Scriptures, Sacred Traditions, and Strategies of Religious Subversion

The articles in this volume discuss polemically charged re-evaluations of the religious traditions and scriptures of the Western world, employed throughout the centuries in various religious contexts. These studies consider new religious outlooks not as glosses on inherited traditions, but as acts of power exercised in the struggle for identity: contestation, appropriation, interpretation and polemics against the religious »other«, involving, sometimes covertly, critiques of inherited tradition. The volume outlines a typology of the variety of attested strategies, highlighting cases of borderline extremes involving subversions of mainstream forms of belief as well as elucidating more moderate avenues of interaction. Most of the studies were presented at a 2016 conference in Jerusalem honouring Guy G. Stroumsa, a renowned scholar of early Christianity and Late Antiquity, recipient of many scholarly awards, including the Leopold Lucas Prize 2018.Moshe Blidstein/Serge Ruzer: Introduction

Part I: Antiquity
Nicole Belayche: Content and, or, Context? Subversive Writing in Greek and Roman Religions - Philippe Borgeaud: Mythe et écriture. Une approche grecque (platonicienne) - Hubert Cancik/Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier: Phaedrus on Greek Myth, Roman Religion and the Origin of Slavish Language - John Scheid: Piété, contestation et livre dans la Rome républicaine. Les épisodes de 213, 186 et 181 av. J.-C. - Sharon Weisser: Do We Have to Study the Torah? Philo of Alexandria and the Proofs for the Existence of God

Part II: Late Antiquity
Moshe Blidstein: Anti-legal Exempla in Late Ancient Christian Exegesis - Gilles Dorival: Is Maryam, Sister of Aaron, the Same as Maryam, the Mother of Jesus? Quran 19:28 Revisited - Maren R. Niehoff: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Creation: A Dispute between Rabbi Hoshaya and Origen - Lorenzo Perrone: Origen Reading the Psalms: the Challenge of a Christian Interpretation - Michel Tardieu: Le conquérant et le macrobiote: un épisode de la philosophie barbare.

Part III: Middle Ages
Sergey Minov: The Exhortation of the Apostle Peter: A Syriac Pseudepigraphon and its Monastic Context - Mark Silk: On Tolerating Religious »Others« in the Twelfth Century - Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra: The Christian Scriptures and Toledot Yeshu - Yuri Stoyanov: Subverting Scripture by Parascriptural Works in Medieval Eastern and Western Christian Dualism

Part IV: Modernity
Giovanni Filoramo: The Power of the Spiritual Man: the Subversive Exegesis of the Historian in Gottfried Arnold's Ketzergeschichte - Aryeh Kofsky/Serge Ruzer: The Gospel according to Tolstoy: Between Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus, Tatian and Marcion - Zur Shalev: Apocalyptic Travelers: The Seventeenth-Century Search for the Seven Churches of Asia - Adam Silverstein: Did Haman Have a Brother? On a Deceptively Interesting Error in a Modern Persian Dictionary

Guy Stroumsa: Epilogue: The Duty of Subversion