocalyptic theology, focusing on phenomena of determinism and dualism and exploring apocalyptic theology's role in ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism. The final chapters of the volume are devoted to the appropriation of apocalypticism in the modern world, reviewing the role of apocalypticism in contemporary Judaism and Christianity, and more broadly in popular culture, addressing the increasingly studied relation between apocalypticism and violence, and discussing the relationship between apocalypticism and trauma, which speaks to the underlying causes of the popularity of apocalyptic beliefs. This volume will further the understanding of a vital religious phenomenon too often dismissed as alien and irrational by secular western society.
Download or read book The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean written by Jörg Rüpke and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the Hellenistic and Imperial periods in both pagan polytheistic as well as Jewish monotheistic settings, this edited collection focuses on individuation in everyday religious practices across the ancient Mediterranean as identified in institutional developments and philosophical reflections on the self.
Download or read book Knowledge and Profanation written by Martin Mulsow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and Profanation offers numerous instances of profoundly religious polemicists profanizing other religions ad majorem gloriam Dei, as well as sincere adherents of their own religion, whose reflective scholarly undertakings were perceived as profanizing transgressions – occasionally with good reason. In the history of knowledge of religion and profanation unintended consequences often play a decisive role. Can too much knowledge of religion be harmful? Could the profanation of a foreign religion turn out to be a double-edged sword? How much profanating knowledge of other religions could be tolerated in a premodern world? In eleven contributions, internationally renowned scholars analyze cases of learned profanation, committed by scholars ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, as well as several antique predecessors. Contributors are: Asaph Ben-Tov, Ulrich Groetsch, Andreas Mahler, Karl Morrison, Martin Mulsow, Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Wolfgang Spickermann, Riccarda Suitner, John Woodbridge, Azzan Yadin, and Holger Zellentin.
Download or read book Greek Philosophy and Mystery Cults written by María José García Blanco and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to this book offer a broad vision of the relationships that were established between Greek Philosophy and the Mystery Cults. The authors centre their attention on such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic and the Neoplatonist philosophers, who used – and in some cases criticised – doctrinal elements from Mystery Cults, adapting them to their own thinking. Thus, the volume provides a new approach to some of the most renowned Greek philosophers, highlighting the influence that Mystery Cults, such as Orphism, Dionysianism, or the Eleusinian rites, had on the formation of fundamental aspects of their thinking. Given its interdisciplinary character, this book will appeal to a broad academic readership interested in the origin of Hellenic thinking and culture. It will be especially useful for those eager for a deeper approach to two fundamental domains that attract the attention of many Antiquity scholars: Greek philosophy and religion.
Download or read book The Open Mind written by Kevin Sullivan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Festschrift draws on the research interests of Christopher Rowland. The collection of essays comes from former doctoral students and other friends, many of whom shed light on the angelic contribution to the thought-world of developing Christianity. The significance of the Jewish contribution to developing Christian ideology is critically assessed, including the impact of the original Jewish sources on the earliest Christian belief. The distinguished contributors to this volume include April DeConick, Paul Foster, John Rogerson, Tobias Nicklas and Andrei Orlov.
