Divine Manifestations In The Slavonic Pseudepigrapha

This volume explores the formative theophanic patterns found in pseudepigraphical writings as 2 Enoch, Apocalypse of Abraham, and the Ladder of Jacob where the visual tradition of the divine Form and the aural tradition of the divine Name undergo their creative conflation and thus provide the rich conceptual soil for the subsequent elaborations prominent in later patristic and rabbinic traditions. The visionary and aural traditions found in the Slavonic pseudepigrapha are especially important for understanding the evolution of the theophanic trends inside the eastern Christian environment where these Jewish apocalyptic materials were copied and transmitted by generations of monks.

Sheds light on the complex Jewish debates about the nature of priesthood in the early centuries of the Common Era.

This book presents a collection of papers from the fifth conference of the Enoch Seminar. The conference re-examined 2 Enoch, an early Jewish apocalyptic text previously known to scholars only in its Slavonic translation, in light of recently identified Coptic fragments.

Apocryphal traditions, often shared by Jews and Christians, have played a significant role in the history of both religions. The 26 essays in this volume show how such traditions were elaborated in literatures, liturgies, figurative arts and mythology, in regions ranging from Ethiopia to Italy.

This volume is a study of two of the most important Slavonic apocalypses, the Apocalypse of Abraham and 2 Enoch, as the crucial conceptual links between the symbolic universes of Second Temple apocalypticism and early Jewish mysticism.

This book examines the multiple contexts for the pseudepigraphal Apocalypse of Abraham, including the ancient Jewish milieu in which it was originally written and its medieval Christian Slavic setting.

Time and eternity are concepts that have occupied an important place within Jewish mystical thought. This present volume gives pride of place to these concepts, and is one of the first works to bring together diverse voices on the subject. It offers a multivalent picture of the topic of time and eternity, not only by including contributions from an array of academics who are leaders in their fields, but by proposing six diverse approaches to time and eternity in Jewish mysticism: the theoretical approach to temporality, philosophical definitions, the idea of time and pre-existence, the idea of historical time, the idea of experiential time, and finally, the idea of eternity beyond time. This multivocal treatment of Jewish mysticism and time as based on variant academic approaches is novel, and it should lay the groundwork for further discussion and exploration.

As inheritors of Platonic traditions, many Jews and Christians today do not believe that God has a body. God is instead invisible and incorporeal, and even though Christians believe that God can be seen in Jesus, God otherwise remains veiled from human sight. In this ground-breaking work, Brittany E. Wilson challenges this prevalent view by arguing that early Jews and Christians often envisioned God as having a visible form. Within the New Testament, Luke-Acts in particular emerges as an important example of a text that portrays God in visually tangible ways. According to Luke, God is a perceptible, concrete being who can take on a variety of different forms, as well as a being who is intimately intertwined with human fleshliness in the form of Jesus. In this way, the God of Israel does not adhere to the incorporeal deity of Platonic philosophy, especially as read through post-Enlightenment eyes. Given the corporeal connections between God and Jesus, Luke's depiction of Jesus's body also points ahead to future controversies concerning his divinity and humanity in the early church. Indeed, questions concerning God's body are inextricably linked with Christology and shed light on how we are to understand Jesus's own visible embodiment in relation to God. In The Embodied God, Wilson reframes approaches to early Christology within New Testament scholarship and calls for a new way of thinking about divine-and human-bodies and embodied experience.