Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, Clare Wilde, Mladen Popović

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783110595710
• eBook ISBN: 9783110593662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds.

In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed.

In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Do Not Disperse the Collection! Motivations and Strategies for Protecting Cuneiform Scholarship in the First Millennium BCE
• 2 Multilingualism, Multiscripturalism, and Knowledge Transfer in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Graeco-Roman Judaea
• 3 Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in the Book of Jubilees
• 4 The Torah Between Revelation and Concealment in Rabbinic Traditions Pertaining to the Conquest of the Land of Canaan
• 5 Alexandria, Diaspora, Politeuma and Patrioi Nomoi: The Sharing and Hiding of Jewish Identity
• 6 Ancient Greek Patterns of Knowledge Transmission and their Continuity in Gnostic Esotericism
• 7 The Sign of Socrates, the Sign of Apollo, and the Signs of Christ: Hiding and Sharing Religious Knowledge in the Gospel of John – A Contrapuntal Reading of John’s Gospel and Plato’s Dialogues
• 8 “They Wish to Extinguish the Light of God with Their Mouths” (Qurʾān 9:32): A Qurʾānic Critique of Late Antique Scholasticism?
• 9 Techniques for Guarding and Restricting Esoteric Knowledge in the Ismaili Daʿwa during the Fatimid Period
• Author Index
• Sources Index