Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions

Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions
Cambridge University Press
0521831024 - Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions - Edited by Ra‘anan S. Boustan and Annette Yoshiko Reed
Frontmatter/Prelims

Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions

Heaven held a special place in the late antique imagination. A poignant sense of the relevance of heavenly realms for earthly life can be found not only in Judaism and Christianity but also in Graeco–Roman religious, philosophical, scientific, and “magical” traditions. The preoccupation with otherworldly realities transcends social, regional, and creedal boundaries. The topic of heaven thus serves as an ideal focus for an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this formative era in Western history. Drawing on the expertise of scholars of Classics, Ancient History, Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, and Patristics, this volume explores the different functions of heavenly imagery in different texts and traditions in order to map the patterns of unity and diversity within the religious landscape of Late Antiquity.

Ra‘anan S. Boustan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. A scholar of early Judaism, he has published studies on early Jewish mysticism, the relationship between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, and the role of gender and sexuality within Judaism, among other topics.

Annette Yoshiko Reed is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. Her research spans the fields of Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, and Patristics, and her publications include The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (coedited with Adam H. Becker).

---

HEAVENLY REALMS

AND

EARTHLY REALITIES

IN

LATE ANTIQUE RELIGIONS

Edited by

RA‘ANAN S. BOUSTAN
University of Minnesota

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED
McMaster University

---

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United States of America

Typefaces ITC Legacy 10/13.5 pt. and Diotima     System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available

ISBN 0 521 83102 4 hardback

---

Contents

Preface		page vii
List of Contributors		xi
	Introduction: “In Heaven as It Is on Earth”	1
	Ra‘anan S. Boustan and Annette Yoshiko Reed
PART ONE. BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN
1.	The Bridge and the Ladder: Narrow Passages in Late Antique Visions	19
	Fritz Graf
2.	“Heavenly Steps”: Manilius 4.119–121 and Its Background	34
	Katharina Volk
3.	Heavenly Ascent, Angelic Descent, and the Transmission of Knowledge in 1 Enoch 6–16	47
	Annette Yoshiko Reed
4.	“Connecting Heaven and Earth”: The Function of the Hymns in Revelation 4–5	67
	Gottfried Schimanowski
5.	Working Overtime in the Afterlife; or, No Rest for the Virtuous	85
	Sarah Iles Johnston
PART TWO. INSTITUTIONALIZING HEAVEN
6.	Earthly Sacrifice and Heavenly Incense: The Law of the Priesthood in Aramaic Levi and Jubilees	103
	Martha Himmelfarb
7.	Who’s on the Throne? Revelation in the Long Year	123
	John W. Marshall
8.	The Earthly Monastery and the Transformation of the Heavenly City in Late Antique Egypt	142
	Kirsti B. Copeland
9.	Contextualizing Heaven in Third-Century North Africa	159
	Jan N. Bremmer
10.	Bringing the Heavenly Academy Down to Earth: Approaches to the Imagery of Divine Pedagogy in the East Syrian Tradition	174
	Adam H. Becker
PART THREE. TRADITION AND INNOVATION
11.	Angels in the Architecture: Temple Art and the Poetics of Praise in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice	195
	Ra‘anan S. Boustan
12.	The Collapse of Celestial and Chthonic Realms in a Late Antique “Apollonian Invocation” (PGM I 262–347)	213
	Christopher A. Faraone
13.	In Heaven as It Is in Hell: The Cosmology of Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit	233
	Peter Schäfer
14.	The Faces of the Moon: Cosmology, Genesis, and the Mithras Liturgy	275
	Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
15.	“O Paradoxical Fusion!”: Gregory of Nazianzus on Baptism and Cosmology (Orations 38–40)	296
	Susanna Elm
Select Bibliography		317
Index		323

