#cavan concannon

[beguines]

My suspicion against rehabilitating Paul also rests on unexamined assumptions about Paul's authority and importance in both the Christian and, more broadly, the Western tradition. The veneration of Paul as a touchstone for Christian theology, as a saint whose words carry the force of the divine, ensures that his letters will always have the potential to be grafted onto the apparatus of oppressive systems. Because his archive is found within the Christian Bible, modern readers, academics, theologians, and laypeople alike tend to start with a series of assumptions, among them the assumption of white Christian hegemony over Western culture. Because the Bible is a sacred text, it is presumed to be good and relevant. Paul benefits from this assumption by association: readers assume that he is good, that he is relevant, and that he can illuminate and answer our problems with his solutions. This is what I would call, riffing on Michel Foucault, the "canonical function," the discourse that surrounds Paul as a canonical author and shapes how he is read before his letters are even picked up. Historians and biblical scholars are not immune to this tendency, though they would argue that Paul is good and relevant when read within his historical context. Even Marxist philosophical readings of Paul make the same assumptions about his quality and relevance, though they do not share Christian presuppositions about his sacrality. Interrogating Paul's assumed place as a canonical author is therefore a necessary starting point to any conversation about his rehabilitation or reuse.

Paul presents us with questions that sit at the heart of what counts as canon . . . What are the pleasures that cause some to set a text apart as special— the joy of insight, the thrill of verbal intimacy? What pleasures come from wielding such a text to enlighten or to force obedience? What are the ethical limits that a text can push? At what point must we stop our faithful interpretive betrayals, our near-infinite capacity to resignify canonical texts? Are there pleasures too in rejection, in profanation? Few literary archives have straddled the lines of these disparate pleasures more adroitly than Paul's, able to incite the blisses of exegetical ecstasy, masochistic self- destruction, and sadistic oppression.

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul

[uscdornsifeadmission]

When in Rome...

[filmloading361]

More Apocrypha Iirejected Scriptures

(This is the second in a series of posts on texts to be featured in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures edited by Brent Landau and I. The material here is included also on my More Christian Apocrypha page).

The Revelation of the Magi has appeared recently in an English translation: Brent Landau, Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men’s Journey to Bethlehem (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2010), based on his dissertation (to be published in CCSA) “The Sages and the Star-Child: An Introduction to the Revelation of the Magi, An Ancient Christian Apocryphon” (Ph. D. diss.., Harvard Divinity School, 2008 (available HERE)). Brent and I did not feel it was necessary to include another translation of the text in the MNTA volume, but did want to expose a wider audience to the text. So, we decided to include an introduction and a summary. The same strategy was going to be employed for the Armenian Infancy Gospel (recently translated into English by Abraham Terian) and the apocryphal Apocalypses of John, but those contributions have not materialized.

More Apocrypha Iirejected Scriptures Fulfilled

More Apocrypha Iirejected Scriptures King James Version

The text is available in a single Syriac manuscript (Vatican, Biblioteca apostolica, syr. 162) of a larger text known as the Chronicle of Zuqnin. There are a number of apocryphal Jewish and Christian texts that have been preserved in such chronicles and compendia (e.g., Joseph and Aseneth, material in the Book of the Bee and the Cave of Treasures). The story is told from the perspective of the Magi, who are described much differently than in the canonical account of their journey. Here there are twelve Magi (perhaps more), they hail from a mythological eastern land named Shir, and the name “Magi,” it is said, derives etymologically from their practice of praying in silence. They knew to follow the star to Bethlehem because they are descendants of Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve, who passed on to them a prophecy told to him by his father Adam. The star appears to the Magi in the Cave of Treasures on the Mountain of Victories. There it transforms into a small, luminous being (clearly Christ, but his precise identity is never explicitly revealed) and instructs them about its origins and their mission. The Magi follow the star to Bethlehem, where it transforms into the infant Jesus. Upon returning to their land, the Magi instruct their people about the star-child. In an epilogue likely secondary to the text, Judas Thomas arrives in Shir, baptizes the Magi and commissions them to preach throughout the world.

Rev. Magi contains several interesting parallels with other texts from antiquity, indicating that its traditions about the Magi were wide-spread. The “Cave of Treasures” is mentioned also in the Syriac version of the Testament of Adam (a Christian work from the fifth or sixth century) and from there is taken up in the Cave of Treasures (dated to the sixth century) and the Book of the Bee (from the thirteenth century). Several elements of Rev. Magi's story are found also in the Liber de nativitate salvatoris, an expansion of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew with curious features that may have originated in a very early infancy gospel. Some aspects of Rev. Magi were also passed on in summary by the anonymous author of a fifth-century commentary on the Gospel of Matthew known as the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum. From here some elements found their way into the Golden Legend (ch. 6). The Rev. Magi traditions are surprisingly widespread for a text that, were it not for that one manuscript, would have been lost to history.

Compilation of little-known and never-before-published apocryphal Christian texts in English translation

This anthology of ancient nonbiblical Christian literature presents introductions to and translations of little-known apocryphal texts from a wide variety of genres, most of which have never before been translated into any modern language.

More Buying Choices $102.40 (24 used & new offers) Apocrypha (Large Print): King James Version. 4.7 out of 5 stars 387. The Encyclopedia of Lost and Rejected Scriptures: The Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha. 4.7 out of 5 stars 532. Hardcover $42.49 $ 42. 49 $65.00 $65.00. FREE Shipping by Amazon. Burke & Long, eds., New Testament Apocrypha, first galley proofs February 19, 2016 1:23 PM New Testament Apocrypha More Noncanonical Scriptures Volume one Edited by Tony Burke and Brent Landau William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan.

