Main Speakers for Hidden God, Hidden Histories Symposium

I have now the list of main speakers for the Rockwell Religious Studies 2010 Symposium: Hidden God, Hidden Histories. There will be graduate student speakers involved in each session as well.

In Western religious traditions, God is conventionally conceived to be humanlike creator, king, or ruler enthroned in heaven. But what about the God of the unconventional Western traditions, the God of the mystics, gnostics, and sages? Like almost everything else in these esoteric traditions, God is hidden, secreted away. Sometimes God shows up in another universe beyond our world. Other times God is cloaked behind veils in celestial palaces or within a body of blinding light. Often God is understood to be utterly transcendent, utterly beyond us, while also immediately immanent, immediately within us. This symposium, the inaugural event of the Department of Religious Studies’ new Program on Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism (or GEM) offers academic reflections on these secreted traditions about God, from the ancient world to the modern period.


ROCKWELL SYMPOSIUM, April 15-18

April 15, 3-5 p.m.

April D. DeConick, Rice University
“The Gospel of John as a Transtheistic Early Christian Gospel: Reconceptualizing Johannine Origins and the Roots of Gnosticism”

John Turner, University of Nebraska
“From Hidden to Revealed in Sethian Revelation, Ritual and Protology”

BURKITT PUBLIC LECTURE, April 15, 7:30-9 p.m.

Kocku van Struckard, University of Groningen
“The Esoteric Quest and Western Culture”

April 16, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

Kelley Coblentz-Bautch, University of St. Edwards
“The Hidden God in the Pseudo-Clementines”

Andrei Orlov, Marquette University
“Adoil Outside the Cosmos: God Before and After Creation in Enochic Traditions”

Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago
“The Hidden God and the Hidden Self in Christian Mysticism”

Claire Fanger, Rice University
"God's Occulted Body: Divine Involucra in Alan of Lille and Bernard Silvestris"

David Porreca, University of Waterloo
"How Hidden is God? Revelation and Pedagogy in Ancient and Medieval Hermetic Writings"

David Cook, Rice University
“The Vision of God in Muslim Dreams”

Jeff Kripal, Rice University
"On the Mothman, UFOs, and Other Monsters: John A. Keel and the Superspectrum of the Occult"

John Stroup, Rice University
"The Multidimensional Physics of History and the Problem of Transtheistic God-Language as Cultural Critique in the Popular and Learned Works of Joseph P. Farrell"

April 17, 8:30 a.m.-3:00 p.m.

Gregory Kaplan, Rice University
"How (Not) to 'Immanentize the Eschaton' and Other Problems for Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin"

Steven Finley, Louisiana State University
"Hidden Away: Esotericism and Gnosticism in Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam"

Anne Klein, Rice University
“The Transcendent, the Mysterious, and the Hidden in Tibet: A Buddhist Logos”

Shira Lander, Rice University
“Scholarship on Ancient Palestinian Helios Mosaics: Hiding the Revealed God”

Marcia Brennan, Rice University
“The Modern Museum and Mystical Houston”

April 18, 8:30-11 a.m.

Jonathan Garb, Hebrew University
"Shamanism and Modern Kabbalah"

Bill Parsons, Rice University
“Contours of an Emerging Psychoanalytic Spirituality: Prospects and Problems”

PhD opportunities at University of Groningen

Professor von Stuckrad sent me a link to what looks like wonderful opportunities in Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. There are four openings for competitive PhD positions. The link is HERE.

Augsburg exhibition and Tchacos material

Christian Askeland contacted me about the Pauline codex from the El-Minya horde. He has a post with additional information HERE. For those interested in Coptic NT matters, Askeland is preparing a dissertation on the Coptic John and has put up a resource page of links to information about Coptic on his website HERE. He comments on his website that "for early Christianity scholars, Coptic is the new Greek." So I'm impressed and am delighted that someone is working on sorting out the Coptic NT manuscripts. A BIG job indeed. Best of luck with your work Christian.

Some of the El-Minya materials are being displayed at Augsburg in an exhibition this year. Information about the exhibition was posted by Martin Heide HERE. Direct link to exhibition information is HERE. I also learned more about the exhibition from Professor Bethge who kindly forwarded me more detailed information about the exhibit.

The exhibition opened on the 13th and will run until April 30th, 2010. The exhibition includes biblical and apocryphal papyri from the 4th c. to late Middle Ages. Three pages from the Tchacos Codex are on display (pp. 28, 33, and 46) Page 28 is from the 1 Apocalypse of James, and pages 33 and 46 are from the Gospel of Judas. There is also displayed two leaves from the unpublished Coptic papyrus codex of Paul's letters.

