Humor, Resistance, and Jewish Cultural Persistence in the Book of Revelation: Roasting Rome
Idolatry is the ultimate concern of the pseudepigraphic Epistle of Jeremiah (Baruch 6). Correspondingly, some have argued that the author of the epistle aimed to disparage idolatry, while others have argued that the author composed the epistle to dissuade Jews from worshipping false gods. While these theses have some merit, I contend that the author did not target the ultimate concern of idolatry head on but rather the penultimate concern, namely the fear of idols, which the author conceptualized as a precursor to idol worship. Accordingly, I demonstrate how the epistle’s opening address (vv. 1–6), repetitive refrains, and individual strophes reveal the author’s focus on assuaging the fear of idols. The study not only refines our understanding of the author’s objective in composing the epistle, but makes the often-noted satirical nature of the strophes all the more fitting, to the extent that humor can be an antidote to fear.
The COVID-19 pandemic proved challenging and traumatic for many, with its effects still being felt four years later. This article contends that the witness of Jesus of Nazareth and the early Christian communities can serve as guides for navigating post-pandemic life. This article will do so by examining the historical context of first-century Jewish Palestine with attention given to the Roman Empire’s brutality and traumatizing impact. It will then provide an analysis of the Matthean Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies and the Markan Jesus’ emphasis on bearing the cross as constructive responses to the trauma Matthew and Mark’s communities went through. Lastly, it will show how Jesus and the early Christian communities reveal that pain and trauma can be healthily transcended for better ways and behaviors. Thus, what has happened to us, however painful, can bear the seeds of a healthy purpose and meaning that can lead to us and our world becoming more humanized. The research methodology in this article is interdisciplinary, employing biblical theological, historical, and psychological methodologies.
This article examines the request for prayers ὑπὲρ βασιλέων in 1 Timothy 2:1–2 by focusing on three exegetical questions: (1) Who are the βασιλεῖς? (2) Are prayers for βασιλεῖς distinguishable from prayers to βασιλεῖς? And (3) to whom is this exhortation directed? The article argues that the rhetorical construction of this passage emulates and internalizes imperial ideology, but the very act of imitation has the potential to cause colonial anxiety by obscuring the colonial subjects behind this document and by disrupting any attempt at fixed interpretation.
This article explores John’s Exodus rhetoric as a decolonial strategy and maps its implications for contemporary migrants. Other scholars have convincingly argued that local authorities deported John to Patmos as a vagus , because his message opposed civic institutions, but they do not explain the nature and function of his preaching. Using migrant narratives and decolonial theory, I read John’s call to come out of Babylon and his deployment of Exodus topoi as migration rhetoric. He uses topoi of liberation, wilderness wanderings, and promised land to subvert the colonial situation of the assemblies under Rome. Rather than migrating to a place, believers embody the eschatological Exodus by rejecting food offered to idols and upholding the boundaries of Jewish identity as they wait for the full realization of God’s kingdom in the New Jerusalem. Regarding Latinx migrant communities, John’s Exodus rhetoric informs how migrants legitimate their migration and how they negotiate identity and resist imperialism in the US/Mexico borderlands.
Waxing “biblical,” Donald Trump has described the COVID-19 pandemic as a “plague.” In a different but related register, millions of Christians worldwide have interpreted the pandemic as one of the eschatological plagues prophesied in the Book of Revelation. This article appropriates the reading tactics of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, together with the resources of affect theory, to connect the Book of Revelation with both the Trump phenomenon and the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the article attempts to relate Revelation’s Beast to Trump (to unleash the Beast against Trump) non-eschatologically, in a non-representationalist reading strategy, and to analyze how Trump has manipulated the pandemic for his post-ideological ends.
Psychological theories have alternately been embraced and rejected by those working in the field of postcolonial studies. This essay briefly surveys some of the early psychological approaches to colonization offered by writers Octave Mannoni and Frantz Fanon, before focusing on a group of writers most commonly termed “trauma” theorists – Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Marianne Hirsch – in order to think about the important possibilities created by recent psychological formulations for the ever-shifting terrain of postcolonial studies. The application of psychology to the study of postcolonialism offers a deeper understanding of the effects on the pysche of those who experienced not only colonial traumas (including slavery, forced migration and colonisation) and their descendants, as well as the effects of more recent 20th- and 21st-century traumas of the postcolonial world.
Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in which it has its roots. Standing accused of irrelevance or indifference to “real-world” issues such as history, politics, and ethics because of its predominantly epistemological focus, this earlier, “textualist” paradigm was largely eclipsed around the mid-1980s by overtly historicist or culturalist approaches, including new historicism, cultural materialism, cultural studies, and various types of advocacy criticism (feminist, lesbian and gay, Marxist, and postcolonial). Trauma studies can with some justification be regarded as the reinvention in an ethical guise of this much maligned textualism.
Cathy Caruth, one of the leading figures in trauma studies (along with Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra), counters the oft-heard critique of poststructuralism outlined above by arguing that, rather than leading us away from history and into “political and ethical paralysis” (Unclaimed 10), a textualist approach can afford us unique access to history. Indeed, it makes possible a “rethinking of reference,” which aims not at “eliminating history” but at “resituating it in our understanding, that is, at permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (11). By bringing the insights of deconstructive and psychoanalytic scholarship to the analysis of cultural artifacts that bear witness to traumatic histories, critics can gain access to extreme events and experiences that defy understanding and representation. Caruth insists on the ethical significance of this critical practice. She claims that “the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand” a “new mode of reading and of listening” (9) that would allow us to pass out of the isolation imposed on both individuals and cultures by traumatic experience. In “a catastrophic age” such as ours, according to Caruth, “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” (“Trauma” 11). With trauma forming a bridge between disparate historical experiences, so the argument goes, listening to the trauma of another can contribute to cross-cultural solidarity and to the creation of new forms of community.
Remarkably, however, trauma studies’ stated commitment to the promotion of cross-cultural ethical engagement is not borne out by the founding texts of the field (including Caruth’s own work), which are almost exclusively concerned with traumatic experiences of white Westerners and solely employ critical methodologies emanating from a Euro-American context.1 Instead of promoting solidarity between different cultures, trauma studies risks producing the very opposite effect as a result of this one-sided focus: by ignoring or marginalizing non-Western traumatic events and histories and non-Western theoretical work, trauma studies may actually assist in the perpetuation of Eurocentric views and structures that maintain or widen the gap between the West and the rest of the world.
If, as Caruth argues, “history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (Unclaimed 24), then Western traumatic histories must be seen to be tied up with histories of colonial trauma for trauma studies to be able to redeem its promise of ethical effectiveness. Attempts to give the suffering engendered by colonial oppression its “traumatic due” have begun to be made in various disciplines in recent years. Mental health professionals, for example, are becoming increasingly aware of the need to acknowledge traumatic experiences in non-Western settings and to take account of cultural differences in the treatment of trauma. These concerns are reflected in the titles of two recent collections of essays: Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon (2006) and Honoring Differences: Cultural Issues in the Treatment of Trauma and Loss (1999).2 Concurrently, taking their cue from such thinkers as Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt, historians working in the fledgling field of comparative genocide studies–including A. Dirk Moses, David Moshman, Dan Stone, and Jürgen Zimmerer–have complicated the notion of Holocaust uniqueness by situating other, mainly colonial, atrocities in relation to the Shoah. Moreover, postcolonial critics and theorists like Kamran Aghaie, Jill Bennett, Victoria Burrows, Sam Durrant, Leela Gandhi, Linda Hutcheon, Rosanne Kennedy...
