Thousands of rare books go up in flames in Cairo

Huffington Post has reported today that the "Institute d'Egypte, a research center set up by Napoleon Bonaparte during France's invasion in the late 18th century, caught fire during clashes between protesters and Egypt's military over the weekend. It was home to a treasure trove of writings, most notably the handwritten 24-volume Description de l'Egypte, which began during the 1798-1801 French occupation."

Thousands of volumes have been damaged, and many are burned beyond recovery. "This is equal to the burning of Galileo's books," Zein Abdel-Hady, who runs the country's main library, said.

The full Huffington Post article can be accessed here.

Parmenter, "The Iconic Book"

Dorina Miller Parmenter, in “The Iconic Book: The Image of the Bible in Early Christian Rituals,” Postscripts 2 (2006): 160-189, describes the ritual display and manipulation of Bibles in Greek Orthodox and Protestant traditions. She argues that the Christian scripture functions in a manner precisely analogous to Orthodox icons. Bibles, therefore, are “iconic” in the strict sense—a fact recognized by medieval theologians engaged in the iconoclastic controversies of the seventh-ninth centuries. Dori argues that our recognition of this fact would enable us to better understand the social and religious function of scriptures in other periods and cultures as well. She concludes:

The iconophiles’ justifications for how icons function as mediators of the divine presence can help scholars today understand the veneration that has been shown to the Christian Bible in diverse, yet often unconscious, ways throughout Christian history. This reverence for the Bible as both text (Word) and object (Book) can be found in rituals that treat the book as if it were the divine presence itself and in myths that offer imagery of powerful divine books made available to humans. These rituals and myths linger in contemporary Christian attitudes, ideas, and practices: most overtly in formal liturgical rituals such as Gospel processions, but also in low-church Protestant displays of the Bible. The latter may be less formalized than the former, but they nevertheless manipulate the same image of the divine presence made possible through the medium of the book. (p. 184)

The full article is available in .pdf from Equinox publishing.

Scriptures As Artifacts at SBL meeting

The Iconic Books Project is not the only research effort on this subject. The Scripture as Artifact Consultation, chaired by Brian Malley, showcased the work of eleven scholars at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego.

The session on Saturday, November 17th, focused on “the late medieval period to the present.”
     Marianne Schleicher (Aarhus University) described her research on the relationship between ritual uses and displays of Torah scrolls and the interpretation of Torah in a Dutch Jewish congregation (paper title: “Transitions between Artifactual and Hermeneutical Use of Scripture”).
     Miriam Levering (U. Tennessee, Knoxville) surveyed artifactual/iconic uses of texts in Buddhist traditions before focusing in particular on Zen schools. She noted the irony that medieval Zen traditions generally downplayed the role of scriptures in comparison with other Buddhist schools, but then proceeded to produce a flood of texts that seem to function as scriptures nevertheless (paper title: “Scripture as Artifact: A Comparative Perspective”).
     Unfortunately, I had to miss the remaining papers in Saturday’s session. They were “Curbing Phantasm: The Bible Moralisée” by Eva Maria Raepple (College of DuPage), “The Danish Hymnbook: Artifact and Text” by Kirsten Nielsen (Aarhus University), and “Some Biblical Artifacts in Search of a Sociological Theory” by David Chalcraft (University of Derby). [But see Dori's comment below for a summary of these last two papers.]

Though the session on Sunday, November 18th, focused on “the ancient and early medieval world,” Brian Malley began with a theoretical paper on the relationship between the artifactual use and semantic meaning of scriptures. Starting with a standard model in communications theory, he argued that artifactual uses, rather than being a small and insignificant aspect of scriptural usage, actually impact virtually all uses of the text (paper title: “Text, Artifact and Meanings”).
     The next four papers all described various kinds of ancient evidence for the artifactual uses of scriptural texts. Larry Hurtado (University of Edinburgh) presented the manuscript evidence for the distinctive forms and uses of early Christian scriptures (2nd-3rd centuries C.E.). Christians’ preference for binding their scriptures (OT and NT) in codex (book) form, rather than as scrolls, their use of distinctive abbreviations (nomina sacra) for the names and titles of God and Jesus, and their employment of reader’s aids in manuscripts intended for public reading all distinguish their material culture from its Greco-Roman context (paper title: “Early Christian Manuscripts of Biblical Texts as Artifacts”).
     Stephen Reed (Jamestown College) surveyed the contents and textual form of the Dead Sea Scroll texts used for ancient Jewish phylacteries (tefillin) and mezuzot. He noted that they differ from other biblical scrolls from Qumran not only in their contents ( fairly standardized excerpts from Exodus and Deuteronomy) but also in the condition of their materials (the texts in tefillin were often written on tattered scraps of leather) and their very small, run-together letters that show they were clearly not meant to be read but manipulated ritually (paper title: “Physical and Visual Features of Dead Sea Scriptural Texts”).
     Eduard Iricinschi (Princeton University) described the heavy use and dependence of the ancient Manicheans on the texts written by their founder Mani/Manus. Their texts served to spread the faith rapidly in the Sassanian and Roman empires of the third century and following, but also became a principal target of imperial efforts (in the long run, successful) to suppress the religion (paper title: “ ‘A Thousand Books will be Saved’: Manichean Manuscripts and Religious Propaganda in the Roman Empire”).
     Thomas J. Kraus (Willibald Gluck Gymnasium) investigated the nature and function of Byzantine armbands with medallions that cite the opening verse of Psalm 91 (Ps 90 in the Greek translation) along with others depicting the Madonna and child. He charted the popularity of the talismanic use of Greek Ps 90 in Byzantine Christian culture to explain its prominence in cryptic form on these artifacts (paper title: “ ‘He that Dwelleth in the Help of the Highest’: Septuagint Psalm 90 and the Iconographic Program on Byzantine Armbands”).
     Dori Parmenter (Syracuse University, co-director of the Iconic Books Project) concluded the session with a broader survey of myths of heavenly books and their impact on early and medieval Christian beliefs. She demonstrated that Christians were influenced by ancient Near Eastern and, especially, Jewish ideas of pre-existent heavenly scriptures and “books of life,” but they conceived the heavenly equivalent of Gospel books to be Christ himself as the Word of God. This equivalence between book and Christ appears prominently in ancient and medieval Christian art and provides the ideological underpinning for the liturgical reverence shown Gospel books (paper title: “The Bible as Icon: Myths of the Divine Origins of Scripture”).

