Author: Martha Himmelfarb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195359658
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
This is a study of the ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses involving ascent into heaven, which have received little scholarly attention in comparison to apocalypses concerned primarily with the end of the world. Recent developments like the publication of the Aramaic Enoch fragments from Qumran and interest in questions of genre in the study of the apocalypses make this a particularly appropriate time to undertake this study. Martha Himmelfarb places the apocalypses in relation to both their biblical antecedents and their context in the Greco-Roman world. Her analysis emphasizes the emergence of the understanding of heaven as temple in the Book of the Watchers, the earliest of these apocalypses, and the way in which this understanding affects the depiction of the culmination of ascent, the hero's achievement of a place among the angels, in the ascent apocalypses generally. It also considers the place of secrets of nature and primeval history in these works. Finally, it offers an interpretation of the pseudepigraphy of the apocalypses and their function.
Author: Martha Himmelfarb
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195082036
Category : Angels in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
This is a comparative study of the ancient Jewish and Christian views of the ascent into heaven. It places the ascent narratives in their cultural and historical context, and explores their relationship to the canonical apocalypses and to other Graeco-Roman literature of ascent and divinization.
Author: Leslie Baynes
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004207260
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
The first full-length analysis of the heavenly book motif in English, this study highlights a vital element of early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. Through multiple intertextual readings, it demonstrates that for the ancients heavenly writing had life or death consequences.
Author: Martha Himmelfarb
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512802778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
From the ancient Book of the Dead to Dante's Divine Comedy, the living have attempted to describe the world of the dead. Tours of Hell focuses on one form of that attempt: the tours of hell found in Jewish and Christian apocalypses of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Himmelfarb examines seventeen texts, preserved in five languages and spanning a thousand years of human history. These include Hebrew texts and Christian texts in Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, and Coptic, such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul family. Muslim texts, medieval visions, and other related literatures are also discussed. Himmelfarb details the common elements of the tour tradition, including such features as a hero or heroine figure, a heavenly revealer, and descriptions of the punishments awaiting those who arrive in hell. She convincingly refutes the accepted nineteenth-century critical view of the earliest of these tours, the Apocalypse of Peter, as a Christian form of an "Orphic-Pythagorean" descent to Hades. She place the work instead on the family tree of the tour apocalypse, a genre she traces back to the third century B.C.E. Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36). Linking the Apocalypse of Peter with later Jewish tours of hell, Himmelfarb reveals significant sin-and-punishment combinations that seem to point to a common source, which she theorizes to be a lost Jewish Tour work of the late Second Temple period. Rich and fascinating texts seldom before brought to light are treated in detail in this pioneering study. A comprehensive work on the apocalyptic tradition, Tours of Hell will be of great interest to scholars and students of religion, history, ancient and medieval literature, and Dante studies.
Author: John J. Collins
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467443832
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 399
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Book Description
A highly regarded expert on the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, John J. Collins has written extensively on the subject. Nineteen of his essays written over the last fifteen years, including previously unpublished contributions, are brought together for the first time in this volume. Its thematic essays organized in five sections, Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Pseudepigraphy complements and enriches Collins’s well-known book The Apocalyptic Imagination.
Author: George Herbert Box
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Apocalypse of Abraham
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Author: Ann Conway-Jones
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191024600
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Integrating patristics and early Jewish mysticism, this book examines Gregory of Nyssa's tabernacle imagery, as found in Life of Moses 2. 170-201. Previous scholarship has often focused on Gregory's interpretation of the darkness on Mount Sinai as divine incomprehensibility. However, true to Exodus, Gregory continues with Moses's vision of the tabernacle 'not made with hands' received within that darkness. This innovative methodology of heuristic comparison doesn't strive to prove influence, but to use heavenly ascent texts as a foil, in order to shed new light on Gregory's imagery. Ann Conway-Jones presents a well-rounded, nuanced understanding of Gregory's exegesis, in which mysticism, theology, and politics are intertwined. Heavenly ascent texts use descriptions of religious experience to claim authoritative knowledge. For Gregory, the high point of Moses's ascent into the darkness of Mount Sinai is the mystery of Christian doctrine. The heavenly tabernacle is a type of the heavenly Christ. This mystery is beyond intellectual comprehension, it can only be grasped by faith; and only the select few, destined for positions of responsibility, should even attempt to do so.
Author: David M. Moffitt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004206914
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Scholars often explain Hebrews’ relative silence regarding Jesus’ resurrection by emphasizing the author’s appeal to Yom Kippur’s two key moments—the sacrificial slaughter and the high priest’s presentation of blood in the holy of holies—in his distinctive portrayal of Jesus’ death and heavenly exaltation. The writer’s depiction of Jesus as the high priest whose blood effected ultimate atonement appears to be modeled upon these two moments. Such a typology discourages discrete reflection on Jesus’ resurrection. Drawing on contemporary studies of Jewish sacrifice (which note that blood represents life, not death), parallels in Jewish apocalyptic literature, and fresh exegetical insights, this volume demonstrates that Jesus’ embodied, resurrected life is crucial for the high-priestly Christology and sacrificial soteriology developed in Hebrews.
Author: Andrei A. Orlov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110703907X
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
Sheds light on the complex Jewish debates about the nature of priesthood in the early centuries of the Common Era.
Author: Phillip Michael Sherman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004248617
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
In Babel's Tower Translated, Phillip Sherman explores the narrative of Genesis 11 and its reception and interpretation in several Second Temple and Early Rabbinic texts (e.g., Jubilees, Philo, Genesis Rabbah). The account of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) is famously ambiguous. The meaning of the narrative and the actions of both the human characters and the Israelite deity defy any easy explanation. This work explores how changing historical and hermeneutical realities altered and shifted the meaning of the text in Jewish antiquity.
