This volume brings together twelve essays by Angela Kim Harkins that use integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to contribute new insights to the understanding of religious experience in ancient Judaism and Christianity. Building on the text-centered work that characterizes much of Second Temple studies, Harkins seeks to reintegrate ancient Jewish and Christian texts with various aspects of the flesh-and-blood experience of religion by using performance-based methods, ritual studies, integrative cognitive science approaches, and emotion studies. This volume aims to overcome the common mind-body dualism that dominates the study of ancient texts by offering ways to imagine the integrative phenomenological experience of these texts for ancient peoples.
At the origin of the Watchers tradition is the single enigmatic reference in Genesis 6 to the sons of God who had intercourse with human women, producing a race of giants upon the earth. That verse sparked a wealth of cosmological and theological speculation in early Judaism. Here leading scholars explore the contours of the Watchers traditions through history, tracing their development through the Enoch literature, Jubilees, and other early Jewish and Christian writings. This volume provides a lucid survey of current knowledge and interpretation of one of the most intriguing theological motifs of the Second Temple period.
This book examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (= Thanksgiving Hymns) in light of ancient visionary traditions, new developments in neuropsychology, and post-structuralist understandings of the embodied subject. The thesis of this book is that the ritualized reading of reports describing visionary experiences written in the first person "I" had the potential to create within the ancient reader the subjectivity of a visionary which can then predispose him to have a religious experience. This study examines how references to the body and the strategic arousal of emotions could have functioned within a practice of performative reading to engender a religious experience of ascent. In so doing, this book offers new interdisciplinary insights into meditative ritual reading as a religious practice for transformation in antiquity.
This collection presents new research in angelology, giving special attention to the otherworldly beings known as the Watchers who are able to move between heaven and earth. According to the pseudepigraphic Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), these angels descend to mate with women. The collection begins by examining Watchers traditions in biblical and non-biblical writings (e.g., Gen 6:1-4, the Qumran Hodayot, Book of Jubilees, and Book of Revelation). The collection also surveys Watchers traditions among late antique writings, including the Apocryphon of John, Manichean and Islamic writings, testamentary literature, the Pseudo-Clementines, and medieval Scholastic texts.
Angela Kim Harkins proposes that the Second Temple ritual context is an overlooked, but potentially fruitful, method for understanding the ancient controversies concerning Jesus' prayer at Gethsemane, as it appears in Mark 14:32-42 and Matthew 26:36-46. Harkins argues that the cultural specificity of emotions can help to account for why later Greek and Roman readers experienced such sharp and divergent responses to Jesus' prayer and ritual practices. Harkins provides a basis for comparison by examining various Second Temple prayers from Ezra 9, 1 Esdras 8, Daniel 9, and Qumran Hodayot col. 4, demonstrating that the cultural specificity of emotions, especially divergent gender expectations, is used to contextualize and frame the ritual performance of grief. Consequently Harkins suggests that Jesus' grief-stricken prayer was the most controversial to early readers; while Second Temple penitential prayer rituals were routinely performed by male leaders (Ezra, Daniel, the Qumran Maskil), Greek and Roman cultural expectations saw such ritual expressions of public mourning as feminine. This volume concludes with the theory that Jesus' emotional prayer at Gethsemane can be contextualized within a larger Second Temple ritual context that would have been unfamiliar to non-Jewish readers, and that the diverse gendered expectations of grief would have made this scene controversial to early readers of this text."--
This book examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (= Thanksgiving Hymns) in light of ancient visionary traditions, new developments in neuropsychology, and post-structuralist understandings of the embodied subject. The thesis of this book is that the ritualized reading of reports describing visionary experiences written in the first person "I" had the potential to create within the ancient reader the subjectivity of a visionary which can then predispose him to have a religious experience. This study examines how references to the body and the strategic arousal of emotions could have functioned within a practice of performative reading to engender a religious experience of ascent. In so doing, this book offers new interdisciplinary insights into meditative ritual reading as a religious practice for transformation in antiquity.
This collection presents new research in angelology, giving special attention to the otherworldly beings known as the Watchers who are able to move between heaven and earth. According to the pseudepigraphic Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), these angels descend to mate with women. The collection begins by examining Watchers traditions in biblical and non-biblical writings (e.g., Gen 6:1-4, the Qumran Hodayot, Book of Jubilees, and Book of Revelation). The collection also surveys Watchers traditions among late antique writings, including the Apocryphon of John, Manichean and Islamic writings, testamentary literature, the Pseudo-Clementines, and medieval Scholastic texts.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.