An introduction to the volume as a whole addresses the most significant features of the included writings and contextualizes them within the contemporary (quickly evolving) study of the Christian Apocrypha. The body of the book comprises thirty texts that have been carefully introduced, annotated, and translated into readable English by eminent scholars. Ranging from the second century to early in the second millennium, these fascinating texts provide a more complete picture of Christian thought and expression than canonical texts alone can offer.

For ordering information, visit Eerdmans.

PREVIEW (introduction and front matter)

CONTENTS

1. Gospels and Related Traditions of New Testament Figures The Legend of Aphroditianus (Katharina Heyden) The Revelation of the Magi (Brent Landau) The Hospitality of Dysmas (Mark Bilby) The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Syriac) (Tony Burke) On the Priesthood of Jesus (Bill Adler) Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 210 (Brent Landau) Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 5072 (Ross P. Ponder) The Dialogue of the Paralytic with Christ (Bradley N. Rice) The Toledot Yeshu (Stanley Jones) The Berlin-Strasbourg Apocryphon (Alin Suciu) The Discourse of the Savior and the Dance of the Savior (Paul C. Dilley) An Encomium on Mary Magdalene (Christine Luckritz Marquis) An Encomium on John the Baptist (Philip L. Tite) The Life of John the Baptist by Serapion (Slavomír Céplö) Life and Martyrdom of John the Baptist (Andrew Bernhard) The Legend of the Thirty Silver Pieces (Tony Burke and Slavomír Céplö) The Death of Judas according to Papias (Geoffrey S. Smith)

2. Apocryphal Acts and Related Traditions The Acts of Barnabas (Glenn E. Snyder) The Acts of Cornelius the Centurion (Tony Burke and Witold Witakowski) John and the Robber (Rick Brannan) The History of Simon Cephas, the Chief of the Apostles (Stanley Jones) The Acts of Timothy (Cavan Concannon) The Acts of Titus (Richard Pervo) The Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena (David Eastman)

3. Epistles The Epistle of Christ from Heaven (Calogero A. Miceli) The Letter of Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite to Timothy on the Death of Peter and Paul (David Eastman)

More Apocrypha Iirejected Scriptures John Hagee

4. Apocalypses The (Latin) Revelation of John about Antichrist (Charles Wright) The Apocalypse of the Virgin (Stephen Shoemaker) The Tiburtine Sibyl (Stephen Shoemaker) The Investiture of Abbaton (Alin Suciu and Ibrahim Saweros)

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

The belief that demons have sex with humans runs deep in Christian and Jewish traditions

Incubus, a male demon, was said to prey on sleeping women in mythological tales. Walker, Charles: The encyclopedia of secret knowledge

Cavan W. Concannon: Associate Professor of Religion, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

https://theconversation.com/the-belief-that-demons-have-sex-with-humans-runs-deep-in-christian-and-jewish-traditions-143589

August 12, 2020

Houston physician and pastor Stella Immanuel – described as “spectacular” by Donald Trump for her promotion of unsubstantiated claims about anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for COVID-19 – has some other, very unconventional views.

As well as believing that scientists are working on a vaccine to make people less religious and that the U.S. government is run by reptilian creatures, Immanuel, the leader of a Christian ministry called Fire Power Ministries, also believes sex with demons causes miscarriages, impotence, cysts and endometriosis, among other maladies.

It has opened her up to much ridicule. But, as a scholar of early Christianity, I am aware that the belief that demons – or fallen angels – regularly have sex with humans runs deep in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Demon sex

The earliest account of demon sex in Jewish and Christian traditions comes from the Book of Genesis, which details the origins of the world and the early history of humanity. Genesis says that, prior to the flood of Noah, fallen angels mated with women to produce a race of giants.

The brief mention of angels breeding with human women contains few details. It was left to later writers to fill in the gaps.

In the third century B.C., the “Book of the Watchers,” an apocalyptic vision written in the name of a mysterious character named Enoch mentioned in Genesis, expanded on this intriguing tale. In this version, the angels, or the “Watchers,” not only have sex with women and birth giants, but also teach humans magic, the arts of luxury and knowledge of astrology. This knowledge is commonly associated in the ancient world with the advancement of human civilization.

The “Book of the Watchers” suggests that fallen angels are the source of human civilization. As scholar Annette Yoshiko Reed has shown, the “Book of the Watchers” had a long life within Jewish and early Christian communities until the middle ages. Its descriptions of fallen angels were widely influential.

The story is quoted in the canonical epistle of Jude. Jude cites the “Book of the Watchers” in an attack on perceived opponents who he associates with demonic knowledge.

Christians in the second century A.D., such as the influential theologian Tertullian of Carthage, treated the text as scripture, though it is only considered scripture now by some Orthodox Christian communities.

Tertullian retells the story of the Watchers and their demonic arts as a way to discourage female Christians from wearing jewelry, makeup, or expensive clothes. Dressing in anything other than simple clothes, for Tertullian, means that one is under the influence of demons.

Christians like Tertullian came to see demons behind almost all aspects of ancient culture and religion.

Many Christians justified abstaining from the everyday aspects of ancient Roman life, from consuming meat to wearing makeup and jewelry, by arguing that such practices were demonic.

Christian fascination with demons having sex with humans developed significantly in the medieval world. Historian Eleanor Janega, has recently shown that it was in the medieval period that beliefs about nocturnal demon sex – those echoed by Immanuel today – became common.

For example, the legendary magician Merlin, from the tales of King Arthur, was said to have been sired by an incubus, a male demon.