The plurality and growing number of responses to cultural trauma theory in postcolonial criticism demonstrate the ongoing appeal of trauma theory despite the fact that it is also increasingly critiqued as inadequate to the research agenda of postcolonial studies. In the dialogue between trauma theory and postcolonial literary studies the central question remains whether trauma theory can be effectively “postcolonialized” in the sense of being usefully conjoined with postcolonial theory. This article presents a detailed account of the core concepts and tenets of cultural trauma theory in order to contribute to a clearer understanding of the issues currently at stake in this developing relationship between trauma theory and postcolonial literary studies. It engages with fundamental issues, such as those deriving from trauma theory’s foundation in Freudian psychoanalysis; its Eurocentric orientation; its inherent contradictions, such as its deconstructionist aesthetics of aporia vs notions of therapeutic and recuperative narrativization; and its tendency to blur lines of distinction and to affirm stasis and melancholia as the empathic, responsible reception of trauma narratives. This article argues for a more precise, as well as more comprehensive, conceptualization of trauma and formulates possible directions in which to expand trauma’s conceptual framework, in order to respond more adequately to postcolonial ways of understanding history, memory and trauma.
Scholars typically describe the book of Judges as encompassing a cyclical transgress–suffer–prosper–transgress–again trope. Although Israelite peace and autonomy are maintained at various moments throughout the text, hardship inevitably ensues, leading exegetes to focus on the Israelites’ repeated demise as opposed to their continual triumphs. As David Gunn notes, ‘reward and punishment is often viewed as the book’s dominant theme’. Or, in the words of Danna Nolan Fewell, the stories within Judges are frequently read as a collective ‘downward spiral for Israel and its leaders’. I question, however, whether such thematic analysis might prove insufficient when engaging a hermeneutic of trauma and survival—or queer survivance, as we will see. Interestingly, of the 400-year period covered in the book of Judges, only 111 of them are spent in subjugation. Nearly three-fourths of the time period covered by the book, in other words, recounts times of judgeship and autonomy. Might this story be less about cultural transgression and more about the creative ways in which the Israelites managed to endure? In this article, I will provide an intertextual comparison of the Judges cycle with the memoir of Holocaust survivor, Gad Beck. In doing so, I will suggest that Judges offers us a literary representation of an ancient culture’s fight to persist. Rather than guide readers through the entirety of the Judges narrative, however, I will focus on Judges 3 and 4, as the stories of and events surrounding Ehud and Jael offer a more concentrated instance of the aforementioned cyclical trope. From a stance of hetero-suspicion and with a theoretical view to intertextuality and queer survivance, I will argue that, like Beck, Ehud and Jael subvert oppressive power structures through gender-bending performances and the embodiment of ambivalent, and even comedic, identity markers. Taking such similarities into consideration, I will then suggest that Ehud’s and Jael’s queer-comic consciousness becomes another thematic trope within the book of Judges as a whole. Yet instead of focusing on the repetition of the Israelites’ self-fulfilling demise, this trope spotlights the creative ways in which the Judges narrative becomes one of survival and reflects an ancient culture’s will to resist, persist, and indeed, live.
This article examines 1 Thessalonians 2: 14–6 as a site of collective Christian memory. Rather than approaching the text as a repository of Paul's memories and theology, the author approaches the text as monument and juxtaposes the text to three monuments (two ancient and one modern) in order to explore how the text organizes the reality of those who recognize it as somehow historically and/or affectively meaningful. Given that this text has proven dangerous as a site of the highly durable and widely legible “fact” that “the Jews killed Jesus,” the article draws on studies of public monuments to trace out how the (re)invention and contestation of public memories are rhetorical-political practices that animate partisan versions of the past to (re)orientate communities in the present and thus shape their possible futures.
This paper argues for the centrality of performance in the life of the early church, an area of study that has been traditionally neglected. In light of some emerging trends, it proposes that we establish “performance criticism” as a discrete discipline in New Testament studies to address this neglect. Performance criticism would inform in fresh ways our understanding of the meaning and rhetoric of the Second Testament writings and our re-constructions of early Christianity. Because it represents a medium change, performance criticism has the potential to impact the way we do biblical studies in general. Finally, performance could breathe new life into the experience of the Bible in the contemporary world. In Part 1, I lay out some features of oral cultures, the potential interplay between written and oral media, and the origins in orality of Second Testament writings. Then, I seek to identify the various features of a performance event—performer, audience, material setting, social circumstances, and so on—as a basis to construct and analyze performance as the site of interpretation for Second Testament writings. In Part 2, I show how performance criticism could draw upon resources from many established and some new disciplines of biblical scholarship as contributors to performance criticism. Finally, I suggest that performance criticism might engage the interpreter in the actual performing of texts, and I lay out the potential research benefits of such an exercise.