---

Preface

The present volume is the product of a unique sort of collaborative effort aimed at bringing together relatively unseasoned scholars – that is, graduate students – and their more experienced counterparts in an environment conducive to interdisciplinary research. In 2000, when the editors were both still in the midst of our doctoral studies in the Religions of Late Antiquity subfield of the Department of Religion at Princeton University, Prof. Peter Schäfer approached us for ideas about innovative ways to enrich graduate-student training and to foster further collaboration between faculty and students in our subfield, with the support of funds generously granted for this purpose by Prof. John F. Wilson, then Dean of Princeton’s Graduate School. This dovetailed with a growing sense on the part of the students in our subfield that we would benefit from having a formal yet supportive forum at which to share our ongoing research. Excited discussions soon yielded a plan for an event with a twofold structure: (1) a semester-long workshop on a theme of special relevance to the study of Late Antiquity, at which students would present papers and receive feedback from Princeton students and faculty, culminating in (2) a public colloquium that would feature reworked versions of these papers, alongside presentations from the faculty members of the workshop and invited scholars from other institutions.

   To enhance this project’s benefits for graduate-student training, it was determined that the responsibility for organizing both elements of this event, as well as for choosing the topic, the title, and the scholars to invite to the colloquium, would fall to us. Working under the guidance of Prof. Schäfer, we decided that the distinctively late antique fascination with the otherworldly realms presented a suitably variegated and widespread phenomenon for our project, intersecting the diverse areas of interest represented in our subfield while also opening the way for a profitably interdisciplinary vista onto the religious landscape of Late Antiquity. Accordingly, we chose a title that reflected our interest in the relationship between images of heaven and the social, cultural, and historical contexts that shaped them: “In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Imagined Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions.”

   From September to December 2000, the faculty and doctoral students in our subfield met biweekly to discuss student papers on this theme. As we had hoped, these meetings served to foster a productive setting of continued, informal dialogue and to encourage the exchange of research between members of our subfield with expertise in different religious traditions and geographical areas, even as they fulfilled the aim of providing students with feedback toward revising their papers for presentation at the culminating colloquium. At this event, held at Princeton on January 14–15, 2001, we were joined by scholars from other universities, from a range of intersecting fields – Classics, Religious Studies, Ancient History, Jewish Studies, Patristics – who shared the products of their ongoing research on images of heaven.

   The success of this event surpassed our expectations. The individual papers were of high quality, the dialogue that they sparked was unusually spirited, and even the participants expressed their surprise at the powerful perspective on late antique religion that emerged from the cumulative effect of the diverse presentations. Despite our different disciplines and fields of specialization, we found ourselves confronted by many of the same interpretative issues and methodological problems; not only were we pleased to discover many intriguing parallels and patterns within different late antique religions, but our interdisciplinary dialogue also allowed us to share the products of our individual attempts to forge heuristic new approaches to studying Late Antiquity. The present volume aims to capture the spirit of this event and to build upon its insights. We here include many of the papers presented at the 2001 colloquium, which have been revised and expanded to reflect our discussions there, together with six additional contributions solicited especially for this publication.¹

   Space does not permit a complete list of all those, at Princeton and beyond, who contributed to the success of the workshop and colloquium and who helped to make this volume possible. We would be remiss, however, not to express our deepest debt of gratitude to Prof. Schäfer, without whom none of this could have happened. From our initial brainstorming sessions about the workshop and colloquium until the completion of this volume, he has shown an intuitive understanding of how to guide this project with a sure hand, while at the same time ensuring that it continued to be shaped primarily by those it was intended to serve, us graduate students. His selfless mentoring has been a rare gift, from which we both have profited more than words can say.

   We would like to express our appreciation to Profs. Peter Brown, Fritz Graf, Martha Himmelfarb, and Elaine Pagels for participating in the workshop and chairing sessions at the colloquium. We are, in addition, profoundly grateful to Dr. Beatrice Rehl at Cambridge University Press for her keen advice on the shape, scope, and focus of this book during every stage of its growth, and for her kindness and patience in shepherding us through the publication process. The volume also benefited from the extensive and incisive comments offered by the anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript. To Lily Vuong and Jennifer Sanders, we offer thanks for their herculean indexing efforts. And, last but not least, we offer our warmest thanks to the contributors to this volume for their unflagging patience and enthusiasm.