Demonic deliverance

For as long as Christians have worried about demons, they have also thought about how to protect themselves from them.

The first biography of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark, written around A.D. 70, presents Jesus as a charismatic preacher who both heals people and casts out demons. In one of the first scenes of the gospel, Jesus casts an unclean spirit out of a man in the synagogue at Capernaum.

In one of his letters to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul argued that women could protect themselves from being raped by demons by wearing veils over their heads.

Christians also turned to ancient traditions of magic and magical objects, such as amulets, to help ward off spiritual dangers.

Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism

In the wake of the Enlightenment, European Christians became deeply embroiled in debates about miracles, including those related to the existence and casting out of demons.

For many, the emergence of modern science called such beliefs into question. In the late 19th century, Christians who sought to retain belief in demons and miracles found refuge in two separate but interconnected developments.

A large swath of American evangelicals turned to a new theory called “dispensationalism” to help them understand how to read the Bible. Dispensationalist theologians argued that the Bible was a book coded by God with a blueprint for human history, past, present and future.

In this theory, human history was divided into different periods of time, “dispensations,” in which God acted in particular ways. Miracles were assigned to earlier dispensations and would only return as signs of the end of the world.

For dispensationalists, the Bible prophesied that end of the world was near. They argued that end would occur through the work of demonic forces operating through human institutions. As a result, dispensationalists are often quite distrustful and prone to conspiratorial thinking. For example, many believe that the United Nations is part of a plot to create a one world government ruled by the coming Antichrist.

Such distrust helps explain why Christians like Immanuel might believe that reptilian creatures work in the U.S. government or that doctors are working to create a vaccine that makes people less religious.

Meanwhile the end of the 19th century also saw the emergence of the Pentecostal movement, the fastest growing segment of global Christianity. Pentecostalism featured a renewed interest in the work of the Holy Spirit and its manifestation in new signs and wonders, from miraculous healings to ecstatic speech.

As scholar André Gagné has written, Immanuel has deep ties to a prominent Pentecostal network in Nigeria – Mountain of Fire Ministries or MFM founded in 1989 in Lagos by Daniel Kolawole Olukoya, a geneticist turned popular preacher. Olukoya’s church has developed into a transnational network, with offshoots in the U.S. and Europe.

Like many Pentecostals in the Global South, the Mountain of Fire Ministries believe spiritual forces can be the cause of many different afflictions, including divorce and poverty.

Deliverance Christianity

For Christians like Immanuel, spirits pose a threat to humans, both spiritually and physically.

In her recent book “Saving Sex,” religion scholar Amy DeRogatis shows how beliefs about “spiritual warfare” grew increasingly common among Christians in the middle of the last century.

These Christians claimed to have the knowledge and skills required to “deliver” humans from the bonds of demonic possession, which can include demons lodged in the DNA. For these Christians, spiritual warfare was a battle against a dangerous set of demonic foes that attacked the body as much as the soul.

Belief that demons have sex with humans is, then, not an aberration in the history of Christianity.

It might be tempting to see Immanuel’s support for conspiracy theories as separate from her claims that demons cause gynecological ailments.

However, because demons have also been associated with influencing culture and politics, it is not surprising that those who believe in them might distrust the government, schools and other things nonbelievers might take to be common sense.

________________________________________

On July 27, the president and his son Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted a viral video featuring Dr. Stella Immanuel, in which the Houston pediatrician rejected the effectiveness of wearing face masks for preventing the spread of COVID-19 and promoted hydroxychloroquine to treat the disease.

God, Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han achieved unity inside the womb…. Hak Ja Han was lifted up to God’s wife position.

Sun Myung Moon – Restoration through Incest

Cheongpyeong: Evil spirits stop Korean and Japanese women from having children.

Shamanic Trees and Magical Thinking at the Cheongpyeong Training Center

Shampoo to get rid of evil spirits

“The Angels and Absolute Good Spirits have left Cheongpyeong” says Hyo-nam Kim / DaeMo Nim

Soon-ae Hong (the mother of Hak Ja Han) spent two years in Chuncheon Prison after Ansu beating an 18-year old boy to death.

Moon’s Other Gospel and Immorality

Ritual Sex in the Unification Church – Kirsti L. Nevalainen

The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) was formerly known as the Unification Church (UC). In May 2020 the name of the organization was again changed – this time to ‘Heavenly Parent’s Holy Community.’

[odinistpressservice]

Immigration: How ancient Rome dealt with the Barbarians at the gate Wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border in Sunland Park, New Mexico, in 2016. AP/Christian Torres Cavan W. Concannon, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

[newseveryhourly]

