Download or read book The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World written by Leonard Victor Rutgers and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 1998 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume a number of scholars from Israel, the USA, and England have joined forces with the well-known Utrecht University Research Unit "The Cultural Milieu of Early Christianity" to investigate in an unprecendently interdisciplinary fashion how sacred books functioned in pagan, Jewish, and Christian circles. The 16 essays cover a wide range of topics including a discussion of emergence of canonical scriptures in late antiquity, an investigation of parallels between exegesis of Homer by the Greeks and that of the Bible by the Jews, a study of the rise of Virgil's Aeneid to the status of "canonical" book; a discussion of the use of sacred books as instant oracles; an investigation of the role of the Bible in polemics between Jews and Christians; an analysis of the wide variety of quotation formula's used by New Testament authors, a discussion of the role of biblical interpretation in the thought world of Jesus' brother, James; an investigation of the function of Scripture in the midrash Aggadat Bereshit, and other topics.
Download or read book Religions of the Ancient World written by Sarah Iles Johnston and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking, first basic reference work on ancient religious beliefs collects and organizes available information on ten ancient cultures and traditions, including Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia, and offers an expansive, comparative perspective on each one.
Download or read book The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written written by Martin Seymour-Smith and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hundred books discussed here have radically altered the course of civilisation , whether they have embodied religions practised by millions, achieved the pinnacle of artistic expression, pointed the way to scientific discovery of enormous consequence, redirected beliefs about the nature of man, or forever altered the global political landscape. For each there is a historical overview, an analysis of the work's effect on our lives today and a lively discussion of the reasons for inclusion.
Download or read book Religious Violence in the Ancient World written by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative examination and interpretation of religious violence in the Graeco-Roman world and Late Antiquity.
Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Download or read book Esther written by Hanna Kahana and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is essentially a very exacting comparison between the Septuaginta translation of the Esther Scroll and its Hebrew text. Each and every verse in the Scroll is graphically presented in a four columned table in which we inserted the Hebrew text, broken up into syntactically coherent short phrases, its Greek counterpart and the English translations of the Hebrew and Greek phrases respectively. In the running commentary we discuss the additions and the omissions, examine how the Translator succeeded in rendering especially difficult and complicated Hebrew verses, and try to throw light on his language, his methods and his translational idiosyncrasies. We also quote the Vulgate, the Aramaic Targumim and the Greek A Text and, in most cases translate them too in English. The added value of this book is the synoptic graphic presentation of each verse which enables one to get an immediate impression of the two texts and their juxtaposition.
Download or read book Magic in the Ancient World written by Fritz Graf and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Greeks and Romans often turned to magic to achieve personal goals. Magical rites were seen as a route for direct access to the gods, for material gains as well as spiritual satisfaction. In this survey of magical beliefs and practices from the sixth century B.C.E. through late antiquity, Fritz Graf sheds new light on ancient religion. Graf explores the important types of magic in Greco-Roman antiquity, describing rites and explaining the theory behind them. And he characterizes the ancient magician: his training and initiation, social status, and presumed connections with the divine world. With trenchant analysis of underlying conceptions and vivid account of illustrative cases, Graf gives a full picture of the practice of magic and its implications. He concludes with an evaluation of the relation of magic to religion.
Download or read book The Ancient Mysteries written by Marvin W. Meyer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1999-05-07 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zeus and the other gods of shining Olympus were in reality divine only by popular consent. Over the course of time Olympian luster diminished in favor of religious experiences more immediate to the concerns of people living in an increasingly cosmopolitan ancient world. These experiences were provided by the mysteries, religions that flourished particularly during the Hellenistic period and were secretly practiced by groups of adherents who decided, through personal choice, to be initiated into the profound realities of one deity or another. Unlike the official state religions, in which people were expected to make an outward show of allegiance to the local gods, the mysteries emphasized an inwardness and privacy of worship within a closed band of initiates. In this book, Marvin W. Meyer explores the sacrifices and prayers, the public celebrations and secret ceremonies, the theatrical performances and literary works, the gods and goddesses that were a part of the mystery religions of Greece in the seventh century B.C. to the Judaism and Christianity of the Roman world of the seventh century A.D.
Download or read book The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East written by Charles Francis Horne and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sacred History written by Katherine Van Liere and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first geographically broad, comparative survey of early modern 'sacred history', or writing on the history of the Christian Church, its leaders and saints, and its internal developments, in the two centuries from c. 1450 to c. 1650.
