Immitatio Ezechielis : the irregular grammar of Revelation reconsidered

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/2546/thumbnail.jp

The Stylometric Processing of Sensory Open Source Data

This research project’s end goal is on the Lone Wolf Terrorist. The project uses an exploratory approach to the self-radicalisation problem by creating a stylistic fingerprint of a person's personality, or self, from subtle characteristics hidden in a person's writing style. It separates the identity of one person from another based on their writing style. It also separates the writings of suicide attackers from ‘normal' bloggers by critical slowing down; a dynamical property used to develop early warning signs of tipping points. It identifies changes in a person's moods, or shifts from one state to another, that might indicate a tipping point for self-radicalisation. Research into authorship identity using personality is a relatively new area in the field of neurolinguistics. There are very few methods that model how an individual's cognitive functions present themselves in writing. Here, we develop a novel algorithm, RPAS, which draws on cognitive functions such as aging, sensory processing, abstract or concrete thinking through referential activity emotional experiences, and a person's internal gender for identity. We use well-known techniques such as Principal Component Analysis, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and the Vector Space Method to cluster multiple anonymous-authored works. Here we use a new approach, using seriation with noise to separate subtle features in individuals. We conduct time series analysis using modified variants of 1-lag autocorrelation and the coefficient of skewness, two statistical metrics that change near a tipping point, to track serious life events in an individual through cognitive linguistic markers. In our journey of discovery, we uncover secrets about the Elizabethan playwrights hidden for over 400 years. We uncover markers for depression and anxiety in modern-day writers and identify linguistic cues for Alzheimer's disease much earlier than other studies using sensory processing. In using these techniques on the Lone Wolf, we can separate their writing style used before their attacks that differs from other writing

Adam, Satan, and the King of Tyre: The reception of Ezekiel 28:11-19 in Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity

The lament over the King of Tyre in Ezekiel 28:11-19 has presented scholars with a great many difficulties. This thesis is a fresh attempt to make sense of this extremely complex text through a detailed reassessment of the texts early transmission history and by analysing its reception among Jewish and Christian communities in Late Antiquity, a topic which has not previously been examined in full. The thesis re-examines the relationship between the Hebrew and Greek witnesses to Ezekiel in light of the manuscript data from Masada and Qumran. I conclude that the historical precedence of neither Hebrew nor Greek can be established and propose that two distinct recensions must have been in circulation concurrently. I then critically examine the Masoretic accentuation and vocalization of the Hebrew text as an interpretative layer and explore the possibilities for alternative meanings presented by a Gonsõnantal text. I then trace the evolution of the text in the Greek versions, asking how the Greek versions function as both translation and interpretation. The thesis then examines more explicitly interpretative material, beginning with the Targum and moving onto the classical rabbinic literature. The final chapter examines the contrasting interpretations of the early Church Fathers, particularly Origen and Jerome who interact polemically with Jewish traditions. In these different sources the central figure of the lament is variously understood to be a 'god' (consonantal Hebrew), the Israelite High Priest (Greek versions), a political exemplar (Targum), a mythical cherub (pointed Masoretic Hebrew), Adam or Hiram (Rabbis), and Satan (Church Fathers).Throughout I seek to ask not only how each community understood the text, but also why they understood it m that particular way. I seek to bring to light the methods of reading used, the results these produced, and the motivations underlying both of these. I conclude by making some preliminary suggestions as to how the historical study of reception history might inform contemporary discussions of hermeneutics

Our Father Isaac : Reading the Sahidic Testament of Isaac in an Egyptian Monastic Context

This dissertation argues that the textual community of fourth or fifth century monastic Egypt read Testament of Isaac as an ascetical regimen in order to transform themselves into children of Isaac. T. Isaac highlights three particular dimensions of Isaac\u27s character from the remembered tradition of Isaac that would have resonated in the Egyptian monastic context of the textual community - Isaac as priestly authority, Isaac as sacrifice, and Isaac as blind ascetic - to create a model for the new self that the textual community aimed to achieve. Two important ascetic practices in T. Isaac that the textual community was to perform were copying and reading T. Isaac. These two practices functioned as technologies of the self that helped the members of the textual community to transform their present subjectivity into a new self modeled on Isaac in T. Isaac

Authoring Authority: The Apostle Paul and the Prophet Joseph Smith--A Critical Comparison of Texts and Power in the Generation of Religious Community