In March, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how Steve Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby and President of Museum of the Bible, plans to return 11,500 illicit Iraqi and Egyptian artifacts currently owned by the company or museum to their countries of origin. Among this vast collection of undocumented items that the museum was voluntarily returning is the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet an ancient clay tablet that, among other things, records part of history’s oldest creation story. One detail Green left out of the story? The tablet had been seized on September 24, 2019 by the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations. Now, Hobby Lobby wants the $1.6 million it spent on the tablet back.On May 19, 2020 Hobby Lobby filed a lawsuit against world renowned auction house Christie’s and a dealer identified as “John Doe” alleging that both parties deceived Hobby Lobby about the legality of the sale and seeking the return of funds spent on the item, interest since 2014, and attorney fees. They acquired the item in 2014 for $1,694,000. The story, as it can be pieced together from the government’s complaint and Hobby Lobby’s filing, begins in 2001 when a dealer and unnamed cuneiform expert identified the tablet on the floor of the apartment of London based Jordanian antiquities dealer Ghassan Rihani. At the time it was unreadable and was purchased for $50,000.  The antiquities dealer brought the tablet to the U.S. where it was worked on by a then unnamed professor at Princeton. In 2007 the antiquities dealer sold the tablet to two other dealers for pretty much what he had purchased it for. When these unnamed dealers asked for provenance, the antiquities dealer used, the suit claims, a “False Provenance Letter [that] indicated that the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was purchased at a 1981 Butterfield & Butterfield auction in San Francisco as part of lot 1503.” Why does the date matter? Because if it hadn’t legally been in the U.S. for decades, then the tablet would have been illicit. Under the UNESCO convention, items of cultural and historical interest discovered after 1970 cannot be removed from their countries of origin except under special agreement. The false provenance letter suggested that the tablet had been in the U.S. for decades.In the same year as the fake letter was acquired, the tablet was published for the first time in a reputable academic journal by Professor A. R. George, a leading expert on Assyriology who teaches at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London). According to his article, George is the same scholar who viewed the tablet in 2005. He says that he published the tablet with the permission of the owner, who wished to remain anonymous. He also notes that the “tablet has since been offered for sale by a Californian bookseller, Michael Sharpe Rare and Antiquarian Books, as item 53 in his catalogue no. 1, issued on 4 September 2007.” The article does not mention the provenance of the item, although by the time the tablet went up for sale in 2007 the faked provenance was already attached. The catalog produced by Sharpe offered it for sale with an asking price of $450,000. At this point “John Doe” bought the item from the immediate owner.The falsified provenance and George’s article certainly lent legitimacy to the project. When the item was subsequently sold via private treaty by Christie’s to Hobby Lobby in 2014, they were allegedly told about the involvement of only a few relevant parties: the faked Butterfield provenance, Michael Sharpe, and John Doe. They were not, Hobby Lobby’s suit alleges, told about the American dealer who had imported the object into the country in the early 2000s, or the exchange of hands in 2007. According to Hobby Lobby’s complaint, Georgiana Aitken, the Head of Antiquities at Christie’s London office, had made inquiries about the provenance letter from the first dealer and was told “over the telephone [that the letter] could not be verified and would not withstand the scrutiny of a public auction.” Christie's, Hobby Lobby claims, organized the private sale to Hobby Lobby when “they should have known that … [the provenance] was false.”After Hobby Lobby purchased the tablet (no later than July 2014), it was “hand-carried by an Auction House representative [the Hobby Lobby suit alleges that this was Margaret Ford] to Hobby Lobby in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma so that Hobby Lobby could avoid incurring a New York sales tax.”It is worth noting that Christie’s have facilitated many such private sales to the Green Family (Hobby Lobby) and that in some cases, for example the sale of papyri, those items turned out to be illicit and also had to be returned. Now, it seems, Hobby Lobby is mad about it.As made clear by the United States Attorney General’s complaint against the item (for legal reasons the governmental complaints are brought against objects and not people), Hobby Lobby didn’t do anything wrong. They were shown faked provenance documents. In contrast to earlier seizures of Hobby Lobby acquisitions, first reported in The Daily Beast by Joel Baden and me in 2015, the Green family were clearly and overtly deceived. Certainly, their willingness to spend large sums of money on Bible-related antiquities and their history of being cavalier about provenance helped make them a target for what Steve Green has called “unscrupulous dealers.” Allegedly, that group may now include one of the world’s most famous and highly regarded auction houses. In a statement issued to The Daily Beast after publication, a Christie’s spokesperson said, “This filing is linked to new information that has come to light regarding an unidentified dealer’s admission to government authorities that he illegally