	Ra‘anan S. Boustan
	Cambridge, Massachusetts
	Annette Yoshiko Reed
	Hamilton, Ontario

Abbreviations of primary sources, journal titles, and names of book series within this volume follow P. H. Alexander, J. F. Kutsko, J. D. Ernst, S. A. Decker–Lucke, and D. L. Petersen, eds., The SBL Handbook of Style: For Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies (Peabody, Mass., 1999), and S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds., Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1996).

---

Contributors

ADAM H. BECKER is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Religious Studies Program at New York University. He completed his dissertation, a study of Christian institutions of learning in late antique and early Islamic Mesopotamia, in the Department of Religion at Princeton University in 2003. His publications include The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2003), coedited with Annette Y. Reed.

RA‘ANAN S. BOUSTAN (né Abusch) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation, written in the Department of Religion at Princeton University, explores the literary and ideological relationships between Jewish mystical and martyrological literatures.

JAN N. BREMMER is Professor of History and Science of Religion at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. He is the author of The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (1983), Greek Religion (1994), and The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (2002).

KIRSTI B. COPELAND teaches at Santa Clara University. She has held numerous fellowships, including the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, and the Lady Davis Fellowship. She wrote her dissertation, “Mapping the Apocalypse of Paul: Geography, Genre and History” (2001), in the Religion Department at Princeton University. She is currently producing a volume of translations of Coptic Apocrypha for the University of Pennsylvania Press.

RADCLIFFE G. EDMONDS III is Assistant Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient History at Bryn Mawr College. His research interests include mythology, religion, and Platonic philosophy, with particular focus on the marginal categories of magic and Orphism within Greek religion.

SUSANNA ELM is Professor of History and Religion at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (1994) and coeditor with E. Rebillard of Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire-Orthodoxy, Christianity, History (2000). She is currently finishing a manuscript on Gregory of Nazianzus, tentatively titled “Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Gregory of Nazianzus, Julian, Themistius, and the Christianization of the Late Roman Elites.”

CHRISTOPHER A. FARAONE is Professor in the Department of Classics and the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. He is coeditor with T. Carpenter of Masks of Dionysus (1993) and author of Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999), as well as a number of articles on early Greek poetry, religion, and magic.

FRITZ GRAF is Professor of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University where he is also director of epigraphy at the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies. His main research interests lie with Greek and Roman religion, increasingly with their development in later antiquity and with the contribution epigraphy can make to the field.

MARTHA HIMMELFARB is Professor of Religion at Princeton University and chair of the Department of Religion. Her books include Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (1993), which treats the heavenly Temple and its relationship to the earthly.

SARAH ILES JOHNSTON is Professor of Greek and Latin and an Affiliate of the Religious Studies Program at the Ohio State University. She specializes in Mediterranean religions, particularly of Late Antiquity, with an emphasis on practices that are often collected under the term “magic.” She is the author of Restless Dead (1999), Hekate Soteira (1990), and various articles, as well as the coeditor of Medea (1996).

JOHN W. MARSHALL is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Parables of War: Reading John’s Jewish Apocalypse (2001).

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2002 with a dissertation on the fallen angels. Her publications include The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2003), coedited with Adam H. Becker.

PETER SCHÄFER is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University. His most recent book is Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbala (2002).

GOTTFRIED SCHIMANOWSKI is a researcher at the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum. His publications include Weisheitund Messias: Diejüdischen Voraussetzungen der urchristlichen Präexistenzchristologie (1985) and Die himmlische Liturgie in der Apokalypse des Johannes: Die frühjüdische Traditionen in Offenbarung 4–5 unter Einschluß  der Hekhalotliteratur (2002).

KATHARINA VOLK is Assistant Professor of Classics at Columbia University. She has published The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (2002) and is currently working on a monograph on the Roman astrological poet Manilius.

---

© Cambridge University Press