There is a catalogue being sold for 10 euros. If you plan to go to the exhibit and are willing to pick up a brochure for me, please let me know. I would love to have one.

PHOTO: from the exhibition web site HERE. From a quick reading of the top of the page, this is a page from Hebrews 11:30 ff. It is from the unpublished Pauline Codex from the El-Minya horde. It is the first time in thousands of years that this page from the Coptic letters of Paul has been viewed!

Aeon Byte interview

I meant to post this a few days ago, but I got overrun (what else is new? does life ever slow down?).

I had the pleasure of interviewing with Miguel Connor for his radio show and podcasts: Aeon Byte. The subject was more revelations about the Gospel of Judas and we talked quite a bit about gnosticism. If you want to check it out, go to this link to AEON BYTE homepage and scroll down until you see my pic and link to the interview. Hope you enjoy it.

Update on EBAY sales of Ferrini's horde

I communicated with Robert Kraft yesterday and found out that Mr. Ernest Muro was the main person who was keeping track of the "Geneva wares" that Ferrini was offering for sale on EBAY. He thought that he had identified a piece of Philippians from the Coptic Paul codex and possibly other pages. So he purchased several of the Coptic pieces.

PHOTO: Piece identified by Muro as Coptic Philippians. Photo from Robert Kraft's article.

Unexpectedly Muro died and someone disposed his collections, including the papyri. Kraft has worked to put up all the images from the EBAY sales. These can be accessed via the article link he wrote, "Pursuing Papyri" and posted.

I am thinking that it would be a good idea to get all the information about the distribution of the El-Minya horde up on a web page(all four books: Tchacos Codex; Paul's Coptic Codex; Exodus' Greek Codex; and the Mathematical Treatise). So I'm going to start working on that project.

I'll share information as I get it.

I missed a couple of things last year about the Judas fragments

Now that the Ohio Fragments are starting to surface and I am working on them, it has come to my attention via Roger Pearse's website (that tracks information on the Gospel of Judas) that Robert Kraft followed and documented the sale of a large number of Bruce Ferrini's EBAY sales (and his bank's) of manuscript materials from Ferrini's collection from autumn 2005 onwards. Kraft has posted information about this HERE. Unfortunately I can't view the EBAY photos, so I can't tell what belongs to the Tchacos Codex and what doesn't. But given that 140 Coptic items were sold, I imagine that some of the Gospel of Judas is at large in (a) private collection(s). This is so depressing that I don't even know where to begin. I will try to get in touch with Bob Kraft to get a better sense of the situation.

In addition, the lost book of Paul's letters in Coptic, discovered along with the Greek book of Exodus, the mathematical treatise, and the Tchacos Codex has now been located according to Christian Askeland who posted about this last April HERE. Well at least 13 pages of it has, mainly Galatians and Colossians. The report there says that either Gregor Wurst and/or Hans-Gebhard Bethge is/are working on them. I have not confirmed this yet, but will contact Wurst and Bethge shortly to see what they know.

The Codex Judas Papers

What to my wondering eyes should appear but The Codex Judas Papers! It arrived this morning in my mailbox, all 650 pages of it, and remarkably published in the year after the Codex Judas Congress had convened here at Rice University (March 13-16, 2008).

April DeConick (ed.). 2009. The Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13-16, 2008. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 71. Leiden: Brill.

It is an expensive volume so you might need to check it out of your library. See my earlier post about the book for ordering information.

The papers in it are of the highest quality, and the volume represents a landmark in Gnostic studies and our understanding of the Gospel of Judas. Scholars address issues of identity and community, portraits of Judas, astrological lore, salvation and praxis, text and intertext, and manuscript matters. Although the contributions show a variety of interpretations of the Tchacos texts, several points of agreement emerge, including the assessment that the Codex belonged to early Christians affiliated with classic Gnostic or Sethian traditions who were in conflict with other Christians belonging to the apostolic or conventional church.

Contributors include (in order of their appearance): Alastair Logan, Karen King, Johannes van Oort, Marvin Meyer, Gesine Schenke Robinson, John Turner, Birger Pearson, Fernando Bermejo Rubio, Kevin Sullivan, Ismo Dunderberg, Pierluigi Piovanelli, April DeConick, Nicola Denzey Lewis, Grant Adamson, Niclas Förster, Franklin Trammell, Elaine Pagels, Bas van Os, Johanna Brankaer, Tage Petersen, Louis Painchaud, Serge Cazelais, Matteo Grosso, Lance Jenott, Simon Gathercole, Gregor Wurst, Wolf-Peter Funk, Antti Marjanen, James Robinson.