imported this item then falsified documents over a decade ago, in order to perpetrate an illegal sale and exploit the legitimate market for ancient art. Now that we are informed of this activity pre-dating Christie’s involvement, we are reviewing all representations made to us by prior owners and will reserve our rights in this matter. Assertions within the filing that suggest Christie’s had knowledge of the original fraud or illegal importation do not comport with our investigation.”There are two important things to note in this story. First is that for the past year Hobby Lobby have been conducting a media campaign to reframe themselves as “victims” of “unscrupulous buyers.” They made mistakes, they claim, but things are different now. The language they use is, as Jill Hicks-Keeton, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has told me, oddly evocative of Christian narratives of repentance and rebaptism. Certainly, the crime and greater blame lies with the dealers, auction houses, and (allegedly) scholars who knowingly perpetrated these crimes. These dealers exploited the religious interests of a powerful evangelical family. At the same time, as early as the Summer of 2010, the Greens were warned about the dangers of buying illicit antiquities by Patty Gerstenblith, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject. As she told Chasing Aphrodite, they chose not to take her advice.The issue is not just that the Green Christian story of confession and rebirth has been told several times before (in 2012 when they replaced key figures in their organization, 2017 when the museum opened, and again this year) but that it doesn’t note that all of their changes have been brought about because of external pressure by scholars. For example, their widely publicized revelation that they own forged (and thus illicitly purchased) Dead Sea Scrolls this year obscured the fact that scholars like Årstein Justnes have been publicly calling them forgeries since 2016. We discussed this and other examples in our 2017 book Bible Nation, and yet Museum of the Bible would have you believe that their investigation was sui generis and, thus, demonstrates that the organization has changed. They do finally seem to be trying to set things right, but it’s also a carefully managed media campaign that ignores their own culpability. The more troubling thing is that the media is buying it. An April 5 article in The New York Times entirely omitted the recent revelation of the Museum’s possession of 13 fragments of papyri that were stolen from the Sackler Library at the University of Oxford and rightly belong to the Egypt Exploration Society. The article claims to represent the views of the Museum’s “toughest critics.” However, none of those who spearheaded academic criticism of the Museum were cited. One would expect to hear from Roberta Mazza, who sounded an early alarm about the illicit nature of the Green family’s papyri collection and has pursued the story since; Brent Nongbri, whose blog Variant Readings is the premiere source of information on the Greens' illicit papyrus collecting; Mark Chancey, who was the first to criticize attempts to introduce their Bible Curriculum to Oklahoma; Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, co-editors of The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction (Fortress, 2019); and, at risk of sounding arrogant, myself and Joel Baden, who authored the first book on the museum Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (Princeton, 2017). None of these scholars were asked for comment. (I attempted to contact the author of the article but did not hear back). Instead the article cites only those academics and experts who have collaborated with the Museum (even if they have offered some criticism of it in the past). The Museum is doing a masterful job at being allowed to control its own press and rebaptize itself in the waters of public opinion. At no point has Steve Green, who does seem genuinely contrite, offered to repay the sizeable tax deductions Hobby Lobby received for worthless forged Dead Sea Scrolls. At risk of being too Catholic about this, what is repentance without penance?The second important thing is that while individual scholars have been instrumental in bringing the problems with Hobby Lobby’s collecting practices to light, the academy also unwittingly participates in the illicit antiquities market. Prior to the publication of Andrew George’s article, the Gilgamesh tablet traded for roughly $50,000, after his publication its value rose first to $450,000 and then to over $1.6 million. The Michael Sharpe catalog mentions George’s analysis. George’s article notes that he had presented his material at seminars at several distinguished universities. Did any of the attendees of these seminars ask where the tablet had come from? George published a tablet that had forged provenance and while there’s no suggestion that he knew it was forged or that he financially benefited, that publication was instrumental in raising the value of the item in question. For Hobby Lobby, using the skills of academics to raise the value of objects was always part of the plan. Scott Carroll, former director of the Green Collection, told me that that was part of the initial business pitch that he and Johnny Shipman had offered the Greens in 2005 and 2008. Academics would jump at the opportunity to work on these texts (for almost nothing), and the Greens would reap the financial rewards. As archaeologist Neil Brodie has said before, when academics work on unprovenanced artifacts, they raise the value of illicit antiquities. As an academic myself, I can only say that we are part of the problem.Andrew George has not returned inquiries for comment.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[lovehardenemycollector]

