This seminar focuses on texts from the Mediterranean world of late antiquity, particularly as they relate to Christian origins. While it studies the New Testament, it also considers the Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi texts, patristic literature, rabbinic material, and Greco-Roman texts.
Co-Chairs
Professor John Edwards
jedwards1329@sfc.edu
Professor Emma Wasserman
wasserme@religion.rutgers.edu
Rapporteur
Christiaan Faul
jf3261@utsnyc.edu
| 09/22/2022 | Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM |
As If By Love Possessed': Spirits and Possession in the Acts of Thomas
Giovani Bazzana,
Abstract AbstractThe Acts of Thomas, one of the five major apocryphal acts, which are usually dated between the end of the second and the beginning of the third century CE, contain narratives of possession and exorcism, as expected in texts belonging to the earliest Christ movement. ActTh in particular, have some specific traits that emerge also in these exorcism narratives. An examination of the nature and activities of spirits in the ActTh have important consequences on our understanding of the ethics and the anthropology presented in the writing through its representation of possession and exorcism. |
| 10/13/2022 | Faculty House, Columbia University/hybrid 7:00 PM |
Men, means, and mortality: Negotiating wealth from the Edge of the Grave
Maria Doerfler, Yale University
Abstract AbstractWealth and poverty are two of the ethical topoi that most preoccupied early Christian authors. Inspired by biblical mandates, Christians wrote, preached, and otherwise sought to motivate their audiences to eschew riches, embrace privation, and provide aid for the needy. Unsurprisingly, given the New Testament’s own preoccupations, death and the literary genres that accompanied it constituted a central locus for these disquisitions. This paper accordingly seeks to trace didactic themes surrounding material possessions in the context of a collection of funerary hymns ascribed to Syriac Christianity’s most celebrated writers, Ephrem “the Syrian.” Three motifs appear with particular prominence: that of wealth’s indifference, a topos apparent in a series of ekphrastic “tours of tombs”; its detriment, as evidenced by concomitant “tours if hell”; and the occasional opportunity it represented for both the deceased and their survivors. The ethical Gestalt that emerges is, perhaps surprisingly, one of moderation: tolerance for a modicum of personal wealth, combined with an emphasis on the subject’s dependence — on divine mercy, on ecclesiastical leaders, even the community’s neediest members. |
| 11/03/2022 | Faculty House, Columbia University/hybrid 7:00 PM |
Torah Laws in the New Testament
Claudia Setzer, Manhattan College
Abstract AbstractIn some ways, the laws of Israel’s Scriptures are so ubiquitous in the New Testament as to be invisible. They are submerged in many narratives, where their presence is assumed, and behind language about covenant, Temple, God’s promises and commandments. Biblical law itself is not the focus for New Testament writers; the laws are carriers of other larger ideas. Considering laws from the Hebrew Bible allows us to touch on numerous current concerns—ritual impurity and healings, new views of the historical Jesus, Paul within Judaism, and Jesus’ relations with the Pharisees. My presentation will be drawn from a larger project, but will touch on some areas where I have expanded or revised my thinking on these matters. |
| 01/26/2023 | Faculty House, Columbia University/hybrid 7:00 PM |
The Politics of Weakness: Identifying a Pauline Dimension in the Growth of Earliest Christianity
B.G. White, The King’s College
Abstract AbstractHow did Paul contribute to the growth of earliest Christianity? While interpreters focus on Paul’s mission to the Gentiles or the practices of his fledgling communities, this paper explores how his 'strength in weakness' discourses (e.g., 2 Cor. 12:9-10; 1 Cor. 4:8-13) created a political theology that had a role in attracting outsiders to earliest Christianity. Building upon Judith Perkins’ trailblazing book, The Suffering Self (Routledge, 1995), this paper explores the early reception of the Pauline 'strength in weakness' motif and observes that, far from an intensely private and apostolic experience, these commentators invoked the apostle's conception of power to explain the spread of their communities. This perspective offers interpretive advances within 1-2 Corinthians and demonstrates that Pauline political theology goes far beyond anti-imperial tropes. More importantly, it implies a complementary relationship between 'history' and 'theology' in analyses of earliest Christianity that, in this case, yield a fresh theory on the growth of the faith in the Greco-Roman world centered on the sociological 'pull' factor of countercultural experiences of weakness and suffering. |
| 02/23/2023 | Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom 7:00 PM |
Thinking about the Voice across Biblical Literature
Jacqueline Vayntrub, Yale University
Abstract AbstractIn biblical studies, recent years have seen efforts towards theorizing the role of the voice in biblical poetry. These approaches have applied theories of performance, and focused on biblical poetry’s “orality,” meaning variously its oral “provenance,” its oral “style,” or even the oral “mindset” of the Bible’s scribes. Earlier debates of the possible “oral origins” of biblical stories and songs, using orality to reconstruct processes of composition, has shifted in the past twenty years towards an interest in the representations of the spoken voice as literary features. In a similar fashion, the field has recently shifted from understandings of attribution, e.g., Psalm of David or Proverbs of Solomon, as “false authorial attributions” or tertiary paratextual frames towards an understanding of attribution as a literary practice animated by vital cultural concepts of authority, authenticity, biography, and the self. These developments in biblical studies parallel a proliferating discourse on voice and its role in literary production in philosophy, comparative literature, media studies, and Classics. Looking across the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish texts, I will offer some preliminary theories on voice and attribution in various genres (e.g., hymns, instruction, prophetic speeches, etc.). Thinking with Dinkler’s study of the Corinthian Corpus and her concept of “Epistolary Embodiment,” I will pose questions about how these practices of attribution, found in early Jewish literary texts and continuing into the Hellenistic period, might shed light on text collections in the New Testament. |
| 03/16/2023 | Faculty House, Columbia University/hybrid 7:00 PM |
Reconsidering 2 Enoch in the Rhizome of Late Antiquity
Grant MacAskill, University of Aberdeen
Abstract AbstractLike many of the pseudepigrapha, 2 Enoch has proven resistant to the scholarly pursuit of provenance, with no meaningful consensus being reached around its origins and authorship. Attempts to argue that it is early and Jewish bypass the details that do not fit easily into standard accounts of ancient Judaism; attempts to argue that it is later and Christian, similarly, struggle to accommodate particular details of the text. In this paper, I suggest that this reflects deeper issues in the dominant discourse of Biblical Studies around the conceptualizing of the relationships between texts, groups and cultures. This discourse typically approaches texts in a framework defined by the relationships between clearly bounded groups, developing on trajectories, informed by the categories familiar to western/northern historiography. Using the image of the rhizome that is developed by Deleuze and Guattari to conceptualize cultural relations and the production of concepts, and contrasting this with their analysis of “arborescence,” I will develop a different approach to 2 Enoch (potentially applicable to other challenging pseudepigrapha), one that is interested precisely in the difficult details of the book, as evidence of non-linear cultural influence. This will open the way to a more complex identification of the work and its locatedness in the frontier contexts of Syria in Late Antiquity. |
| 04/20/2023 | Faculty House, Columbia University/hybrid 7:00 PM |
Jenny Labendz,
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