This excerpt from a recent piece in the Christian Post tells us a lot: “One of the things fundamentalist Christians mess up on is they try to say the earth is 6,000 years old. The Bible never makes that claim,” Jeffress said. To those comments, Ham responded: “It is so distressing that so many of our Christian leaders don't seem to understand that to accept man's fallible beliefs of billions of years, Big Bang etc, they are really undermining the... Read more
Via Episcopal Church Memes, HT Jim West Read more
The ARAM conference on the Mandaeans officially ended at 7pm this evening (although some of us hung out afterwards). Here is a final photo we took in front of the Oriental Institute with most of the attendees: This includes the scholars as well as some Mandaeans who attended not because they are academics, but because they wanted to hear what academics say about their history, literature, and other aspects of their tradition. There are certainly a few more scholars who... Read more
The last two presentations were by Erica Hunter and by Layla al-Roomi and another Mandaean, and they focused on the situation of Mandaeans today. Mandaeans face discrimination and persecution in their historic homelands in Iran and Iran, and in the diaspora they face the difficulty of trying to preserve their heritage when they may have little or no community, do not have their religious texts in the languages their children grow up speaking, and if someone marries outside the community,... Read more
Jorunn Buckley's paper at the ARAM conference on the Mandaeans focused on a series of prayers focused on the pihta, a special bread used in Mandaean ritual. There are references and allusions to other groups which are viewed as not making or eating the bread in an appropriate manner. I think that CP357 is particularly interesting, since it lists a variety of groups, starting with Jews and ending with Arabs. Since the latter are accused of eating blood, it... Read more
The second paper this morning was by Tania Notarius, and is on the relationship between a variety of overlapping and partially-overlapping manuscripts we have, each of which is a compilation of smaller collections of individual magical incantations, together with explanations for how to use them. Often these sorts of things were copied by scribes who did not understand the older Mandaic language of the incantation formulas. In this rare case of having a significant number of different manuscripts of the... Read more
The first presentation this morning was by Sandra van Rompaey and was about the way female figures are depicted in Mandaean religious art. There are distinctive features, such as how the bodies are shaded and whether they have hair. But there is also a parity, an equality to male beings, in how they are depicted, and that is reflected in the texts as well. Here are a few photos to give a sense not only of the art as excerpted,... Read more
One nice feature of the ARAM conference on the Mandaeans is having a banquet one night. Last time as well as this time, it was held at Al-Shami Lebanese Restaurant. In addition to being attended by scholars working on some aspect of Mandaean life, literature, history, or Mandaic language, some Mandaeans living in the UK also attend the conference and the banquet. They are appreciative of scholarly efforts, whether to make their texts understood, preserve aspects of their language and... Read more
It was good to see that the proceedings from previous conferences on the Mandaeans – in 2007 and 2009 – have finally appeared in print. There is a display copy here! Read more
Matthew Morgenstern's paper was about his work to produce a new Mandaic lexicon. Much of the talk focused on shortcomings in the Drower-Macuch dictionary, which the current work by Morgenstern seeks to build and improve upon. The photo below indicates the contrast between the image produced from the microfilm of a particular text which suffered water damage, and the photo he took with his digital camera, which shows the parts of the text that are completely illegible in the microfilm.... Read more
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