Covering an expanse of more than three thousand years, Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches charts, in one concise volume, the history of Greece's religious cultures from antiquity all the way through to present, post-independence Greece.

Focusing on the encounter and interaction between Hellenism and (Orthodox) Christianity, which is the most salient feature of Greece's religious landscape--influencing not only Greek religious history, but Greek culture and history as a whole--Vasilios N. Makrides considers the religious cultures of Greece both historically, from the ancient Greek through the Byzantine and the Ottoman periods up to the present, and systematically, by locating common characteristics and trajectoriesacross time. Weaving other traditions including Judaism and Islam into his account, Makrides highlights the patterns of development, continuity, and change that have characterized the country's long and unique religious history.

Contrary to the arguments of those who posit a single, exclusive religious culture for Greece, Makrides demonstrates the diversity and plurality that has characterized Greece's religious landscape across history. Beautifully written and easy to navigate, Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches offers an essential foundation for students, scholars, and the public on Greece's long religious history, from ancient Greece and the origins of Christianity to the formation of "Helleno-Christianity" in modern Greece.

Archetypal images, Carl Jung believed, when elaborated in tales and ceremonies, shape culture's imagination and behavior. Unfortunately, such cultural images can become stale and lose their power over the mind. But an artist or mystic can refresh and revive a culture's imagination by exploring his personal dream-images and connecting them to the past. Dante Alighieri presents his Divine Comedy as a dream-vision, carefully establishing the date at which it came to him (Good Friday, 1300), and maintaining the perspective of that time and place, throughout the work, upon unfolding history. Modern readers will therefore welcome a Jungian psychoanalytical approach, which can trace both instinctual and spiritual impulses in the human psyche. Some of Dante's innovations (admission of virtuous pagans to Limbo) and individualized scenes (meeting personal friends in the afterlife) more likely spring from unconscious inspiration than conscious didactic intent. For modern readers, a focus on Dante's personal dream-journey may offer the best way into his poem.

This phenomenologically oriented ethnography focuses on experiential aspects of Yanomami shamanism, including shamanistic activities in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the idea that the "part is equal to the whole," which is embedded in the nature of the Yanomami macrocosm, human dwelling, multiple-soul components, and shamans' relationships with embodied spirit-helpers. This book fills an important gap in the regional study of Yanomami people, and, on a broader scale, enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon by focusing on the consciousness involved in shamanism through firsthand experiential involvement.

This volume collects papers written during the past two decades that explore various aspects of late Second Temple period Jewish literature and the figurative art of the Late Antique synagogues. Most of the papers have a special emphasis on the reinterpretation of biblical figures in early Judaism or demonstrate how various biblical traditions converged into early Jewish theologies. The structure of the volume reflects the main directions of the author's scholarly interest, examining the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and Late Antique synagogues. The book is edited for the interest of scholars of Second Temple Judaism, biblical interpretation, synagogue studies and the effective history of Scripture.

A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity. Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time:" I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.

This fourth volume (letters R to Z, nos. 1167 to 1752) completes the first series of IBIS which summarizes and analyzes publications concerning the spread of Egypitan cults in the Greco-Roman world produced between 1940 and 1969. A very detailed index of more than 150 pages allows a rapid consultation of the work making it a valuable research tool. Avec ce 4e volume (lettres R a Z = nos. 1167 a 1752) se termine la premiere serie d'IBIS, ou sont resumees et analysees les publications relatives a la diffusion des cultes egyptiens dans le monde greco-romain, parues entre 1940 et 1969. Un index tres detaille de plus de 150 pages permet une consultation rapide de l'ouvrage, qui constitue un precieux instrument de travail.

In this formidable study, Jastrow compares several aspects of the religious life of the Israelites and ancient Babylonias by comparison of their written texts. Among the topics examined are the creation and flood accounts, the concept of the Sabbath, and the ethics of both cultures.

