Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam PDF Author: Mladen Popović
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110596601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.

Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam PDF Author: Mladen Popović
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110596601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.

Behind the Myths

Behind the Myths PDF Author: John Pickard
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1481783629
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 495

Get Book

Book Description
There has never been a more important time for a study of the social, economic, and political origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three important world religions that share a common root. This book adopts a Marxist, that is a materialist, view of human development, so it takes as its starting point the idea that gods, angels, miracles, and other supernatural phenomena do not exist in the real world and therefore cannot be taken as explanations for the origin and rise of these faiths. It looks instead at the material conditions at appropriate periods in antiquity and the social and economic forces that were at work, to outline the real foundations of these three doctrines. In doing so, it challenges the historicity of key figures like Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. This is a unique book that draws on the research, knowledge, and expertise of hundreds of historians, archaeologists, and scholars to create a new synthesis that is both coherent and completely based on a materialist world outlook. It is a book written by an unbeliever for other unbelievers as a contribution to a discussion among atheists and secularists as to the real origins of the so-called Abramic faiths. It will be a revelatory read, even to those already firmly of an atheist or secularist persuasion, underpinning their nonreligious views, and it will provide a valuable resource for all those who might be coming to question the hold that organized religion has had on human society.

Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity

Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity PDF Author: George H. van Kooten
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900441150X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 615

Get Book

Book Description
In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world are discussed. The contributions enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion.

Know Yourself

Know Yourself PDF Author: Ole Jakob Filtvedt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111083853
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 644

Get Book

Book Description
The book explores ancient interpretations and usages of the famous Delphic maxim “know yourself”. The primary emphasis is on Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman sources from the first four centuries CE. The individual contributions examine both direct quotations of the maxim as well as more distant echoes. Most of the sources included in the book have never previously been studied in any detail with a view to their use and interpretation of the Delphic maxim. Thus, the book contributes significantly to the origin and different interpretations of the maxim in antiquity as well as to its reception history in ancient philosophical and theological discourses. The chapters of the book are linked to each other by numerous cross-references which makes it possible to compare the different views of the maxim with each other. It also helps readers to notice relationships and trajectories within the material. The explorations of the relevant sources are also set in the context of ongoing debates about the shape and nature of ancient conceptions of self and self-knowledge. The book thus demonstrates the wide variety of philosophical and theological approaches in that the injunction to know oneself could be viewed and how these interpretations provide windows into ancient discourses about self and self-knowledge.

Apocryphal and Esoteric Sources in the Development of Christianity and Judaism

Apocryphal and Esoteric Sources in the Development of Christianity and Judaism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004445927
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 652

Get Book

Book Description
Apocryphal traditions, often shared by Jews and Christians, have played a significant role in the history of both religions. The 26 essays in this volume show how such traditions were elaborated in literatures, liturgies, figurative arts and mythology, in regions ranging from Ethiopia to Italy.

Babel

Babel PDF Author: Samuel L. Boyd
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506480683
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book

Book Description
In Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy, Samuel L. Boyd offers a new reading of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. Using recent insights on the rhetoric of Neo-Assyrian politics and its ideology of governance as well as advances in biblical studies, Boyd shows how the Tower of Babel was not originally about a tower, Babylon, or the advent of multilingualism, at least in the earliest phases of the history and literary context of the story. Rather, the narrative was a critique against the Assyrian empire using themes of human overreach found in many places in Genesis 1-11. Boyd clarifies how idioms of Assyrian governance could have found their way into the biblical text, and how the Hebrew of Genesis 11:1-9 itself leads to a different translation of the passage than found in versions of the Bible, one that does not involve language. This new reading sheds light on how the story became about language. Boyd argues that this new understanding of Babel also illuminates aspects of the call of Abram when the Tower of Babel is interpreted as a story about something other than the origin of multilingualism. Finally, he frames the historical-critical research on the biblical passage and its reception in ancient Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources with the uses of the Tower of Babel in modern politics of language and nationalism. He demonstrates how and why Genesis 11:1-9 has become so useful, in often detrimental ways, to the modern nation-state. Boyd explores this intellectual history of the passage into current events in the twenty-first century and offers perspectives on how a new reading of the Tower of Babel can speak to the current cultural and political moment and offer correctives on the uses and abuses of the Bible in the public sphere.

Levant, Cradle of Abrahamic Religions

Levant, Cradle of Abrahamic Religions PDF Author: Catalin-Stefan Popa
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643914261
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book

Book Description
The volume is the result of a Lecture Series on The Levant, Cradle of Abrahamic Religions, which engaged scholars on topics related to the cultural and religious diversity of the historical Levant. Like a jigsaw, the studies contained within showcase interlock fragments of the historical encounters between faiths, religions and societies in a rich Levantine and Oriental space, in an attempt to render them more accessible to readers today by focusing both on broader religious phenomena as well as on the practical, liturgical and social interaction between traditions and mentalities, features representative of both faith and society at large.

Ancient Knowledge Networks

Ancient Knowledge Networks PDF Author: Eleanor Robson
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787355942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it.Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing medium: Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires.

Shared Stories, Rival Tellings

Shared Stories, Rival Tellings PDF Author: Robert C. Gregg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190231505
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 688

Get Book

Book Description
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are considered kindred religions-holding ancestral heritages and monotheistic belief in common-but there are definitive distinctions between these "Abrahamic" peoples. Shared Stories, Rival Tellings explores the early exchanges of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and argues that their interactions were dominated by debates over the meanings of certain stories sacred to all three communities. Robert C. Gregg shows how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpreters--artists as well as authors--developed their unique and particular understandings of narratives present in the two Bibles and the Qur'an. Gregg focuses on five stories: Cain and Abel, Sarah and Hagar, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, Jonah and the Whale, and Mary the Mother of Jesus. As he guides us through the often intentional variations introduced into these shared stories, Gregg exposes major issues under contention and the social-intellectual forces that contributed to spirited, and sometimes combative, exchanges among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Offering deeper insight into these historical moments and their implications for contemporary relations among the three religions, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings will inspire readers to consider--and reconsider--the dynamics of traditional and current social-religious competition.

The Fatimids

The Fatimids PDF Author: Paul Walker
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004548629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Get Book

Book Description
The chapters of this volume contain a series of detailed studies of various aspects of Fatimid rule in the regions of its Mediterranean and Near Eastern empire, 909 to 1171 AD, including separately the role of the imam-caliph, wazīr, chief qāḍī and dāʿī, and other political and public offices of this Shīʿī caliphate. Geographically it covers North Africa, Sicily, the Levant, Hijaz, Cairo and Egypt in the medieval period, with special attention to books, science and libraries, court society, festivals, intellectual traditions and Ismaili doctrines, its religious appeal, military, enemies and rivals, among them the Abbasids, Umayyads, and Ibadis.