Download or read book Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World written by John Pedley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-17 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering important themes and issues which are linked to historic and specific sanctuaries, this book will provide students with an accessible yet authoritative introduction to ancient Greek sanctuaries.
Download or read book The Wildsea RPG written by Felix Isaacs and published by . This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A POST-FALL FANTASY TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME SET IN A RAMPANT OCEAN OF VERDANT GREEN. Some three hundred years ago the empires of the world were toppled by a wave of fast growing greenery, a tide of rampant growth spilling from the West known as the Verdancy. Now chainsaw-driven ships cut their way across dense treetop waves, their engines powered by oilfruit, rope-golems, honey and pride.You play a wildsailor, part of a motley crew consisting of humanity's weathered descendants, cactoid gunslingers, centipedal fungi, silk-clothed spiderfolk, and other, stranger things. With your fellow crewmembers, you'll journey across the lingin' tide discovering charts, pursuing drives, and avoiding mires of the deep.The Wildsea hungers and grows, roots sinking deep into the forest floor as the waves above ripple with life. What will you discover in its depths?The Wildsea is a tabletop roleplaying game from Quillhound Studios for 2-6 players inspired by stories like Sunless Sea, Bastion, and the Bas-Lag Trilogy. The Wildsea uses a narrative, fiction-first d6 dicepool system that draws inspiration from games like Belly of the Beast, Blades in the Dark, and 13th Age.
Download or read book The Death of Sacred Texts written by Kristina Myrvold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Death of Sacred Texts draws attention to a much neglected topic in the study of sacred texts: the religious and ritual attitudes towards texts which have become old and damaged and can no longer be used for reading practices or in religious worship. This book approaches religious texts and scriptures by focusing on their physical properties and the dynamic interactions of devices and habits that lie beneath and within a given text. In the last decades a growing body of research studies has directed attention to the multiple uses and ways people encounter written texts and how they make them alive, even as social actors, in different times and cultures. Considering religious people seem to have all the motives for giving their sacred texts a respectful symbolic treatment, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the ritual procedures of disposing and renovating old texts. This book fills this gap, providing empirical data and theoretical analyses of historical and contemporary religious attitudes towards, and practices of text disposals within, seven world religions: Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Exploring the cultural and historical variations of rituals for religious scriptures and texts (such as burials, cremations and immersion into rivers) and the underlying beliefs within the religious traditions, this book investigates how these religious practices and stances respond to modernization and globalization processes when new technologies have made it possible to mass-produce and publish religious texts on the Internet.
Download or read book Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings written by James W. Watts and published by Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts. This book was released on 2020 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume an international team of scholars address the theme of books as sacred beings from an impressively diverse range of primary material and perspectives. Yet, as a group, they meld to engage and advance previous research to solidify the conclusion that human cultures, especially religious groups, often ritualize bodies as sacred books and books as divine beings. The studies collected here not only increase the range of examples of this phenomenon. They also show the wide variety of ways in which the identity of books, bodies and beings gets both ritualized and theorized. The articles are bracketed by an introduction to the collection, and then by a concluding essay that extrapolates the theme of books as sacred beings on a more general level.
Download or read book Excavating Pilgrimage written by Troels Myrup Kristensen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume sheds new light on the significance and meaning of material culture for the study of pilgrimage in the ancient world, focusing in particular on Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity. It thus discusses how archaeological evidence can be used to advance our understanding of ancient pilgrimage and ritual experience. The volume brings together a group of scholars who explore some of the rich archaeological evidence for sacred travel and movement, such as the material footprint of different activities undertaken by pilgrims, the spatial organization of sanctuaries and the wider catchment of pilgrimage sites, as well as the relationship between architecture, art and ritual. Contributions also tackle both methodological and theoretical issues related to the study of pilgrimage, sacred travel and other types of movement to, from and within sanctuaries through case studies stretching from the first millennium BC to the early medieval period.
Download or read book Brandjack written by Q. Langley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing 90+ case studies including BP, Beyoncé, Pizza Hut and Chrysler, this is the first book to analyze brandjacking - when organizations lose control of their brand's image online. Combining crisis communication and social media, this book charts the trend's growth, offering advice to those who find themselves at the mercy of brand pirates.
Download or read book Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism written by Christian Frevel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on concepts, practices and images associated with purity in the ancient Mediterranean, this volume contributes new aspects to the current discussion about the forming of religious traditions, from a comparative perspective that acknowldges individual developments, mutual exchanges, as well as transcultural processes.