Astrology in Bristol

If you are going to be in or near Bristol this spring, you might want to consider attending this fantastic-looking conference "Imagining Astrology" convened by Dr. Darrelyn Gunzberg, April 24-25, 2010.

ABSTRACT: Astrology as a way of understanding the world has woven its thread into cultures since Mesopotamian times. Along with its technical descriptions of calculation and interpretation, whether written on clay tablets or vellum, using stylus, quill or printing press, it has also taken form in sculpture, mosaics and painting, as well as inhabiting such esoteric bodies of knowledge as Kabbalah, alchemy and magic. Modern scholarship, viewing astrology from the outside, pays little attention to the language incorporated in such esoteric lore and has assigned it solely a cultural meaning, assuming astrology to be a form of divination, shaped by Aristotlean cosmology and Neo-Platonic philosophy. In so doing the Academy has failed to understand that astrology forms a lingua franca stitching together multiple paradigms of thinking. These fall beyond cultures, and bind, underpin and flow through them, reflective of and inherently part of human experience.

SPEAKERS

• Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, The University of Bristol, The Strange History of Astro-Archaeology
• Elliot Wolfson, Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New YorkUniversity, Theosis, Vision, and the Astral Body in Medieval German Pietism and the Spanish Kabbalah
• Kocku von Stuckrad, University of Groningen, Jewish Astrological Imagery in Late Antiquity
• Roger Beck, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Imagery and narrative in an ancient horoscope: P. Lond. 130 (Greek Horoscopes no. 81)
• Peter Forshaw, Assistant Professor in Western Esotericism, University of Amsterdam, Astronomia Inferior et Superior:Some Medieval and Renaissance Instances of the Conjunction of Alchemy and Astrology
• Geoffrey Shamos, Postgraduate research student, University of Pennsylvania, Astrology as Sociology: Depictions of the “Children of the Planets,” 1400-1600
• Liz Greene, Postgraduate research student, University of Bristol, The magical astrology of the British occult revival, 1885-1939
• Bernadette Brady, Postgraduate research student, Bath Spa University, The visual cartography of the sky since Mesopotamian times
• Darrelyn Gunzburg, Postgraduate research student, University of Bristol, Medieval frescoes and sculptures as astrological documents

Blogger and Wordpress question

I have not been satisfied with Blogger's inability to support webpages. I would like to be able to have one integrated website-blog that is EASY to manage. I like Blogger because it is so easy to use. And I really dislike my website because it is so cumbersome to alter, which is why nothing is ever updated.

So I tried to alter Blogger to give me some static pages last summer. But this is a temporary fix. I need to find another platform and integrate website and blog.

My biggest concerns are threefold.

1. Is there a way to automatically move my subscribers to a new URL? Or not?

2. Is there a way to automatically move my past three years of blogging history/archives to a new platform?

3. Finally, is Wordpress what I should be looking at? Or are there other recommendations? I like to control the look of my pages, so I am concerned about Wordpress if it is the case (which I don't know) that I can't access the html code.

The tragedy in Haiti

I was horrified this morning when I read in the newspaper that as many as 500,000 people may have been killed in the earthquake on Haiti. I can't even get my head around this. The survivors are going to need so much help and immediately. I am remembering IKE and KATRINA and the devastation wrecked here in the south and the length of time it has taken a wealthy nation with many resources to rebuild and take care of its misplaced, its injured, and its dead.

Want to help? Here is a LINK to some national organizations and some suggestions for local aid in the Houston area. Check your local newspaper for your own city's local help centers. Survivors are going to need clothing (consider an early spring cleaning of your closet), food, medicines, and water immediately.

Ohio Fragments of the Gospel of Judas

I have been intending to write about this subject since New Orleans, but I got sick and had so many family obligations over break that I haven't had a clear moment to do so.

The Ohio Fragments of the Gospel of Judas are coming to light. In New Orleans, Professor Meyer distributed initial transcriptions of the fragments which were made by he and Professor Wurst last year from photographs they have access to. My understanding is that very soon the fragments will be moved to Europe and rephotographed, and those photographs will be distributed to scholars working on the Gospel of Judas.