Review

A summary review of In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000, edited by Michelle Brown, has been posted by the Review of Biblical Literature.

Uneasiness over Non-Canonical Texts

April DeConnick, on the Forbidden Gospels Blog, has raised the question, “Why do non-canonical texts make us uneasy?” As a scholar of Nag Hammadi texts and other early Christian writings, she has repeatedly run up against the desire among fellow academics to keep such materials marginalized.

The issue is not new, though the publication in accessible form of “Gnostic” materials in the last several decades has brought it home to students of early Chistian history. One hundred years ago, it was the publication of the Gilgamesh flood story that threatened to relativize the Hebrew Bible’s account of origins by placing its materials within a wider and older historical and religious context.

The cultural standing of Jewish and Christian scriptures, however, seems not to have been dented much by such discoveries over the last one-and-a-half centuries or by the two-centuries of historical-critical scholarship on their origins and development. I suggest that resilience is due to the fact that the Bible’s reputation depends as much on the inspiration it produces through performance in sermon, song and dramatization (now frequently on film) and on the legitimacy conveyed by its iconic representation in ritual, art, and mass media as it does to the textual authority conveyed by interpretations of its message by scholars.

If anything, the main effect of biblical scholarship on public perceptions of the Bible is to emphasize the scripture’s importance precisely because so much attention and effort is devoted to controversies over its meaning and origins. Here may lie one source of anxiety about non-canonical texts: the intuitive suspicion that more attention to these other materials raises their status and dilutes claims to the unique importance of the scriptures.

The history of the actual religious influence of such scholarship suggests that Christians and Jews have little reason to worry. The net effect of comparative scholarship is probably to draw even more popular attention to scriptures whose status is, at any rate, well protected by the ways in which Jews and Christians ritualize their iconic and performative dimensions.

Scripture as Talisman, Specimen, and Dragoman

"Scripture as Talisman, Specimen, and Dragoman" is the title of Dr. Edwin Yamauchi's Presidential Address to the Evangelical Theological Society on November 16, 2006. Dr. Yamauchi's address now appears in the latest issue of the conservative Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50/3 (March 2007): 3-30. Dr. Yamauchi, an internationally known scholar of the ancient Mediterranean, maintains a long-standing research interest in the uses (and abuses) of Scriptures for magical purposes in the ancient world. Yamauchi highlights several case examples of how the Bible was used as a magical talisman for "prophylactic purposes," and discusses some cultural consequences of this functional purpose. The author also considers how the Bible functions as a "specimen" for scholars, where the text is of interest only for academic criticism and analysis, and notes additional consequences of this function. Finally, Yamauchi argues that the Bible functions as a "dragoman," a word the author adopts to suggest that the Bible acts as an "interpreter" in the way that a diplomat from the Ottoman Empire would interpret the ruler's decrees. Scholars of iconic books will likely find the "Talisman" portion of Dr. Yamauchi's article to be of the most use, as it is the only section where the author explicitly considers material aspects of the Bible, although even here Yamauchi's focus is more on material configurations of the content of the Bible and less on magical uses of the Book itself.

The Early Christian Book

At last, the papers from the Early Christian Book Conference held at the Catholic University of America in 2002 have been published. Papers that are particularly relevant to early Christian iconic books are Claudia Rapp, "Holy Texts, Holy Men and Holy Scribes: Aspects of Scriptural Holiness in Late Antiquity;" John Lowden, "The Word Made Visible: The Exterior of the Early Christian Book as Visual Argument;" and Caroline Humfress, "Judging by the Book: Christian Codices and Late Antique Legal Culture."