El Cristianismo en sus Orígenes ¿una Religión del Libro?.

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Robert Bellah on the origins of religion. A Critical Review

This book, as hefty as it is ambitious, represents the opus maximum of the great American sociologist of religion Robert Bellah. The author establishes his quest, from the ‘big Bang’ to Karl Jaspers’ ‘axial age,’ in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., upon Durkeimian and Weberian principles, and studies in turn the civilizations of Israel, of Greece, of India and of China. Doing this, he ignores Iran, and does not reach up to Christianity and Islam, which appeared later. The failure of the enterprise is at the level of its ambitions. It is an honorable one.L’opus maximum du grand sociologue américain de la religion Robert Bellah est aussi imposant qu’ambitieux. Du « Big Bang » à la « période axiale » chère à Karl Jaspers, au milieu du premier millénaire avant notre ère, l’auteur, se fondant à la fois sur l’héritage de Durkheim et sur celui de Max Weber, tente de reconstituer la formation du champ religieux tel que nous le connaissons, à travers les civilisations d’Israël, de la Grèce, de l’Inde et de la Chine. Ce faisant, il ignore l’Iran et ne traite ni du christianisme ni de l’islam, apparus plus tard. L’échec de l’entreprise est à la hauteur de ses ambitions. C’est toutefois un échec honorable

Mystical Jerusalems

Between memory and imagination, the image of Jerusalem in the Western mind is deeply informed by the ambivalence of the city in Christian consciousness. The destruction of the Temple soon came to be perceived as a devine punishment visited upon the city for the killing of Christ. Parallel to the negative perception of Jerusalem, however, early Christian texts and traditions reflect the interplay of different conceptions of the city where Christianity was born : from the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, coming down from heaven in the messianic times to the spiritual Jerusalem in the heart of the believers. Already in Patristic literature, this conception of Jerusalem became the cornerstone of the mystical visio pacis. Since the early Middle Ages, various reproductions of Jerusalem, and in particular of its core for the Christians, i.e., the Church of the Anastasis, began to appear in Western Europe, as so many eidola of Jerusalem. In a sense, this phenomenon of the translatio Hierosolymae is the physical expression of the Christian conquest of Europe. What is the nature of the links between the idea of a heavenly or spiritual Jerusalem and the multiple Jerusalems sprouting on European soil ? And what are the dialectical relationships between the multiple reproductions of the sacred space and the impetus to reconquer the Holy City itself ? The various mental (re)constructions of Jerusalem reflect different types of piety, different approaches to memory, cult, and religious imagination. From Origen to Swedenborg, this paper investigates some implications of the "blowing up" of Jerusalem, as it were, in Christian consciousness.Stroumsa Guy S. Mystical Jerusalems . In: Bulletin de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, tome 8, n°7-12, 1997. pp. 377-402

Anquetil Duperron et les origines de la philologie orientale: l'orientalisme est un humanisme

Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron (1731-1805) a pioneer of Oriental philology, was also a real humanist, an intellectual at once deeply ethical and remarkably courageous. Anquetil''s publication of the first European translation of the Zend Avesta started what has been called « the Ouarrel of the Avesta ». The three volumes of Anquetil's Zend Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre were published in 1771. This is the first literary document coming from a civilization beyond the Greco-Roman world and outside the religions stemming from the Hebrew Bible to be translated into a European language -even though it is a Persian version, rather than the original Avestan, that Anquetil had translated. I offer here some reflections on Anquetil's fascinating character and carreer.Je voudrais réfléchir ici sur le cas remarquable d'Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron (1731-1805), un pionnier de la philologie orientale, qui fut aussi un grand humaniste, un intellectuel dont la trempe morale sans failles faisait écho au grand courage physique. C'est la publication, par Anquetil, de la première traduction européenne du Zend Avesta qui est à l'origine de ce qu'on a pu appeler « la Querelle de l'Avesta ». Zend Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre, divisé en deux parties, fut publié en trois tomes en 1771. Il s'agit là du tout premier monument littéraire provenant d'une civilisation extérieure au monde gréco-latin et à celui des religions issues de la Bible hébraïque à être traduit dans une langue européenne -même si c''est d'une version persane, plutôt que de l'original avestique, qu'Anquetil l'avait traduit.Stroumsa Guy S. Anquetil Duperron et les origines de la philologie orientale: l'orientalisme est un humanisme. In: ASDIWAL. Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions, n°13, 2018. pp. 161-174

John Spencer and the roots of idolatry

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