Mladen Popović – författare

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.

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.

This study deals with physiognomic and astrological texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls that represent one of the earliest examples of ancient Jewish science. For the first time the Hebrew physiognomic-astrological list 4Q186 (4QZodiacal Physiognomy) and the Aramaic physiognomic list 4Q561 (4QPhysiognomy ar) are comprehensively studied in relation to both physiognomic and astrological writings from Babylonian and Greco-Roman traditions. New reconstructions and interpretations of these learned lists are offered that result in a fresh view of their sense, function, and status within both the Qumran community and Second Temple Judaism at large, showing that Jewish culture in Palestine participated in the cultural exchange of learned knowledge between Babylonian and Greco-Roman cultures.

Many scholars of the Second Temple period have replaced the concept of canonization by that of canonical process. Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been crucial for this new direction. Based on this new evidence taxonomic terms like biblical, nonbiblical or parabiblical seem anachronistic for the period before 70 C.E. The notion of authoritative Scriptures plays an important part in the new paradigm of canonical process, but it has not yet been sufficiently reflected upon and is in need of clarification. Why were some texts more authoritative than others? For whom and in what contexts were texts authoritative? And what are our criteria to determine to what extent a text was authoritative? In short, what do we mean by “authoritative”? This volume focuses on specific texts or corpora of texts, and approaches the notion of authoritative Scriptures from sociological, cultural and literary perspectives.