Professor Meyer has kindly uploaded his SBL talk, transcriptions and translations of the fragments to his official website HERE.

I don't want to say too much about the fragments, because I do not yet have access to the photographs which I will need to make my own transcription and translation. I have put together a seminar here at Rice to begin this work with my graduate students, and hope that the photos will be available very soon.

From the transcription done by Meyer and Wurst, it appears that Jesus is the one who ascends in the cloud at the end of the gospel and Judas is left behind on the ground looking at him, only to betray him a few lines later, fulfilling the fate of his ignorant star.

Starting off the New Year: Announcements

What is up this semester? I'm teaching two courses, my 100-level Introduction to New Testament Studies, and a graduate reading course in Coptic where we will finish up our work on the Gospel of Judas and the 1 Apocalypse of James from the Tchacos Codex.

Mark your calendars. Rice Religious Studies Department is hosting its Rockwell Symposium 2010, an international conference on April 15-18th in the Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library: Hidden God, Hidden Histories.

The symposium is designed to work on two distinct but related levels. On the first level, we intend the symposium as the inaugural event of the Department's new GEM Program, an area of graduate study at Rice that focuses on the traditional scholarly categories of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism, but also seeks to revision, renew, and move beyond them in creative and positive ways.

On the second level, the symposium will serve as a platform to bring together a set of particular studies to be published under the title, Histories of the Hidden God. Papers will address the specific topic of the Hidden God and the relationship of that God to the universe and humanity. The “thesis” of this edited volume is the exploration of religious traditions that characterize an absolute being who is “beyond” the conventional gods and our cosmos, a being who may even be conceived of as existing outside the known universe. This absolute being may be portrayed in theistic or non-theistic terms. Its relationship with the cosmos and other beings may vary from a relationship that is utterly transcendent to one that is radically immanent.

By focusing on the manner in which these ideologies describe the relationship between this god-beyond-god(s), the cosmos, and humanity, one of the main goals of this volume is to attempt to view thinkers and groups, whose traditional labels (‘gnostic’, ‘dualist’ etc) have associated them with the history of heresy, within a broader world view that connects them with others who were conceiving God and the world in similar ways. Thus another goal of this project is the hope that our studies will engage academic language and discourse in such a way that will facilitate a better understanding of this type of ideology (transtheism?, metatheism? etc) as part of a continuum of forms of belief, rather than as something sharply distinct from more normative or mainstream theologies. If this can be accomplished, it would move us in the direction of opening up the study of gnosticism, esotericism and mysticism to non-judgmental, yet critical academic categories.

A schedule of speakers and events will be posted as soon as that becomes finalized over the next month.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas!

A Merry Christmas from me and my family to you and yours!

Photo: Christmas at Mission Espada

A call to dialogue between postmodernists and historical critics

I am so glad that John van Seters published his response (Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9.26 [2009]) to Aichelle, Miscall, and Walsh's call for dialogue between historical critics and postmodernists (JBL 128.2 [2009] 383-404). I came across Seters article via the Dunedin School blog.

It will be no surprise that I hold very similar criticisms to Aichelle, Miscall, and Walsh's position. I have been wanting to take a moment to respond on my blog to this 'call' for dialogue since I read it last summer. So now appears to be a great opportunity to do so.

1. It has become evident to me especially in the last year that postmodernism is not a method, and should not be confused with a method, and is not a substitute for empirical research. It does not move us "beyond" the rigors of historical criticism. Rather Postmodernism is a set of critiques and attitudes toward texts and their interpretation that are largely dependent on modernism and historical criticism's own hermeneutic of suspicion.

2. The historian relies on empirical data gathered by using a critical, rational, contextual approach to the materials being studied. In Europe this is called "the scientific" approach to the study of religion rather than the "theological approach".

3. The postmodern approach, which divorces literature from historical context and questing for 'authorial' intent, is more amenable to churched traditions and theological readings which have been at odds with historical methods for 200 years. It claims that texts have a diversity of meanings that are located in the point of view of those reading it and the intertextual associations that those readers make. Thus many postmodernists want to conclude from this that historical interpretation is no more meaningful or valuable than any other. It is as 'ideological' and 'mythic' as the next. This conclusion is very dangerous and very inaccurate for some of the reasons that I outline in #4.