Recent scholarship on ancient Judaism, finding only scattered references to messiahs in Hellenistic- and Roman-period texts, has generally concluded that the word ''messiah'' did not mean anything determinate in antiquity. Meanwhile, interpreters of Paul, faced with his several hundred uses of the Greek word for ''messiah, '' have concluded that christos in Paul does not bear its conventional sense. Against this curious consensus, Matthew V. Novenson argues in Christ among the Messiahs that all contemporary uses of such language, Paul's included, must be taken as evidence for its range of meaning. In other words, early Jewish messiah language is the kind of thing of which Paul's Christ language is an example.
Looking at the modern problem of Christ and Paul, Novenson shows how the scholarly discussion of christos in Paul has often been a cipher for other, more urgent interpretive disputes. He then traces the rise and fall of ''the messianic idea'' in Jewish studies and gives an alternative account of early Jewish messiah language: the convention worked because there existed both an accessible pool of linguistic resources and a community of competent language users. Whereas it is commonly objected that the normal rules for understanding christos do not apply in the case of Paul since he uses the word as a name rather than a title, Novenson shows that christos in Paul is neither a name nor a title but rather a Greek honorific, like Epiphanes or Augustus.
Focusing on several set phrases that have been taken as evidence that Paul either did or did not use christos in its conventional sense, Novenson concludes that the question cannot be settled at the level of formal grammar. Examining nine passages in which Paul comments on how he means the word christos, Novenson shows that they do all that we normally expect any text to do to count as a messiah text. Contrary to much recent research, he argues that Christ language in Paul is itself primary evidence for messiah language in ancient Judaism.

The present volume provides a comparative look at the contents and layout features of secondary annotations in biblical manuscripts across linguistic traditions. Due to the privileged focus on the text in the columns, these annotations and the practices that produced them have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. The vast richness of extant verbal and figurative notes accompanying the biblical texts in the intercolumns and margins of the manuscript pages have thus been largely overlooked. The case studies gathered in this volume explore Jewish and Christian biblical manuscripts through the lens of their annotations, addressing the various relationships between the primary layer of text and the secondary notes, and exploring the roles and functions of annotated manuscripts as cultural artifacts. By approaching biblical manuscripts as potential "notepads", the volume offers theoretical reflection and empirical analyses of the ways in which secondary notes may shed new light on the development and transmission of text traditions, the shifting engagement with biblical manuscripts over time, as well as the change of use and interpretation that may result from the addition of the notes themselves.

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, fromRome in the first century, to Romanticism in the nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture--we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places--everywhere from the US Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games--and in so doing makes an important new contribution to a very old debate.

This collection of essays gives an insight into the problems that we encounter when we try to (re)construct events from Israel's past. On the one hand, the Hebrew Bible is a biased source, on the other hand, the data provided by archaeology and extra-biblical texts are constrained and sometimes contradictory. Discussing a set of examples, the author applies fundamental insight from the philosophy of history to clarify Israel's past.

First revealed by a Tibetan monk in the 14th century, Bardo Thodol ("Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State") - known more commonly as The Tibetan Book of the Dead - describes the experience of human consciousness in the bardo, the interval between death and the next rebirth in the cycle of death and rebirth. The teachings are designed to help the dying regain clarity of awareness at the moment of death, and by doing so achieve enlightened liberation. Popular throughout the world since the 1960s and overwhelmingly the best-known Buddhist text in the West, this classic translation by Kazi Dawa Samdup is divided into 21 chapters, with sections on the chikhai bardo, or the clear light seen at the moment of death; choenyid bardo, or karmic apparitions; the wisdom of peaceful deities, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas; the 58 flame-enhaloed, wrathful, blood-drinking deities; the judgement of those who the dying has known in life through the "mirror of karma"; and the process of rebirth. The text also includes chapters on the signs of death and rituals to undertake for the dying. Presented in a high-quality Chinese-bound format with accompanying illustrations, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an ideal resource of ancient wisdom for anyone interested in Tibetan Buddhist notions of death and the path to enlightenment.