One of the best episodes in Petronius' Satyrica involves the presence of the narrator, Encolpius, his lover Giton, and the rogue-poet Eumolpus, on board a ship owned by Lichas, of which another passenger is the flighty matron, Tryphaena. In an earlier episode of the novel, Lichas seems to have been the lover of Encolpius and Tryphaena of Giton, though both affairs had ended in enmity. There ensues a comic deliberation between Encolpius and Giton about ways of escape. One of them involves the ink which Eumolpus has brought aboard as a man of literature. Encolpius suggests that he and Giton dye themselves with it from head to foot and pretend to be Eumolpus' Ethiopian (that is, African) slaves. Giton contemptuously dismisses the idea, and proposes suicide. Eumolpus intervenes with what he considers a better idea. His manservant, who is a barber, will shave the heads and eyebrows of Encolpius and Giton, and then he himself 'will mark your faces with an elaborate inscription to give the impression that you have been punished with a mark. That way the same letters will both allay the suspicions of your pursuers and hide your faces with the appearance of punishment' ('sequar ego frontes notans inscriptione sollerti, ut uideamini stigmate esse puniti. ita eaedem litterae et suspicionem declinabunt quaerentium et uultus umbra supplicii tegent'). This is agreed to, and 'Eumolpus filled the foreheads of us both with huge letters, and with generous hand covered our whole faces with the wellknown inscription of runaway slaves' ('impleuit Eumolpus frontes utriusque ingentibus litteris et notum fugitiuorum epigramma per totam faciem liberali manu duxit').
George Bernard Shaw once described the Book of Revelation as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict,” but then modern literati have had a penchant for unkindness when it comes to the language of the Apocalypse. D. H. Lawrence found what he called its “splendiferous imagery” to be “distasteful,” and hailed it “perhaps the most detestable of all these books of the Bible.” Lawrence hated the book so much that he wrote a commentary on it. In his own monumental commentary on the Apocalypse, writing just a decade earlier than Lawrence, fellow Englishman R. H. Charles understood the book to be a product of linguistic incompetence and redactional ineptitude, egregious travesties that remained until modernity, when Charles corrected them with his own heavy-handed redaction and conjectured emendations.
Several foreign rulers (Egyptian, Moabite, Cannanite, Persian, 'Babylonian' and Israelite) are configured in the Hebrew Bible as obtuse. This paper explores the configuration from two perspectives: humour and feminist concerns. The foreign rulers are presented as ludicrous, with bitter humour bordering on malice and contempt for their (im)potence. Their reported inadequacy is satirized by scornful allusions to their maleness and male sexuality, at times also to their bodily functions. These rulers' ineptitude is negatively mirrored by their relations with women and the latter's smarter actions. The configuration discloses the political and gender ideologies it is grounded in. 'Foreign' means a threat; humour is an important weapon for the politically powerless. Females are inferior social agents, and their resourcefulness amplifies male (foreign) shortcomings.
The reading offered is corroborated by the exclusion of the offensive materials from Flavius Josephus's recounting of the relevant texts.
L'A. s'interesse a la maniere dont Mikhail Bakhtin envisage la verite dialogique et le texte polyphonique comme moyen de faciliter le dialogue entre la Bible et la theologie. L'approche de Bakhtin n'est pas une methode a appliquer, mais une perception de la nature du discours. Bakhtin met toujours l'accent sur les voix qui n'ont pas emerge du texte. Cette demarche repons a celle des theologiens bibliques qui doivent respecter la variete et la particularite du texte. Une approche bakhtinienne serait en outre susceptible d'exagerer le caractere ideologique de certaines parties du texte
This article draws attention to the events of the `Year of the Four Emperors', the period of unrest and civil war which followed Nero's death in 68 CE. Their bearing on the Revelation of John has been underestimated. My aims are to demonstrate the centrality of Nero in John's understanding of the seven-headed beast, and its image, and to propose a precise dating for the composition of Revelation in the period under Galba, Otho and Vitellius in 68/69 CE. This involves an analysis of Nero's Golden House, his colossal statue and the pro-Neronian attitude of his successors Otho and Vitellius. After my consistent rereading of Revelation in the context of 68/69 CE, I set out to disprove the common interpretation of Revelation, which draws upon the provincial imperial cult in Asia under Domitian. I finish by showing the relevance of Nero's expected return for a reading public in the Roman province of Asia.