4. The historian is no idiot. Every generation of historians has critiqued its outcomes, well aware that personal biases affect the interpretation or assemblage of the data. In fact, this is a point that I first learned when I was an undergraduate in college in a history class. My professor called it "our colored glasses", and how it was necessary for us to be aware of them because they would affect our interpretation of the data. The fact that we all have biases that affect the interpretative process does not suggest that the historical critical method does not work or that it is 'mythic' or equivalent in validity with any other interpretation. On the contrary! The historian's own hermeneutic of suspicion and agreement to employ a critical or scientific approach to understanding our past demonstrates that the historical method works and that over time, as more and more historical interpretations and critiques of these interpretations are generated, we get a better and better grasp of our past and what was going on.

That's all I have time for today. I need to get back to cleaning and organizing my office, but at least it is a start to the 'dialogue' called for by Aichelle, Miscall and Walsh.

My Debut in BAR

This summer, I was asked to write a column for Biblical Archaeology Review that reflected my research on the Gospel of Thomas. It was just published in the January/February 2010 issue.

What's Up with the Gospel of Thomas?

What's on your desk?

I've been office cleaning this week and still in the process. Thought it would be fun to share five things that I found on my desk that I either forgot about or have been looking for but couldn't find previously beneath the massive paper mounds.

William Hartner, "The Pseudoplanetary Nodes of the Moon's Orbit in Hindu and Islamic Icongraphies," Ars Islamica 5 (1038) 112-154.

Howard M. Jackson, "The Meaning and Function of the Leontocephaline in Roman Mithraism," Numen 32 (1985) 17-45.

Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University 1982).

Michael Frede, "Numenius," ANRW 36.2: 1034-1075.

Elliot Wolfson, "Seven Mysteries of Knowledge: Qumran E/sotericism Recovered," The Idea of Biblical Interpretation (2003) 177-215.

What is buried on your desk?

Why do Americans believe so many different things?

The Pew Forum has put out an absolutely fascinating report about a survey they recently conducted in which they wanted to analyze how much and in what ways Americans "mix" aspects of different religions. This report has me captivated since I feel like I am reading a report about religious belief of Christians in the second century.

The argument I have been developing about second century Christians is that they were eclectic, and that gnosticism was an amalgamation of Egyptian astrology and religion, Greek mysteries and Hermetism, middle Platonic philosophy, Judaism and Christianity, with its constituents comfortable attending more than one religious house or being part of a multiple of religious bodies. It is exactly the kind of 'hybrid' that we are seeing today, and may have been seeing since the 1800s. I think it has something to do with 'internationalization', when a variety of religious traditions become available for consumption within a given culture at a given point in history.

I will be returning to this report and analyzing it carefully, and expect to post more thoughts on it. For now I just want to bring it to your attention because it is so fascinating and representative of the religion of no religion that is sweeping America.

Empirical research

This month I have been thinking about our graduate program at Rice, and the biblical field and its direction of research. I have written many posts on my concern that the field's infatuation with theory is causing many universities to produce a generation of new scholars who have become more and more detached from the texts and history and the hard work of empirical research.

When I attended a humanities fellows luncheon at Rice a few weeks ago, a historian of French literature spoke directly to the point in her field. When we do not do the empirical research, but privilege theory and method, we are at a disadvantage, because theory and method are trends that shift and change and go away. But the empirical data does not, and so we need to be the best linguists, the best philologists, the best textual scholars we can be.

Although it is to our advantage to employ a variety of approaches and nuance our approach to history, there is no substitute for the hard work of facing the text at the manuscript level, checking decisions made by editors of critical editions we rely on, being immersed in the literature and culture of the era we are studying, and being attuned to the metaphysical and practical landscape of the text under analysis. None of this is "sexy" or "innovative," and it is not quick in terms of ease of publication. But without it, we are left with theory which is here today and gone tomorrow.

Mandaeans in Massachusetts

Associated Press just published an important article about the Mandaean diaspora community in Massachusetts. There is real concern that the diaspora will be swallowed into the wider community. So to help preserve their ancient religion, they are trying to fund the building of a community center. Read more HERE.

Question about future of SBL

I am sorry to post again on SBL, but perhaps my frequency since the meeting reflects the intensity of my concern. I am a practical person and it seems to me that there has to be resolutions to some of the problems facing our society, especially as long as we remain divorced from AAR. I'm trying to brainstorm some possibilities for solutions.

So I am curious, especially to hear from fellow members: would consolidation of some of the units be part of the solution? What are the pros and cons? Are there ways to re-envision the formation and structure of units to allow for more interchange among members in our society? Is it possible for units to consolidate while still maintaining individual agendas?

Those of you who are in other organizations that operate with discipline units, how do you organize?