The Sacred Executioner

The Sacred Executioner PDF Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500012819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Looks at the nature and history of human sacrifice, examines the stories of Cain, Noah, and Abraham, and discusses the causes of anti-Semitism

The Sacred Executioner

The Sacred Executioner PDF Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500012819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Looks at the nature and history of human sacrifice, examines the stories of Cain, Noah, and Abraham, and discusses the causes of anti-Semitism

The Sacred Executioner

The Sacred Executioner PDF Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human sacrifice
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description


Deconstructing Jesus

Deconstructing Jesus PDF Author: Robert M. Price
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615921206
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
After more than a century of New Testament scholarship, it has become clear that the Jesus of the gospels is a fictive amalgam, reflecting the hopes and beliefs of the early Christian community and revealing very little about the historical Jesus. Over the millennia since the beginning of Christianity various congregations, from fundamentalist to liberal, have tended to produce a Jesus figurehead that functions as a symbolic cloak for their specific theological agendas. Through extensive research and fresh textual insights Robert M. Price paves the way for a new reconstruction of Christian origins. Moving beyond the work of Burton L. Mack and John Dominic Crossan on Jesus movements and Christ cults, which shows how the various Jesus figures may have amalgamated into the patchwork savior of Christian faith, Price takes an innovative approach. He links the work of F.C. Baur, Walter Bauer, Helmut Koester, and James M. Robinson with that of early Christ-myth theorists-two camps of biblical analysis that have never communicated. Arguing that perhaps Jesus never existed as a historical figure, Price maintains an agnostic stance, while putting many puzzles and scholarly debates in a new light. He also incorporates neglected parallels from Islam, the Baha'i Faith, and Buddhism. Deconstructing Jesus provides a valuable bridge between New Testament scholarship and early freethinkers in a refreshing cross-fertilization of perspectives.

Interpreting al-Tha'labi's Tales of the Prophets

Interpreting al-Tha'labi's Tales of the Prophets PDF Author: Marianna Klar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134211996
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Al-Tha’labi was a renowned Qur’anic scholar of the fifth/eleventh century, and his ‘Ara’is al-majalis is arguably the finest and most widely consulted example of the Islamic qisas al-anbiya’ genre. Drawing on primary Arabic sources, Klar applies modern critical methods in order to explore the nature of al-Tha’labi’s ‘Ara'is al-majalis within its historical and literary context, and thereby produces a compelling examination of the stories of Noah, Job, Saul and David as portrayed in the key historiographical and folkloric texts of the medieval Islamic period. Via a close analysis of the relevant narratives, the book considers a number of universal aspects of the human condition as they are displayed in these tales, from first a religious, then a familial, and finally a social perspective. Touching upon the benefits and limitations of the application of biblical studies and literary motifs to Islamic materials, the book investigates the possibilities of interpretation raised by a primarily psychoanalytical reading of the tales of the four individuals in question. As such, this text will be of great interest to scholars of the biblical prophets, Qur’anic studies, Islamic historiography, folklore and literary criticism.

The Changes of Cain

The Changes of Cain PDF Author: Ricardo J. Quinones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400862140
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Era by era, from the writings of the classical Christian epoch up to East of Eden and Amadeus, from Philo to Finnegans Wake, Ricardo Quinones examines the contexts of a master metaphor of our culture. This brilliant work is the first comprehensive book on the Cain and Abel story. "Ricardo Quinones takes us on a grand tour of Western civilization in his admirable book, which reveals the riches of the Cain-Abel story as it develops from its Biblical origin to Citizen Kane and Michel Tournier. This is cultural history and literary criticism of the first order, finely written, formidably but gracefully erudite, and illustrating the capacity of Judeo-Christian culture and the modernity emerging from it constantly to criticize the darker side of its own foundations and realizations."--Joseph Frank "Ricardo J. Quinones skips Biblical and Talmudic exegesis to follow Cain and Abel through later centuries, from classical times to the present. What he uncovers sheds light on important shifts of consciousness and behavior in European and American culture. . . . Quinones writes with true eloquence and conviction. . . ."--James Finn Cotter, The Hudson Review "Quinones's study of how [the] three Cains were transformed by Romanticism and Modernism into a sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but always necessary archetype of the modern world is literary and cultural analytic history at its very best."--Choice Ricardo J. Quinones is Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of English and Comparative Literatures, and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. He is the author of The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Harvard), Dante Alighieri (Twayne), and Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton). Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Judaism on Trial

Judaism on Trial PDF Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1909821454
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
'A superb work of committed scholarship . . . a work full of interest to those already familiar with the material it contains, and compelling reading for those who are not. Maccoby has done a fine job in recapturing the intellectual and social drama of the confrontations.' Jonathan Sacks, Jewish Journal of Sociology Hyam Maccoby's now classic study focuses on the major Jewish—Christian disputations of medieval Europe: those of Paris (1240), Barcelona (1263), and Tortosa (1413-14).

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf PDF Author: Viktor Pelevin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780670019885
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A novel about a fifteen-year-old prostitute who is actually a 2,000-year old werefox who seduces men with her tail and drains them of their sexual power. She falls in love with a KGB officer who is actually a werewolf.

The Mythmaker

The Mythmaker PDF Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing
ISBN: 9780760707876
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The author presents new arguments which support the view that Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity. He argues that Jesus and also his immediate disciples James and Peter were life-long adherents of Pharisaic Judaism. Paul, however, was not, as he claimed, a native-born Jew of Pharisee upbringing, but came in fact from a Gentile background. He maintains that it was Paul alone who created a new religion by his vision of Jesus as a Divine Saviour who died to save humanity. This concept, which went far beyond the messianic claims of Jesus, was an amalgamation of ideas derived from Hellenistic religion, especially from Gnosticism and the mystery cults. Paul played a devious and adventurous political game with Jesus' followers of the so-called Jerusalem Church, who eventually disowned him. The conclusions of this historical and psychological study will come as a shock to many readers, but it is nevertheless a book which cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with the foundations of our culture and society. -- Book jacket.

The Faithful Executioner

The Faithful Executioner PDF Author: Joel F. Harrington
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448129370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Meet Frantz Schmidt: executioner, torturer and, most unusually for his times, diarist. Following in his father’s footsteps, Frantz entered the executioner’s trade as an Apprentice. 394 executions and forty-five years later, he retired to focus his attentions on running the large medical practice that he had always viewed as his true vocation. Through examination of Frantz’s exceptional and often overlooked record, Joel F. Harrington delves deep into a world of human cruelty, tragedy and injustice. At the same time, he poses a fascinating question: could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate – even progressive? The Faithful Executioner is the biography of an ordinary man struggling to overcome an unjust family curse; it is also a remarkable panorama of a Europe poised on the cusp of modernity, a world with startling parallels to our own.

Vengeance in Reverse

Vengeance in Reverse PDF Author: Mark R. Anspach
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628952903
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
How do humans stop fighting? Where do the gods of myth come from? What does it mean to go mad? Mark R. Anspach tackles these and other conundrums as he draws on ethnography, literature, psychotherapy, and the theory of René Girard to explore some of the fundamental mechanisms of human interaction. Likening gift exchange to vengeance in reverse, the first part of the book outlines a fresh approach to reciprocity, while the second part traces the emergence of transcendence in collective myths and individual delusions. From the peacemaking rituals of prestate societies to the paradoxical structure of consciousness, Anspach takes the reader on an intellectual journey that begins with the problem of how to deceive violence and ends with the riddle of how one can deceive oneself.