[squf ] Jensine Andresen [Ph.D. 1997]

Kālacakra, “The Wheel of Time”

This dissertation investigates Kālacakra, “The Wheel of Time,” a tantric system of multivalent text and elaborate ritual. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology, I describe Kālacakra's manifestations in India, Tibet, and the West, focusing on social, psychological, economic, and political factors that have propelled this tradition forward. Fundamentally interested in patterns of cultural and religious transmission, I examine the manner in which potent themes inherent to both textual and ritual Kālacakra—threats of apocalypse, projections of utopia, pronouncements of curse, promises of fulfillment, and the aesthetic resonance of melothesia—have made this tradition adaptable to changing historical and cultural contexts.

A visit in November 1999 to libraries in Boston and Cambridge in order to view Greek manuscripts of the New Testament yielded two groups comprising a total of six manuscripts not—so far as we are aware—widely known. The purpose of this article is to offer a description of the manuscripts, with an account of what we have been able to discover about them.

The so-called Gospel of Barnabas is attested by two textual witnesses, an Italian manuscript probably dating from the end of the sixteenth century and presently kept in Vienna, and a lacunar Spanish manuscript from the eighteenth century recently rediscovered in Sydney.The Italian manuscript was edited with an English translation by Lonsdale and Laura Ragg, The Gospel of Barnabas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907). A facsimile of the manuscript, with a French translation, is given in Luigi Cirillo and Michel Frémaux, Évangile de Barnabé (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977). The Spanish manuscript is available in the edition of Luis F. Bernabé Pons, El texto morisco del Evangelio de San Bernabé (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1998). For a description of this manuscript and its history, see John Fletcher, “The Spanish Gospel of Barnabas,” NovT 18 (1976) 314–20. Very little is known, however, about the origins of the writing; dates assigned to it range from antiquity to the early seventeenth century.See the review of recent publications in Jan Slomp, “The ‘Gospel of Barnabas’ in recent research,” Islamochristiana 23 (1997) 81–109. Online: http://home.t-online.de/home/chrislages/barnarom.htm.

It is one of the ironies of American religious history that the most thoroughly anti-Catholic work to appear after the Civil War was published in the unlikely decade after the Second World War, when the last good war had been fought and won, and what Gibson Winter termed “the suburban captivity of the churches” was well underway, a “captivity” in which questions of crabgrass ostensibly replaced theology as the major topic of conversation. A series of articles that had begun to appear in the Nation, a staunchly libertarian journal, in November 1947, was published by Beacon Press in 1949 as American Freedom and Catholic Power—a work that would set the stage for increasingly neuralgic exchanges between Catholics and Protestants during a decade in which sociologist Will Herberg announced that the “American Way of Life” was now acceptably packaged in Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish forms. The author of that book, Paul Blanshard, understood himself to be issuing a timely call to protect the First Amendment of the Constitution against the encroachments of a Catholic hierarchy living within the very fortress of the free world, but hostile to American democratic and political values.

It has been recognized by at least some scholars that many early Christians, and not only the simpliciores, believed God to be corporeal (materially embodied) or anthropomorphic (humanlike in form), as some biblical narratives portray him. Likewise certain trajectories of Christian mysticism, under the influence of Jewish kabod speculation, maintained that the pinnacle of mystic ascent was the contemplation of the body of God. Among theologians there was also a stoicizing school, prominently represented in Tertullian, who held that God was corpus, even if not anthropomorphic. All of this stands in stark contrast with that Christian theology which developed, primarily under the influence of Platonism, a nonanthropomorphic and incorporeal conception of God that has come to dominate all subsequent theology and philosophy. It is difficult for moderns to transcend these subsequent norms and recognize among early Christians some quite different theological conceptions, or to do so without dismissing them as crude and primitive notions and, hence, as isolated aberrations.

David Ralph Bains [Ph.D.2000]: The Liturgical Impulse in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Mainline Protestantism

Ernest Boyer, Jr. [Th.D. 2002]: “What is Religion?”: Shaftesbury, the German Enlightenment, and Schleiermacher

Christopher Stuart Chandler [Ph.D. 2000]: Establishing A Pureland on Earth: The Foguang Buddhist Perspective on Modernization and Globalization

Susanne Mrozik [Ph.D. 1999]: The Relationship Between Morality and the Body in Monastic Training According to the Shikshasamuccaya

Laura S. Nasrallah [Th.D. 2002]: Rhetorical Strategies in Early Christian debates over Prophecy

Nancy Eileen Nienhuis [Th.D. 2002]: Neighbors and Other Strangers: Poor Women, Critical Feminist Liberation Theology, and Welfare-Reform Rhetoric

Yuko Taniguchi [Th.D. 2002]: To Lead Quiet and Peaceable Lives: Rhetorical Analysis of the First Letter to Timothy

34And in the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani,” which is translated, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 35When some of the bystanders heard this, they said, “See, he is calling Elijah.” 36Then one ran off and filled a sponge with sour wine. He put it on a stick and offered it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah comes to take him down.” 37But Jesus, after emitting a loud cry, expired. 38Then the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. 39When the centurion who was standing in front of him saw that he had so expired, he said, “Truly this man was Son of God.”