No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis explores transmission of religious representations of sacrifice and commitment within modern Jewish-Israeli culture. The thesis begins with a focus on the domain of religious representations and then explores the empirical plausibility of a context-based approach for studying their transmission patterns using recently emerging perspectives within cognitive science of religion. On that basis, the thesis turns the attention to religious representations that violate shared cultural assumptions (counter-cultural), through a review of the possible differences between these and religious representations that violate innate intuitions ( counterintuitive ). It is argued that without further expanding of the context-based view to include violations of cultural kind, new advances in this approach will not be convincing. A theoretical model of the effect of context on the spread of counter-cultural religious representations is therefore developed through a conceptual integration of aspects of script theory. The socio-cognitive model presented here is based on the potential connection between emerging accounts for cultural transmission and script theory. The first study involves an empirical investigation of media representations of sacrifice and commitment scripts within Jewish - Israeli culture. A second study, involving 1,005 participants, seeks to operationalize the investigation of religious representations, and does so by an online research tool that allows structured insight into mental representations of sacrifice and commitment scripts, based on representation elicited from the previous media analysis. This dynamic technology facilitates the investigation of the different qualities of recurrent representations over time and under different contextual conditions. In conclusion, this thesis attempts to explore the potential connections between the context in which counter-cultural representations are spread and the degree to which they spread by suggesting that under some conditions representations that maximally deviate from cultural assumptions can turn minimal, becoming optimal for transmission, as long as they can be justified in that context.

No description available.

This thesis seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the nature and function of the Old Testament Passover by considering how it shaped and transmitted Israel's collective memory. In this context, special attention is paid to the work of Jan Assman, who argues that the Ancient Near East in general and Israel in particular underwent a transition from ritual repetition to textual interpretation as the primary medium of cultural memory. This model is tested by a detailed exegesis of the Passover texts in Exodus 12-13, Deuteronomy 16 and 2 Chronicles 30 and 35. It is concluded that there is not a general tendency for text to displace rite so far as the Old Testament Passover is concerned. A better framework for understanding the distinctive contribution of each text is the relationship between ritual resemblance (mimesis) and oral or written explanation (catechesis). The thesis explores how these two features of Passover observance interact to shape Israel's memory of her past and her communal identity in the present. Exodus 12-13 portray Israel as a people belonging to YHWH by virtue of the deliverance from Egypt, Deuteronomy 16 recalls the memory of the departure from Egypt as a motivation for Torah observance and Chronicles portrays Israel as an organised cultic community gathered at the temple to petition YHWH to bring an end to national captivity. If there is a trajectory in Old Testament Passover texts it is found in the textualisation of catechesis. In the first instance the Passover's significance is explained alongside the rite itself. However, over time a developing body of authoritative texts provides an everwidening canonical context within which the Passover can be practised and interpreted. The thesis concludes by considering how its findings provide the basis for exploring other Old and New Testament themes.

No description available.

Jack Capon. / "May 25, 1955." "This report is based on a thesis submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering, M.I.T., ... for the degree of Master of Science." / Bibliography: p. 53. / Army Signal Corps Contract DA36-039 sc-42607 Project 102B Dept. of the Army Project 3-99-10-022

The early 9th century Carolingian manuscript of the Epistola Anne ad Senecam was discovered by B. Bischoff in the Archiepiscopal library of Cologne and published by him 1984. It is a short, incomplete Latin text of some ninety lines that Bischoff identified as a late antique Jewish missionsschrift addressed to certain unidentified fratres. There is little agreement in the current literature on the identity of the author or the addressee(s), nor on the date of its composition, and it has been proposed that the text is in fact Christian. The titulus has been taken as a later interpolation with no relation to the work. There have been two subsequent editions (Jacobi and Hilhorst) and a German translation (Wischmeyer) all dependent on Bischoff’s editio princeps. No extended study of the text has been published. The present study reexamines the text and presents a corrected edition of the Latin from the original manuscript together with an English translation. An analysis of the latinity and rhetoric of the text shows it to be have been written by a highly literate author aimed at a pagan, aristocratic audience similar to the group seen in the works of Macrobius. The fratres are not the prime addressee of the text but represent a Iamblichan neoplatonic group addressed in an apostrophe within the text. The use of a mixed cursus in the clausulae indicates a late 4th-5th century date. The work is shown to allude to Genesis and sapiential texts, particularly Wisdom but does not quote directly from them. There are indications that the author is using Biblical texts that are substantially different from the Vulgate Latin and possibly dependent on the Hebrew. The Epistola also appears to show a familiarity with a number of works of Seneca; Naturales Quaestiones, De Beneficiis and De Supersitione. An intertextual link between the text and Augustine’s De Civitate Dei and the De Reditu Suo of Rutilius Namatianus suggest a composition of the text in the second decade of the fifth century, c. 415. This would allow the author to be identified with the Annas didascalus Iudaeorum mentioned in the Theodosian code as active on behalf of the Jewish community at the imperial court in Ravenna, and a plausible context is reconstructed for such a scenario. Placed in the historical context of late paganism, the text is interpreted as constituting a protreptic exhorting its audience to avoid the obscurities of neoplatonism and the inanities of the cult of Liber Pater and to follow a philosophical faith consonant with that of the author. It can thus be seen as an attempt to establish a Jewish-Pagan dialogue in the face of the continuing Christianisation of the empire at a time when this process was still not seen as irreversible.