In March, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how Steve Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby and President of Museum of the Bible, plans to return 11,500 illicit Iraqi and Egyptian artifacts currently owned by the company or museum to their countries of origin. Among this vast collection of undocumented items that the museum was voluntarily returning is the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet an ancient clay tablet that, among other things, records part of history’s oldest creation story. One detail Green left out of the story? The tablet had been seized on September 24, 2019 by the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations. Now, Hobby Lobby wants the $1.6 million it spent on the tablet back.On May 19, 2020 Hobby Lobby filed a lawsuit against world renowned auction house Christie’s and a dealer identified as “John Doe” alleging that both parties deceived Hobby Lobby about the legality of the sale and seeking the return of funds spent on the item, interest since 2014, and attorney fees. They acquired the item in 2014 for $1,694,000. The story, as it can be pieced together from the government’s complaint and Hobby Lobby’s filing, begins in 2001 when a dealer and unnamed cuneiform expert identified the tablet on the floor of the apartment of London based Jordanian antiquities dealer Ghassan Rihani. At the time it was unreadable and was purchased for $50,000.  The antiquities dealer brought the tablet to the U.S. where it was worked on by a then unnamed professor at Princeton. In 2007 the antiquities dealer sold the tablet to two other dealers for pretty much what he had purchased it for. When these unnamed dealers asked for provenance, the antiquities dealer used, the suit claims, a “False Provenance Letter [that] indicated that the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was purchased at a 1981 Butterfield & Butterfield auction in San Francisco as part of lot 1503.” Why does the date matter? Because if it hadn’t legally been in the U.S. for decades, then the tablet would have been illicit. Under the UNESCO convention, items of cultural and historical interest discovered after 1970 cannot be removed from their countries of origin except under special agreement. The false provenance letter suggested that the tablet had been in the U.S. for decades.In the same year as the fake letter was acquired, the tablet was published for the first time in a reputable academic journal by Professor A. R. George, a leading expert on Assyriology who teaches at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London). According to his article, George is the same scholar who viewed the tablet in 2005. He says that he published the tablet with the permission of the owner, who wished to remain anonymous. He also notes that the “tablet has since been offered for sale by a Californian bookseller, Michael Sharpe Rare and Antiquarian Books, as item 53 in his catalogue no. 1, issued on 4 September 2007.” The article does not mention the provenance of the item, although by the time the tablet went up for sale in 2007 the faked provenance was already attached. The catalog produced by Sharpe offered it for sale with an asking price of $450,000. At this point “John Doe” bought the item from the immediate owner.The falsified provenance and George’s article certainly lent legitimacy to the project. When the item was subsequently sold via private treaty by Christie’s to Hobby Lobby in 2014, they were allegedly told about the involvement of only a few relevant parties: the faked Butterfield provenance, Michael Sharpe, and John Doe. They were not, Hobby Lobby’s suit alleges, told about the American dealer who had imported the object into the country in the early 2000s, or the exchange of hands in 2007. According to Hobby Lobby’s complaint, Georgiana Aitken, the Head of Antiquities at Christie’s London office, had made inquiries about the provenance letter from the first dealer and was told “over the telephone [that the letter] could not be verified and would not withstand the scrutiny of a public auction.” Christie's, Hobby Lobby claims, organized the private sale to Hobby Lobby when “they should have known that … [the provenance] was false.”After Hobby Lobby purchased the tablet (no later than July 2014), it was “hand-carried by an Auction House representative [the Hobby Lobby suit alleges that this was Margaret Ford] to Hobby Lobby in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma so that Hobby Lobby could avoid incurring a New York sales tax.”It is worth noting that Christie’s have facilitated many such private sales to the Green Family (Hobby Lobby) and that in some cases, for example the sale of papyri, those items turned out to be illicit and also had to be returned. Now, it seems, Hobby Lobby is mad about it.As made clear by the United States Attorney General’s complaint against the item (for legal reasons the governmental complaints are brought against objects and not people), Hobby Lobby didn’t do anything wrong. They were shown faked provenance documents. In contrast to earlier seizures of Hobby Lobby acquisitions, first reported in The Daily Beast by Joel Baden and me in 2015, the Green family were clearly and overtly deceived. Certainly, their willingness to spend large sums of money on Bible-related antiquities and their history of being cavalier about provenance helped make them a target for what Steve Green has called “unscrupulous dealers.” Allegedly, that group may now include one of the world’s most famous and highly regarded auction houses. In a statement issued to The Daily Beast after publication, a Christie’s spokesperson said, “This filing is linked to new information that has come to light regarding an unidentified dealer’s admission to government authorities that he illegally imported this item then falsified documents over a decade ago, in order to perpetrate an illegal sale and exploit the legitimate market for ancient art. Now that we are informed of this activity pre-dating Christie’s involvement, we are reviewing all representations made to us by prior owners and will reserve our rights in this matter. Assertions within the filing that suggest Christie’s had knowledge of the original fraud or illegal importation do not comport with our investigation.”There are two important things to note in this story. First is that for the past year Hobby Lobby have been conducting a media campaign to reframe themselves as “victims” of “unscrupulous buyers.” They made mistakes, they claim, but things are different now. The language they use is, as Jill Hicks-Keeton, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has told me, oddly evocative of Christian narratives of repentance and rebaptism. Certainly, the crime and greater blame lies with the dealers, auction houses, and (allegedly) scholars who knowingly perpetrated these crimes. These dealers exploited the religious interests of a powerful evangelical family. At the same time, as early as the Summer of 2010, the Greens were warned about the dangers of buying illicit antiquities by Patty Gerstenblith, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject. As she told Chasing Aphrodite, they chose not to take her advice.The issue is not just that the Green Christian story of confession and rebirth has been told several times before (in 2012 when they replaced key figures in their organization, 2017 when the museum opened, and again this year) but that it doesn’t note that all of their changes have been brought about because of external pressure by scholars. For example, their widely publicized revelation that they own forged (and thus illicitly purchased) Dead Sea Scrolls this year obscured the fact that scholars like Årstein Justnes have been publicly calling them forgeries since 2016. We discussed this and other examples in our 2017 book Bible Nation, and yet Museum of the Bible would have you believe that their investigation was sui generis and, thus, demonstrates that the organization has changed. They do finally seem to be trying to set things right, but it’s also a carefully managed media campaign that ignores their own culpability. The more troubling thing is that the media is buying it. An April 5 article in The New York Times entirely omitted the recent revelation of the Museum’s possession of 13 fragments of papyri that were stolen from the Sackler Library at the University of Oxford and rightly belong to the Egypt Exploration Society. The article claims to represent the views of the Museum’s “toughest critics.” However, none of those who spearheaded academic criticism of the Museum were cited. One would expect to hear from Roberta Mazza, who sounded an early alarm about the illicit nature of the Green family’s papyri collection and has pursued the story since; Brent Nongbri, whose blog Variant Readings is the premiere source of information on the Greens' illicit papyrus collecting; Mark Chancey, who was the first to criticize attempts to introduce their Bible Curriculum to Oklahoma; Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, co-editors of The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction (Fortress, 2019); and, at risk of sounding arrogant, myself and Joel Baden, who authored the first book on the museum Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (Princeton, 2017). None of these scholars were asked for comment. (I attempted to contact the author of the article but did not hear back). Instead the article cites only those academics and experts who have collaborated with the Museum (even if they have offered some criticism of it in the past). The Museum is doing a masterful job at being allowed to control its own press and rebaptize itself in the waters of public opinion. At no point has Steve Green, who does seem genuinely contrite, offered to repay the sizeable tax deductions Hobby Lobby received for worthless forged Dead Sea Scrolls. At risk of being too Catholic about this, what is repentance without penance?The second important thing is that while individual scholars have been instrumental in bringing the problems with Hobby Lobby’s collecting practices to light, the academy also unwittingly participates in the illicit antiquities market. Prior to the publication of Andrew George’s article, the Gilgamesh tablet traded for roughly $50,000, after his publication its value rose first to $450,000 and then to over $1.6 million. The Michael Sharpe catalog mentions George’s analysis. George’s article notes that he had presented his material at seminars at several distinguished universities. Did any of the attendees of these seminars ask where the tablet had come from? George published a tablet that had forged provenance and while there’s no suggestion that he knew it was forged or that he financially benefited, that publication was instrumental in raising the value of the item in question. For Hobby Lobby, using the skills of academics to raise the value of objects was always part of the plan. Scott Carroll, former director of the Green Collection, told me that that was part of the initial business pitch that he and Johnny Shipman had offered the Greens in 2005 and 2008. Academics would jump at the opportunity to work on these texts (for almost nothing), and the Greens would reap the financial rewards. As archaeologist Neil Brodie has said before, when academics work on unprovenanced artifacts, they raise the value of illicit antiquities. As an academic myself, I can only say that we are part of the problem.Andrew George has not returned inquiries for comment.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[intlchristianherald]