. . . believe in God, believe also in me . . . --John 14.1 Authoring Authority analyzes the ways texts function to generate social cohesion while at the same time advancing the power interests of their authors. The study is a comparative, critical, and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary excavation of the religion-making efforts of the first-century Christian Apostle Paul and the nineteenth-century Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith. This comparison defamiliarizes and recharacterizes the heroes and origin-stories of the dominant (and my own) tradition to force important questions about scholarly perspectives, interests and deferences (protection, exceptionalization), self-reflexivity, and politics. The project\u27s critical orientation deploys insights and models from a range of disciplines to read these texts, not for exegetical purposes, but for what they signify and how they function in nascent social formations. The texts of these men were presented as if their contents were other than the products of embedded social actors (e.g. it really is God\u27s word 1 Thes 2.13) contending for limited resources such as discursive authority and social power. These charismatic narrators harnessed the authority of pre-existing texts and traditions and integrated them with contemporary perspectives and sentiment. Their texts and performances offered a contingent construal of reality as ultimate reality--which served the power needs of their authors and the existential needs of their communities of subscribers. The dissertation begins with the articulation of an analytical framework appropriate for the critical and comparative academic study of religion. Chapter two contextualizes the lives of these men within cultural settings that provided motivation, made available vocational training and, ultimately provisioned social opportunities for them as adept charismatics. Chapter three directly illuminates the range of techniques embedded in texts, both implicit and explicit, of claiming power and developing a following. The final chapter wrestles with the functional role of deception in social formation and human life

Subversive speech acts? An evaluation of an imperial-critical reading of Ephesians

While recent publications have examined how NT texts engage with early Roman imperial ideology, no full-scale exploration of Ephesians has been constructed to date. This project provides an original contribution in the field of study by utilizing an eclectic hermeneutic in order to evaluate the plausibility of an imperial-critical reading of Ephesians. Current literature related to imperial-critical readings of Ephesians are surveyed, demonstrating that there are significant gaps in the scholarly literature. This study then employs an eclectic hermeneutic: drawing on speech-act theory, implied/empirical distinctions, and a narrative hermeneutic to construct and evaluate an anti-imperial reading of Ephesians. In doing so, the empirical life-setting of Ephesians is re-examined. Previously underexplored elements of the Roman context of Ephesians, with a focus on maiestas [treason] charges, imperial cults, and Roman imperial eschatology, are examined in light of the two major theories of the date of the epistle. New proposals for the epistle’s implied elements are then explored in light of the possibilities offered for the Roman imperial empirical life-setting. A bi-focal exploration of the implied and empirical life-settings of Ephesians provides the foundations for constructing an imperial-critical reading of Ephesians. Since no full-scale anti-imperial reading of Ephesians exists to date, this study first provisionally constructs one within the two major sections of Ephesians (1-3; 4-6) in order to evaluate its plausibility. An eclectic hermeneutic is then employed to evaluate whether speech acts within Ephesians were intended to carry anti-imperial overtones. This study concludes that, while there are prospects and limitations with an imperial-critical reading of the epistle, some of the epistle’s speech acts can be understood to have subverted Roman imperial ideology on a narrative level

The neologisms in 2 Maccabees

This thesis investigates a hitherto under-researched topic in Septuagint studies, the Septuagint neologisms, that is, the words which are first attested in the Septuagint, taking as a case in point a deuterocanonical/apocryphal book originally written in Greek, the Second Book of Maccabees (2 Maccabees). The thesis first examines how the neologisms have so far been treated in Septuagint studies and lexicography and proposes a method for their identification based on a thorough search of the electronic databases of ancient Greek literary and non-literary texts rather than of the existing Greek lexica. It also discusses the significance of neologisms for identifying a Septuagint book’s intertextual relationships and for determining the approximate time of its translation/composition. The main part of the thesis consists of a detailed commentary on some sixty neologisms of various types that occur in 2 Maccabees: neologisms first attested in this book, which do not recur anywhere else in the Septuagint (Septuagint hapax legomena) or anywhere else in Greek (absolute hapax legomena); neologisms shared between 2 Maccabees and other deuterocanonical/apocryphal books, or parts of books; neologisms first attested in the canonical books of the Septuagint, which were taken up by 2 Maccabees; neologisms shared between 2 Maccabees and roughly contemporary extra-Septuagintal literary and non-literary texts; and neologisms of 2 Maccabees which recur in later Jewish and secular Greek texts. The examination of these multifarious neologisms seeks to trace the intertextual connections that link 2 Maccabees with such texts as the Greek Pentateuch, the Greek Psalter, Old Greek Daniel, 1 Esdras, 3 and 4 Maccabees, Addition E to Esther, and the Alpha Text of Esther, and explores the possible influence on the deuterocanonical book’s diction of secular Greek literary and non-literary texts such as Polybius’ Histories and the Hellenistic honorific decrees. It also provides chronological clues that suggest a date of composition or final redaction of 2 Maccabees in the first century BCE, or around the turn of the Common Era, rather than in the last third of the second century BCE, as is commonly believed