In 1143 Robert of Ketton produced the first Latin translation of the Qur'an. This translation, extant in 24 manuscripts, was one of the main ways in which Latin European readers had access to the Muslim holy book. Yet it was not the only means of transmission of Quranic stories and concepts to the Latin world: there were other medieval translations into Latin of the Qur'an and of Christian polemical texts composed in Arabic which transmitted elements of the Qur'an (often in a polemical mode). The essays in this volume examine the range of medieval Latin transmission of the Qur'an and reaction to the Qur'an by concentrating on the manuscript traditions of medieval Qur'an translations and anti-Islamic polemics in Latin. We see how the Arabic text was transmitted and studied in Medieval Europe. We examine the strategies of translators who struggled to find a proper vocabulary and syntax to render Quranic terms into Latin, at times showing miscomprehensions of the text or willful distortions for polemical purposes. These translations and interpretations by Latin authors working primarily in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain were the main sources of information about Islam for European scholars until well into the sixteenth century, when they were printed, reused and commented. This volume presents a key assessment of a crucial chapter in European understandings of Islam.

For all Muslims the Qur'an is the word of God. In the first centuries of Islam, however, many individuals and groups, and some Shi'is, believed that the generally accepted text of the Qur'an is corrupt. The Shi'is asserted that redactors had altered or deleted among other things all passages that supported the rights of 'Ali and his successors or that condemned his enemies. One of the fullest lists of these alleged changes and of other variant readings is to be found in the work of al-Sayyari (3rd/9th century), which is indeed among the earliest Shi'i books to have survived. In many cases the alternative readings that al-Sayyari presents substantially contribute to our understanding of early Shi'i doctrine and of the early and numerous debates about the Qur'an in general.

The first half of the book of Daniel contains world-famous stories like the Writing on the Wall. These stories have mostly been transmitted in Aramaic, not Hebrew, as has the influential apocalypse of Daniel 7. This Aramaic corpus shows clear signs of multiple authorship. Which different textual layers can we tease apart, and what do they tell us about the changing function of the Danielic material during the Second Temple Period? This monograph compares the Masoretic Text of Daniel to ancient manuscripts and translations preserving textual variants. By highlighting tensions in the reconstructed archetype underlying all these texts, it then probes the tales' prehistory even further, showing how Daniel underwent many transformations to yield the book we know today.

This volume delves into the socio religious milieu of the authors, editors, and propagators of the ""Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra"" (Questions of Rastrapala), a Buddhist text circulating in India during the first half of the first millennium C.E. Daniel Boucher first reflects upon the problems that plague historians of Mahayana Buddhism, whose previous efforts to comprehend the tradition have often ignored the social dynamics that motivated some of the innovations of this new literature. Following that is a careful analysis of several motifs found in the Indian text and an examination of the value of the earliest Chinese translation for charting the sutra's evolution.The first part of the study looks at the relationship between the bodily glorification of the Buddha and the ascetic career that produced it within the socioeconomic world of early medieval Buddhist monasticism. Boucher then focuses on a third-century Chinese translation of the sutra and traces the changes in the translation to the late tenth century. He concludes with an annotated translation of the sutra based on a new reading of its earliest extant Sanskrit manuscript.

This collection presents innovative research by scholars from across the globe in celebration of Gabriele Boccaccini's sixtieth birthday and to honor his contribution to the study of early Judaism and Christianity. In harmony with Boccaccini's determination to promote the study of Second Temple Judaism in its own right, this volume includes studies on various issues raised in early Jewish apocalyptic literature (e.g., 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra), the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other early Jewish texts, from Tobit to Ben Sira to Philo and beyond. The volume also provides several investigations on early Christianity in intimate conversation with its Jewish sources, consistent with Boccaccini's efforts to transcend confessional and disciplinary divisions by situating the origins of Christianity firmly within Second Temple Judaism. Finally, the volume includes essays that look at Jewish-Christian relations in the centuries following the Second Temple period, a harvest of Boccaccini's labor to rethink the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in light of their shared yet contested heritage.

Small enough to take with you everywhere you go, this pocket Bible will ensure you have the Word of God at hand at all times. With a lilac pastel purple soft imitation leather cover and matching zip, the Bible pages will be kept tidy and clean. This lovely gift Bible has a removable presentation box and a pastel purple ribbon marker, and features a black and white hand-drawn pattern on the endpapers. First published in British English in 1979, the New International Version is the world's most popular modern English Bible. It is renowned for its combination of reliability and readability and is ideal for personal reading, public teaching and group study. This Bible also features: - clear, readable 6.75pt text - easy-to-read layout - shortcuts to key stories, events and people of the Bible - reading plan - book by book overview - quick links to find inspiration and help from the Bible in different life situations. This edition uses British spelling, punctuation and grammar to allow the Bible to be read more naturally. Royalties from all sales of the NIV Bible help Biblica in their work of translating and distributing Bibles around the world.

The study of the Books of Chronicles has focused in the past mainly on its literary relationship to Historical Books such as Samuel and Kings. Less attention was payed to its possible relationships to the priestly literature. Against this backdrop, this volume aims to examine the literary and socio-historical relationship between the Books of Chronicles and the priestly literature (in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel). Since Chronicles and Pentateuch (and also Ezekiel) studies have been regarded as separate fields of study, we invited experts from both fields in order to open a space for fruitful discussions with each other. The contributions deal with connections and interactions between specific texts, ideas, and socio-historical contexts of the literary works, as well as with broad observations of the relationship between them.

Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of "sacred scripture" traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - David Carrasco, Harvard University

Reimagining the Bible collects a dozen essays by Howard Schwartz. Together the essays present a coherent theory of the way in which each successive phase of Jewish literature has drawn upon and reimagined the previous ones. The book is organized into four sections: The Ancient Models; The Folk Tradition; Mythic Echoes; Modern Jewish Literature and the Ancient Models. Within these divisions, each of the essays focuses on a specific genre, ranging from Torah and Aggadah to Kabbalah, fairy tales, and the modern Yiddish stories of S.Y. Agnon and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Arguing the important thesis that there is a continuity in Jewish literature which extends from the Biblical era to our own times, over a period of more than 3,000 years, this collection also serves as a guide to the history of that literature, and to the genres it comprises.

This volume is a collection of fresh essays in honor of Professor John T. Townsend. It focuses on the interpretation of the common Jewish and Christian Scripture (the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) and on its two off-shoots (Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament), as well as on Jewish-Christian relations. The contributors, who are prominent scholars in their fields, include James L. Crenshaw, Goeran Eidevall, Anne E. Gardner, Lawrence M. Wills, Cecilia Wassen, Robert L. Brawley, Joseph B. Tyson, Eldon J. Epp, Yaakov Elman, Rivka Ulmer, Andreas Lehnardt, Reuven Kimelman, Bruce Chilton, and Michael W. Duggan. "an engaging and impressive scholarly work." - Zev Garber, Los Angeles Valley College, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 81.3 (2019)

This work presents to the scholarly world the hitherto unpublished trove of over 500 catchwords that were attached to Masoretic doublet notes in the Leningrad Codex. All the doublets with their catchwords are listed both in the chronological order of their first appearance in the Bible and again on their second appearance. The nature of the catchwords, their purpose, and their relation to other Masoretic notes are described in detail, and suggestions are made how they can be of value to biblical scholars.

Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyavartani is an essential work of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophical literature. Written in an accessible question-and-answer style, it contains Nagarjuna's replies to criticisms of his philosophy of the "Middle Way." The Vigrahavyavartani has been widely cited both in canonical literature and in recent scholarship; it has remained a central text in India, Tibet, China, and Japan, and has attracted the interest of greater and greater numbers of Western readers.
In The Dispeller of Disputes, Jan Westerhoff offers a clear new translation of the Vigrahavyavartani, taking current philological research and all available editions into account, and adding his own insightful philosophical commentary on the text. Crucial manuscript material has been discovered since the earlier translations were written, and Westerhoff draws on this material to produce a study reflecting the most up-to-date research on this text. In his nuanced and incisive commentary, he explains Nagarjuna's arguments, grounds them in historical and textual scholarship, and explicitly connects them to contemporary philosophical concerns.

The Talmud's Red Fence explores how rituals and beliefs concerning menstruation in the Babylonian Talmud and neighboring Sasanian religious texts were animated by difference and differentiation. It argues that the practice and development of menstrual rituals in Babylonian Judaism was a product of the religious terrain of the Sasanian Empire, where groups like Syriac Christians, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, and Jews defined themselves in part based on how they approached menstrual impurity. It demonstrates that menstruation was highly charged in Babylonian Judaism and Sasanian Zoroastrian, where menstrual discharge was conceived of as highly productive female seed yet at the same time as stemming from either primordial sin (Eve eating from the tree) or evil (Ahrimen's kiss). It argues that competition between rabbis and Zoroastrians concerning menstrual purity put pressure on the Talmudic system, for instance in the unusual development of an expert diagnostic system of discharges. It shows how Babylonian rabbis seriously considered removing women from the home during the menstrual period, as Mandaeans and Zoroastrians did, yet in the end deemed this possibility too "heretical." Finally, it examines three cases of Babylonian Jewish women initiating menstrual practices that carved out autonomous female space. One of these, the extension of menstrual impurity beyond the biblically mandated seven days, is paralleled in both Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Mandaic texts. Ultimately, Talmudic menstrual purity is shown to be driven by difference in its binary structure of pure and impure; in gendered terms; on a social axis between Jews and Sasanian non-Jewish communities; and textually in the way the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds took shape in late antiquity.

The disengagement of recent academic biblical study from church and synagogue has been widely noted. Even within the discipline, there are those who suggest it has lost its way. As the discipline now stands, is it mainly concerned with studying and listening to the texts, or with dissecting them in order to examine hypothetical sources or situations or texts that might lie behind them. Christopher Bryan seeks to address scholars and students who do not wish to avoid the challenges of the Enlightenment, but do wish to relate their work to the faith and mission of the people of God. Is such a combination still possible? And if so, how is the task of biblical interpretation to be understood? Bryan traces the history of modern approaches to the Bible, particularly "historical criticism," noting its successes and failures-and notably among its failures, that it has been no more able to protect its practitioners from (in Jowett's phrase) "bringing to the text what they found there" than were the openly faith-based approaches of earlier generations. Basing his work on a wide knowledge of literature and literary critical theory, and drawing on the insights of the greatest literary critics of the last hundred years, notably Erich Auerbach and George Steiner, Bryan asks, what should be the task of the biblical scholar in the 21st century? Setting the question within this wider context enables Bryan to indicate a series of criteria with which biblical interpreters may do their work, and in the light of which there is no reason why that work cannot relate faithfully to the Church. This does not mean that sound biblical interpretation can ignore the specificity of scientific or historical questions, or dragoon its results into conformity with a set of ecclesial propositions. It does mean that in asking those questions, interpreters of the biblical text will not ignore its setting-in-life in the community of faith; and they will concede that although textual interpretation has scientific elements, it is finally an exercise in imagination: an art, and not a science.