Cavan W. Concannon: Lessons We Can Learn About the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis From a 4th-Century Church Schism

Cavan W. Concannon: Lessons We Can Learn About the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis From a 4th-Century Church Schism

Psychoneurologist and founding member of the Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA) organization, Denise Buchanan, right, and member Leona Huggins, second from right, participate in a protest outside the St. Anselm on the Aventine Benedictine complex in Rome on the second day of a summit called by Pope Francis at the Vatican on sex abuse in the Catholic Church on Feb. 22, 2019. Pope Francis has issued 21…

[urbanchristiannews]

Cavan W. Concannon: Lessons We Can Learn About the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis From a 4th-Century Church Schism

Cavan W. Concannon: Lessons We Can Learn About the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis From a 4th-Century Church Schism

Psychoneurologist and founding member of the Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA) organization, Denise Buchanan, right, and member Leona Huggins, second from right, participate in a protest outside the St. Anselm on the Aventine Benedictine complex in Rome on the second day of a summit called by Pope Francis at the Vatican on sex abuse in the Catholic Church on Feb. 22, 2019. Pope Francis has issued 21…

[uscreligion]

Cavan Concannon: Could Jesus Ball?

Cavan Concannon is an expert on Christianity, so when someone wants to know something about Jesus...who ya’ gonna call?  Professor Concannon. 

Could Jesus Ball? That’s the question the reporter asked. What do you think?

Image by Koyodesigns

[beguines]

What do I mean when I say that Paul needs to be thrown out with the garbage? First, we must get our Pauls straight. The Paul who lived and wrote letters in the first century CE is not who I have in mind for the garbage heap. While such a person undoubtedly existed, we have no access to this Paul that isn't always already mediated by the archive of letters that bear his name. This Pauline archive is a collection of thirteen letters that were preserved, edited, rewritten, and collected through processes that remain opaque to modern historians. This archive, continually edited in antiquity and reconstructed by modern editors from a myriad of textual remains, is coded by modern readers in two interconnected movements for producing Pauls: canonization and secularization. Each of these movements operates within what Kwok Pui-lan has identified as a white, Protestant logocentrism, the belief that writing is derivative of speech, meaning that it depends on the existence of a speaker/author for its meaning . . .

"Paul" is an invention to authorize certain ways of reading over others. This canonical function is thus a way to mask power: the power to set the terms as to which interpretations count and which don't.

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul

[beguines]

While the Historical Paul has been subject to a dizzying array of historical reconstructions, what is rarely questioned is the assumption that whatever Paul is historically reconstructed via these operations will serve as a foundational figure for ethics, morality, politics, and theology. Cut away some pseudepigrapha here, contextualize an embarrassing statement over there, build a few analogical links between his context and ours, and we will get a Paul that can ground our ethics. Of course, not everyone in the field is invested in Paul's continuing relevance, but I think most Pauline scholars are interested in him because, at some level, they are convinced that a properly historicized Paul has something to say to their corner of (post)modernity.

A good example of how this process works is Eric C. Smith's recent monograph Paul the Progressive? Smith, a historian of early Christianity, writes for a progressive Christian audience while drawing from the rhetorical techniques of historicism to transform Paul into a modern progressive ally: "After years of studying Paul within the academic field of biblical studies, I have come to see [Paul] as one of the most misunderstood figures of the Bible and the Christian tradition. . . . The Paul that is revealed in careful study of his letters is nothing like the person so many progressive Christians hate, and, in fact, he shares many progressive Christian values".

[ . . . ]

Take, for example, Smith's chapter on Paul and slavery. He is at pains to absolve Paul of criticism for the historical support that the apostle's archive has given to slavery, ancient and modern. His approach takes several steps, some of which follow his scholarly "ground rules." First, he subtracts from Paul any references to slavery that come from deutero-Pauline literature (notably Ephesians, Colossians, and the pastoral Epistles). This gets rid of the most baldly pro-slavery passages in the Pauline archive. Turning to the uncontested letters of Paul, Smith argues that Paul's advice to slaves in 1 Corinthians 7 to remain in their state is much more ambiguous than most modern translations suggest and that Paul might be encouraging slaves to take the opportunity to gain their freedom if the possibility presents itself. But even this reading of Paul's advice hardly counts as "progressive." Manumission was a regular part of ancient slavery, something many slaves could count on and expect. Manumission was also used by ancient slavers as an inducement to good behavior that ultimately served as a means of maintaining the system itself, a point made forcefully by Jennifer Glancy. Paul's advice to slaves, charitably read, was to work within the system as it was set up.

[ . . . ]

We might think that accepting the institution of slavery would disqualify Paul as a progressive, but this is where Smith's rhetorical moves subtly shift the goalposts. First, he compares his pared-down Paul with the worst excesses of the American slave system, which gives the impression that Paul was not that bad. Pointing to the explicitly pro-slavery statements in the deutero-Paulines, Smith concludes that "it was not Paul's writings that were to blame, or Paul himself, but it was the misuse of Paul, both deliberate and accidental," that put him on the side of slavery as an institution. Smith assumes that the Christian texts written after Paul in his name represent a betrayal of Paul's theological vision. He does not entertain the possibility that these later devotees of the apostle saw him as an ally in their support for the ancient status quo and not as a problematic progressive needing to be contained.

