Stand back! I am an EDUCATOR!
Bismillah~
My two night classes (Intro to Western Religions) are going swimmingly. The first seventh, or two weeks, I went over religious patterns & groups in the ancient & classical near east, with special attention to mystery cults & Zoroastrianism, and with side jaunts into Gnosis & Manichaeanism. I've woken up to the fact that I'm more interested in specifics about various such groups now that I'm not sweating over my own degree & have accordingly been charging through the books.
Current reading:
Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism in Talmudic Babylonia. Jacob Neusner, one of my favorite scholars, even though Rabbinical Judaism is really not my area. I'm amazed by any scholar who's written and edited close to 1,000 books. Anyway, his focus is on the history & social conditions of Jewry in the place that Rabbinical (i.e., Talmudic) Judaism really took off. It was a multi-ethnic society with immigrant Greeks, Babylonians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Persians, Kurds, and others, with the then-typical Hellenized upper-middle class. The sometimes-zealously Zoroastrian Sasanian empire alternated between bouts of viscious persecution of non-Zoros and heretical Zoros and bouts of coddlings various groups, like Jews and Nestorian Christians. You know those stories about the horrible infidel Persians stealing the Relics of the True Cross from Jerusalem? Well, the officer corps & bureaucracy were full of Nestorians in that war, and THEY did it! This and many other fascinating tidbits.
Sameul Lieu's Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China and M" in Mesopotamia and the Roman East. Manichae[an]ism was a big deal, the most successful world religion in terms of geographic spread & numbers of adherents after the Big Three Missionary Religions, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. It died out at last in China possibly as late as the 1600s. What have I known about it until now? Not a whole lot. More than I'll summarize here, but yikes, I didn't even know the founder Mani had the patronage of one Sassanid emperor, who hoped for a synthesizing religion to unify the diverse subject peoples; or that he was assassinated by Zoroastrian zealotz zhen he lozt the zatronage of za lazer zemperor. Until I read Neusner; I just got these & the ones bellow tonight & have only read the introductions & such. Learn to speed-read, folks, you've no idea how much you can suck down in one evening!
On the same front, Jason BeDuhn's The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual means to deconstruct the scholarly consensus about Manichaean practices & attitudes. He argues that, while there's been huge progress on actual M. texts, they're still interpreted through the lens inherited from Christian polemicists like Iraenus and Augustine. This one has the feeling of the scholar in love with something dead and on the shelf, something unjustly crushed by the unsympathetic boot of time; it's for sure aimed at people who already have more background in this area than I do, so I'm going to read Lieu for a picture from that ol' scholarly consensus. Something about body-hating Manichaeans who believe a monster awakened from God's impersonated wisdom's nightmare and created the earth as a trap for God-reflecting spirits; who had a lowly Auditor grade who couldn't read the books and several layers of Elect who could and couldn't share the secrets with grades below them; etc.
Gnosticism in caveman speech: World bad. Flies, pain, bad smells! Spirit good. Spirit need magic to escape bad world. Seeeeeeecret magic. Must fast and punish body. Then get secrets from priests, go to next level, get more secrets.
Gnosis had a big presence in old Alexandria, as did the Christianity of Athanasius & his school which fed in a major way into the pre-schism Orthodox/Catholic church. Roelof van den Broek's Studies in Gnosticism and Alexandrian Christianity (he leaves out Hermetica, which he addresses at length, too) is supposed to study some of those connections. Obviously Gnosis was not just something from which Orthodox XP could distinguish itself, there are shades and shades and shades of grey in an intellectually-charged religious environment. I like the look of this one, and it's put out by Brill, a very high-caliber publisher I've come to respect.
***
I've got some nice ones on the table from before this evening's spree, but my laptop's about to die.
My two night classes (Intro to Western Religions) are going swimmingly. The first seventh, or two weeks, I went over religious patterns & groups in the ancient & classical near east, with special attention to mystery cults & Zoroastrianism, and with side jaunts into Gnosis & Manichaeanism. I've woken up to the fact that I'm more interested in specifics about various such groups now that I'm not sweating over my own degree & have accordingly been charging through the books.
Current reading:
Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism in Talmudic Babylonia. Jacob Neusner, one of my favorite scholars, even though Rabbinical Judaism is really not my area. I'm amazed by any scholar who's written and edited close to 1,000 books. Anyway, his focus is on the history & social conditions of Jewry in the place that Rabbinical (i.e., Talmudic) Judaism really took off. It was a multi-ethnic society with immigrant Greeks, Babylonians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Persians, Kurds, and others, with the then-typical Hellenized upper-middle class. The sometimes-zealously Zoroastrian Sasanian empire alternated between bouts of viscious persecution of non-Zoros and heretical Zoros and bouts of coddlings various groups, like Jews and Nestorian Christians. You know those stories about the horrible infidel Persians stealing the Relics of the True Cross from Jerusalem? Well, the officer corps & bureaucracy were full of Nestorians in that war, and THEY did it! This and many other fascinating tidbits.
Sameul Lieu's Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China and M" in Mesopotamia and the Roman East. Manichae[an]ism was a big deal, the most successful world religion in terms of geographic spread & numbers of adherents after the Big Three Missionary Religions, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. It died out at last in China possibly as late as the 1600s. What have I known about it until now? Not a whole lot. More than I'll summarize here, but yikes, I didn't even know the founder Mani had the patronage of one Sassanid emperor, who hoped for a synthesizing religion to unify the diverse subject peoples; or that he was assassinated by Zoroastrian zealotz zhen he lozt the zatronage of za lazer zemperor. Until I read Neusner; I just got these & the ones bellow tonight & have only read the introductions & such. Learn to speed-read, folks, you've no idea how much you can suck down in one evening!
On the same front, Jason BeDuhn's The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual means to deconstruct the scholarly consensus about Manichaean practices & attitudes. He argues that, while there's been huge progress on actual M. texts, they're still interpreted through the lens inherited from Christian polemicists like Iraenus and Augustine. This one has the feeling of the scholar in love with something dead and on the shelf, something unjustly crushed by the unsympathetic boot of time; it's for sure aimed at people who already have more background in this area than I do, so I'm going to read Lieu for a picture from that ol' scholarly consensus. Something about body-hating Manichaeans who believe a monster awakened from God's impersonated wisdom's nightmare and created the earth as a trap for God-reflecting spirits; who had a lowly Auditor grade who couldn't read the books and several layers of Elect who could and couldn't share the secrets with grades below them; etc.
Gnosticism in caveman speech: World bad. Flies, pain, bad smells! Spirit good. Spirit need magic to escape bad world. Seeeeeeecret magic. Must fast and punish body. Then get secrets from priests, go to next level, get more secrets.
Gnosis had a big presence in old Alexandria, as did the Christianity of Athanasius & his school which fed in a major way into the pre-schism Orthodox/Catholic church. Roelof van den Broek's Studies in Gnosticism and Alexandrian Christianity (he leaves out Hermetica, which he addresses at length, too) is supposed to study some of those connections. Obviously Gnosis was not just something from which Orthodox XP could distinguish itself, there are shades and shades and shades of grey in an intellectually-charged religious environment. I like the look of this one, and it's put out by Brill, a very high-caliber publisher I've come to respect.
***
I've got some nice ones on the table from before this evening's spree, but my laptop's about to die.