This reaction addresses the Major Contribution section of this journal issue related to multicultural research in counseling psychology. Although the three articles composing the Major Contribution have different foci and may be viewed independently, an implicit proposal inherent within each is the call to move beyond complacency to commitment, a phrase devised by Carter, Akinsulure-Smith, Smailes, and Clauss (1998) in their literature review of multicultural research in several counseling psychology journals. Carter et al suggested that investigators address whether multiculturally focused research adds new knowledge about racial and ethnic minorities to the counseling psychology literature, thus moving the field forward (i.e., showing commitment), or simply reiterates the status quo (i.e., remains complacent). We highlight aspects of this theme that are common throughout the Major Contribution in addition to providing our critique and comments specific to each. As multicultural leaders (Parham, 2001; Sue, 2003, 2005) have asserted, we concur that investigating the psyche of the imposer (i.e., Whites) is essential to understand, address, and ultimately dismantle racism. Hence, our conceptual and empirical research centers on how White individuals react to and are affected by racism and other racial issues, such as Whites' experiences of the psychosocial costs of racism, which will be defined. Accordingly, we focus on the meaning and implications for White counseling psychologists and trainees. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In Minucius Felix's Octavius , the pagan Caecilius offers an intriguing critique of the Christian God. Having pilloried Christian faith as trust in a “solitary, forlorn God, whom no free nation, no kingdom, no superstition known to Rome has knowledge of,” he goes on to mock him as a voyeur:
[W]hat monstrous absurdities these Christians invent about this God of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see! That he searches diligently into the ways and deeds of all people, yea even their words and hidden thoughts, hurrying to and fro, everywhere present at once; they make him out to be a troublesome, restless being, who has a hand in everything that is done, is shamelessly curious, interlopes at every turn, and can neither attend to particulars because he is distracted with the whole, nor to the whole because he is engaged with particulars.
This article describes an approach to the treatment of genocide survivors that addresses both the personal and communal/historical dimensions of their experiences. I begin by outlining the characteristics of massive psychic trauma as background for using video testimonies in the treatment of Holocaust survivors. I then discuss videotaped interviews with perpetrators as an illustrative contrast to survivors' testimonies. The third section explains my position as a psychoanalyst encountering historical trauma and its relationship to my own experiences as a survivor. Following a brief history of videotaping as a medium for recording testimonies, I conclude by demonstrating the ways in which active listening can lead to the revelation of new dimensions of historical as well as personal truth.
Historical trauma (HT) is cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma experiences; the historical trauma response (HTR) is the constellation of features in reaction to this trauma. The HTR often includes depression, self-destructive behavior, suicidal thoughts and gestures, anxiety, low self-esteem, anger, and difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions. It may include substance abuse, often an attempt to avoid painful feelings through self-medication. Historical unresolved grief is the associated affect that accompanies HTR; this grief may be considered fixated, impaired, delayed, and/or disenfranchised. This article will explain HT theory and the HTR, delineate the features of the HTR and its grounding in the literature, offer specific Native examples of HT and HTR, and will suggest ways to incorporate HT theory in treatment, research and evaluation. The article will conclude with implications for all massively traumatized populations.
The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature
- Scepter
- Star
Humor in the Holocaust: Its Critical, Cohesive, and Coping Functions,” in Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations
- John Morreall
Biphobia and the Pulse Massacre
- Elle Dowd
Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic
- Laughter
Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger
- Jeffrey Goldberg
The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity
- Adele Reinhartz
Virgin Heroes and Cross-Dressing Kings: Reading Ambrose’s On Virgins 2.4 as Carnivalesque
- Sarah Emanuel
Nations in Song: Dialogic Imagination and Moral Vision in the Hymns of the Book of Revelation
- War