Second, Smith recontextualizes Paul so as to take away the blame somewhat for his acceptance of slavery. He does this by claiming Paul believed that the world would soon end, thus making him less likely to try to overturn accepted social institutions. Paul's world was one in which slavery was normal, and he should not be blamed for accepting slavery as a given. Finally, Smith can conclude that Paul was not a "slavery apologist," which is the question that frames the entire chapter. What is so rhetorically clever here is that the entire chapter sets the goalposts in the most convenient location for Smith: Paul is absolved of being a full-throated supporter of slavery. What Smith has shown is that Paul accepted slavery as normal; he even felt comfortable enough playing with the terminology of human enslavement in his own self-descriptions. This hardly strikes me as an argument that Paul ought to be reclaimed as a progressive.

Even Smith seems somewhat abashed at making such an argument: "With the help of modern biblical scholarship we can recover a Paul who is far from a slavery apologist, and who might even be an ally in the struggle for emancipation". Smith's tepid endorsement of a Paul who "might even be an ally" should force us to ask the question, At what cost have we paid for Paul's own emancipation from his entanglement with slavery? Smith has pared Paul down, recontextualized him, lowered the bar, and still can't produce a Paul who can say that slavery is wrong, full stop. What are we saying to readers who have lived with the historical weight of the Pauline archive's support of slavery when we ask them to welcome someone who only "might" be an ally in their struggle? This strategy is what Joseph Marchal has recently called "pinkwashing Paul," in which a progressive figuration of the apostle is offered, "while ignoring or downplaying his letters' ambivalences, complicities, and recapitulations of imperializing and sexual naturalizing trajectories." More to the point: Why is Paul's purity so important? Why does he have to be the hero of our historical work? Must we value (or revere?) the corpora we study?

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul

[beguines]

The ability to shape meaning resides not in the text itself but in the power relations surrounding it . . . Those who claim to be just interpreting what the texts "say" (as if texts had the magical capacity for speech) mask what makes their interpretations possible in the first place: "What is real is the politics and uses of language, the work of the metadiscursive regimes that enslave, that control language use and the effects of such."

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul

[beguines]

As Julia Kristeva notes, Christian consciousness is forged through interiorizing our abjection: "Man is a spiritual, intelligent, knowing, in short, speaking being only to the extent that he is recognizant of his abjection— from repulsion to murder— and interiorizes it as such, that is, symbolizes it." Jesus and Paul, on Kristeva's reading, rearrange biblical laws regarding purity, such that impurity/abjection is no longer an external concern but a permanent threat from within. This sense of permanent internal defilement eventually gives way to guilt for sin. The purging of this guilt is ongoing but never finished, a debt that is never paid in this life but continues to accrue both principal and interest. It is continually deferred to the future, feeding a spiritual hunger that is never quenched. This debt system parallels economic imperatives under neoliberalism. We are enjoined: consume! constantly—a telos infinitely deferred because there can be no end to consumption's demands. When have we bought enough to be done? And we are always followed by guilt: guilt for not consuming the right way, not buying organic, not using our own bags at the grocery store, not taking on debts. The history of shit shows how this cycle by which humans are made into shit so that they can be redeemed parallels the redemption of shit and its inscription into a capitalist logic of production and consumption. The history of shit shows that a Christian theology of human redemption is tied at its core to a capitalist logic. Is there any way to break out?

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul

[beguines]

When biblical scholars narrate the history of the biblical studies discipline, they often start with the Enlightenment (with an occasional nod to the Protestant Reformation) and the challenge that confronted Christians with the rise of new epistemologies, sciences, and political orders. These factors are important to the history of the field, but often overlooked in the discussions is the role that colonialism played in shaping biblical studies. As European colonizers invaded what for them were vast new territories, they brought missionaries and Bibles with them. These played the double role of justifying colonialism and explaining the peoples, practices, and cultures that the Europeans "discovered." Indeed, an emerging consensus among scholars of religion is that the very category of religion itself was forged in the fires of colonial violence. Before the Europeans' conquests, the spread of the Latin Bible throughout their continent created the conditions for consolidating Christian identity around the Bible, a phenomenon intensified by the vernacular translations that circulated after the invention of the printing press. As Christian theologians confronted the new diversity of their colonial conquests, they reworked earlier epistemological and hermeneutical frameworks to invent "biblical" histories for non-European peoples; undercut, demonize, and eradicate local textual and ritual traditions; and justify Europe's national and religious superiority and its concomitant right to rule over new "barbarous" Others. These moves were necessary, as Katie Cannon argued, to dehumanize Africans to the point that their very enslavement would go unremarked by Christians. Paul was at the center of these new uses of the Bible, both as the idealized Christian missionary who attacked native religious traditions wherever he went and as the ideological supporter of the slave trade and the plantation system. In addition, the academic study of the Bible emerged when Europe's colonial empires reached their greatest extent toward the end of the nineteenth century, which has meant that colonialist and racist ideologies have been written into the field since its inception.

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul

[beguines]

The historical turn that marks contemporary academic biblical studies emerged as a response to increasing criticism of the Bible's morality in early modernity, even as that same modernity was founded on systemic violence and enslavement. Academic biblical scholarship came to serve as the Bible's sanitation department, taking out the shit so that its texts could be kept fresh and clean. The Bible had to be clean if it was to be used to regulate white citizens and convert and discipline nonwhite bodies. The philosophical turn to Paul follows a similar path into and out of the Pauline archive, seeing in his rhetoric potential for radical political theorizing while ignoring potential moral critiques of his intellectual project. In both cases, "historicizing" Paul offers a way of ignoring some of the terrible shit he says.

Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul