News and Events

This talk proposes a novel, working hypothesis of the socio-material conditions driving early Christian collecting, compositional, and interpretive habits in the latter part of the second century. Integrating recent scholarship that considers Pauline influence on the Gospels with work in classics on the editorial and authorial logics of collections and miscellany, it situates the textual practices of so-called Christian intellectuals within the broader literary and agonistic intellectual scene of imperial Rome.

The Babylonian Epic of Creation, also known as Enuma Elish, was the most widely studied cuneiform text in first millennium BCE Mesopotamia. Initially composed to extol the Babylonian god Marduk and his home city Babylon, it was also popular in Assyria, where it served as a blueprint for the autocratic model promoted by the rulers of the Assyrian Empire. As time went by, the epic informed the religious identities of a variety of cities and states in the Levant, and even left traces in the works of some Greek philosophers. But on several occasions, first in Assyria and later in the Biblical book of Genesis, the epic and the cultic festivals during which it was recited also became the target of newly introduced forms of polemical “deconstruction” that changed the religious discourse of the times in decisive ways. This lecture analyzes the volatile history of a text whose theo-ideological rigidity did not preclude it from being subjected to a number of radical reinterpretations over a period of some one-thousand years.

Dr. Daniel Falk and Dr. Jennifer Singletary have been awarded a grant from the Database of Religious History (DRH), a largescale quantitative-qualitative database for the cultural evolution of religions, hosted by the University of British Columbia. The award will fund a research project, titled “Prayer as Interaction: A Quantitative Study,” which aims to answer questions about the correlation between various features of prayers and conceptions of superhuman agents.

Textuality in the ancient world had many more dimensions than simply alphabetic words for individual or public reading. Potent texts, like the words of gods, could be accessed through touch and through washing, through wearing and through the visual gaze on assemblages of letters. This presentation introduces the sensory features of the written word by which the authority of institutions, priesthoods, and religious traditions came into the lives of ordinary people. I will begin with some comparative materials from modern Islam and ancient Egypt before focusing on early views of Christian scripture.

One of the major scholarly revolutions in the study of ancient Judaism is the rejection of outdated binaries that stratified Jews into the scholastic elite and the superstitious masses, dividing between rabbis and sorcerers. Instead, recent work offers a more complex portrait, where diverse social actors engaged in contests over the most effective and legitimate forms of prophylactics, as well as those individuals authorized to perform them. This talk engages these questions through three vignettes: a rabbinic tale featuring a Satanic encounter, the continued discovery of the invocation of rabbis and rabbinic formulae on Aramaic incantation bowls, and the enigmatic usage of “pseudo-script” on roughly a quarter of the incantation bowl corpus.