Marked Bodies: Skin as a Communicative Entity in Late Antique Hagiography. (original) (raw)
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Bodies, Borders, Believers. Ancient Texts and Present Conversations
A stimulating collection of essays by prominent scholars honoring Turid Karlsen Seim. Bodies, Borders, Believers brings together biblical scholars, ecumenical theologians, archeologists, classicists, art historians, and church historians, working side by side to probe the past and its receptions in the present. e contributions relate in one way or another to Seim's broad research interests, covering such themes as gender analysis, bodily practices, and ecumenical dialogue. e editors have brought together an international group of scholars, and among the contributors many scholarly traditions, theoretical orientations, and methodological approaches are represented, making this book an interdisciplinary and border-crossing endeavor. A comprehensive bibliography of Seim's work is included. " ese articles refuse to be segregated on one side of any border, present conversations setting parameters for complementary readings of Scriptures, ancient texts complicating contemporary categories, thus embodying the pioneering spirit of the scholar honored by this strong, consistent, genre-defying collection. " JENNIFER A. GLANCY, author of Slavery in Early Christianity and Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies " A tribute to the rst woman with a doctoral degree in theology from a Norwegian university, by some of her students and colleagues, this volume showcases the broad orientation of Seim's theological interests spanning from exegesis via social reception history to ecumenical theology. It also presents samples of what is by now a coherent trajectory: the 'Oslo School' of gender-critical work on early Christian texts—one of whose main inspirations is professor Seim herself! " JORUNN ØKLAND, Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies in the Humanities, University of Oslo " In this remarkable collection, international scholars of the Bible, church history, art history, classics, archaeology, and ecumenical dialogue follow Seim's model of nuanced interpretation in e Double Message: Patterns of Gender in Luke-Acts. Luke features women prominently but simultaneously subordinates them. In this volume, scholars take the body seriously as a site for theologizing; explore the borders between life and death, women and men, and Christians and Muslims; and discuss how belief can unite, not just divide. " BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN, Robert and Myra Kra Professor of Christian Studies and Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, of Classical Studies, and of Religious Studies, Brandeis University
The Ancients did not distinguish the body from the person. 1 Contrary to the Platonic and Cartesian traditions of the dichotomy between a body-anatomic, material, and temporal but mainly fragile-and a spirit-intellectual, spiritual, universal, and infallible-both Sumerians and Akkadians understood the person as the assemblage of its parts, which are not only bodily parts but also names, functions, and images. As there is no dichotomy, no separation between the physical and psychic functions, bodily parts are endowed with cognitive functions and may symbolically represent the whole person. In biblical studies, this renewed approach has permitted us to give back, so to say, to the physical person all its importance. 2 Moreover, this conception of the unity of the person, widespread in the ancient Near East, applies also to the divine world: 3 gods are to some extent their objects, their places, and their attributes. Within the frame of this project, which aims at revisiting the body and its conceptions whether on linguistic, social, or ideological grounds, I would like to pursue a question that has long been debated about the divine face in biblical texts: does not one seek in the divine face all that a divinity is, whereas the arm reflects only power, for example? Indeed, among all the bodily parts, the face represents the unique site which constitutes an interface between the interior and the exterior of the person, the being rather than the appearance. 4 As a consequence, the face may refer to the divine statue in many cultic and religious contexts. 5 From a linguistic point of view, in Hebrew, one has to note the particularity of the substantive "face," since the verbal root ,פנה( *pnh, "to turn") serves different usages, among which the
Thesis: Divine Embodiment: Ritual, Art and the Senses in Late-antique Christianity
University of Bristol, 2013
"How does antique Christianity look if the lens of Cartesian dualism is removed and replaced with an embodied perspective? In responding to this question, this thesis proposes a new way of understanding ‘art’ and religion as integrally linked through ritual in Christian Late Antiquity. The investigation proceeds via ‘common-sensory archaeologies’ of material evidence. This is a methodology designed to enable interpretation of artefacts in ways not necessarily dependent on the imposition of literary interpretative methods, particularly semiotics. It enables new information to be elicited directly from materials. The argument addresses ‘magical’ practices and objects, and the ideas underpinning Roman religious practices, before analysing rituals specific to late-antique Christianity, including Holy-Land pilgrimage, saint cult, and the Eucharist. It differentiates rituals that were institutionalised, and those which evolved ‘organically’ among adherents, in order to highlight common underlying impulses. A picture emerges of the complex and subtle overlap between religions in Late Antiquity, which questions stark differentiations between ‘paganism’ and Christianity. This period’s ‘common sense’ (or, encultured mode of embodiment) is suggested to oscillate between two poles of cosmology – ‘cosmic uniformity’ and ‘infinite materiality’. Central to both perspectives was the need for (embodied) humans to engage ritually with the world through their senses in order to interact with the divine. By paying attention not just to what Christians thought but also to what they did, it is suggested that certain tensions in our understanding of late-antique culture may be resolved by retracting assumptions of stark Cartesian contrasts between belief/ritual, soul/body, text/material, and Christian/’pagan’. Furthermore, an embodied approach is shown to open avenues not just into elite culture, but also into the popular Christian perspective, by expanding our purview to the lived practice of, rather than just the theological debate surrounding, antique religion."
Body Marks in Jewish Sources: From Biblical to Post-Talmudic Times
Review of Rabbinic Judaism, 2018
The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the role of marks – signs and scripts – that Jews imprinted on their bodies during the course of two millennia. Although a Biblical prohibition exists against tattooing (Lev. 19:28), there were Jews who wrote the Lord’s name on their body, probably with ink. Ezekiel 9:4-6 is discussed, and then Cain’s Mark (Gen. 4:15), where the apotropaic character of the mark (or letter) is clear. Isaiah 44:5 is analyzed, and compared to Exodus 28:36 and 39:30, where examples of setting the Lord’s Name on one’s arm or forehead are delineated. It is surmised that this practice originated among priests and only later was imitated by the laity. Special attention is given to Numbers 6:22-27; it is claimed here that ‘setting’ the Lord’s Name was done literally by the priests, in contrast to previous commentators who interpret this verse metaphorically. Thus, priests blessed orally and committed their blessing into a bodily inscription on the people they had blessed. This custom most likely reflects the third commandment (Exod. 20:7): ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’, which is interpreted as inscribing the Lord’s Name and then profaning it. In the Talmud, there is evidence that in Late Antiquity there were Jews who had the Lord’s Name written on their bodies in ink. Moreover, in Hekhalot literature there are two detailed descriptions of how people were inscribed with God’s name accompanied by liturgy, in a kind of rite-of-passage ritual. Additional texts are cited and discussed in what follows (e.g., Revelation 19:16; Galatians 6:17) as evidence that there were Jews in Antiquity who inscribed the Lord’s name on their bodies.