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I
do not
disagree with my
teachers, but only add
to their words, if I
say that the more polished patristic
literature has much to offer talmudic studies,
even when it is not dealing with socalled popular concepts & practices,
but with the most prized & pivotal religious discourses and practices,
such as martyrology itself.

Indeed,
the very distinction
between high and low culture
has to be called
into question.

Several scholars
have been vigorously engaged
in rejecting this opposition for the very Christian literature with which we deal.
Thus their inquest into popular beliefs in the Late Roman historians ends
in reporting that there were no such beliefs?
Acoording to their opinion,
in the fourth and fifth centuries there were of course plenty of beliefs
which historians of the twentieth century would gladly call popular,
but the historians of the fourth and fifth centuries, they think,
never treated any belief as characteristic of the masses
and consequently discredited among the elite.
So they say lectures on populat beliefs
and Late Roman historians should be severely discouraged!
They well articulated this perspective
with respect to the contemporary
Fathers of the Church:

"Yet
it is remarkable that men who were acutely aware of elaborating
dogmas,
such as the nature of the trinity, whose contents were difficult of access to the
'unlettered,'
felt themselves so little isolated for so much of the time from these same
'unlettered'
when it came to the shared religious
practices
of their community and to the assumptions about the relation of man to supernatural beings which these practices condensed.
In the area of life covered bt religious practice ~ an area immeasurably wider and more intimately felt by ancient men than by their modern counterparts ~ differences of class and education play no significant role?"

What is true
of the historians
and true of the Fathers
is no less true of
the Rabbis.

It follows
from our first central point
that the areas of shared cultural and religious creativity
might be much broader than we have previously,
even untill now, thought,
as well!?

A case in point
is the dialogue about martyrdom!
Not only rabbinic Jews, but Christians were thinking very similarly
about this practice and its value in the third century,
and in texts of different genres.

Sleep well
& dream sweet.
If it must be
about the value of our short lifes.
Is it worth its while living for ourselves and each other?
What makes it so [or doesn't]?
And what can we do
about it?

blozen
engel
cool!
08 jul 2008 - bewerkt op 09 jul 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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