New Series from Baylor

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I am happy to announce a new book series from Baylor University Press called The Library of Early Christology series.  This series is a collaborative effort to bring together "essential readings" that represent the new history of religions school, with a focus on the study of early Christology and its historic Judaic antecedents.

Most of these books were published by other publishers (Mohr Siebeck, Brill, and Fortress) as part of a limited-run series.  Now they are being republished and distributed via Baylor in order to bring these important works to a new and wider audience.

With that said, I am so pleased to announce that my first monograph, Seek To See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas, is now published as part of this series, along with my mentor's book, Jarl Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism.  Both of these books (and many more!) are available at very reasonable prices now.

Rorotoko Interview

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I am so pleased to extend to you the link to an interview that I did for Rorotoko (Cutting-Edge Intellectual Interviews) about my book The Gnostic New Age. I was honored to be contacted by Judi Pajo, the acting editor for the website.  The site runs weekly distinguished interviews with scholars on their books published in all fields.

Their motto is, "Start the day smart." 

In the interview they asked me four questions. Describe your book "in a nutshell."  What is "the wide angle" of your work?  Give us "a close up" of your favorite passage.  And "lastly" what insight do you want to leave your reader with?

Their website also captures authors' biographies. Mine can be found HERE.

Gnosis 2.1 is published!

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I am so pleased to share with you the news that the spring issue (2.1) of GNOSIS: Journal of Gnostic Studies has been published.  I provide here the cover and the table of contents. 

This journal can be ordered by individuals and libraries on an annual subscription.  Click on the title of the journal above to be taken to Brill's website if you are interested in obtaining a personal subscription or one for your library.

Secret Religion is released!

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I have been working with two other editors, Jeff Kripal and Tony Pinn, on a 10-volume series on Religion for Macmillan.  These volumes are a hybrid between a textbook and a reference book.  There are only two volumes left to be published.  We started this project when we were contacted in August 2014.  So it is very exciting to have these volumes already published.  Only two years.  Really unbelievable!

My pet project was a volume called Secret Religion, and it just came out in hardcover and e-book. 

I want to thank all the scholars who took out time from their schedules to write for this volume.  It wouldn't be the great book it is without all of you!  You were WONDERFUL to work with!

In order of their contributions:  Michael Williams, Matthew Dillon, Grant Adamson, Tuomas Rasimus, Madeleine Scopello, Bas van Os, John Turner, Kevin Corrigan, Marco Pasi, Wouter Hanegraaff, Kocku von Struckrad, Claire Fanger, Hugh Urban, Dylan Burns, Erin Prophet, Henrik Bogdan, Chad Pevateaux, Jared Calaway, Jeff Kripal, Brian Ogren, Kevin Sullivan, Christopher Rowland, Kelley Coblentz-Bautch, James Davila.

It can be purchased via Macmillan or Amazon: Secret Religion.

Description: Religion: Secret Religion is part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series dedicated to the study of religion. Composed of twenty-four thematic chapters, this volume looks at the margins of religion or religious texts and traditions that are not considered authoritative by orthodox communities. The volume is broken down into three sections that correspond with different classifications of religion in the margins: gnosticism, with its focuses on knowledge of a transcendent God who is the source of life and the human spirit; esotericism, with its focus on private religion kept from the public and critical of orthodoxy; and mysticism, with its focus on immediate contact with the ultimate reality. Each classification will be explored historically and comparatively to give the reader a more rounded understanding. The volume also includes bibliographies, filmographies, images, a glossary, and a comprehensive index, all of which aid the reader in exploring this rich, rewarding, and relevant field.

 

Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies

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Signing contract for GNOSIS: Journal of Gnostic Studies, with Loes Schouten and Lautaro Lanzillotta, June 2015

Signing contract for GNOSIS: Journal of Gnostic Studies, with Loes Schouten and Lautaro Lanzillotta, June 2015

Lautaro Lanzillotta and I have been working with the wonderful people at Brill to start a new journal.  This has been a dream of mine for many years, and when I discovered that Lautaro had similar aspirations, we banded together, got many others involved, and Brill decided to give the journal a try.  I want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way, to make this dream come true.  Especially my thanks goes to Loes Schouten, Publishing Director at Brill. 

Here is the link to the official webpage for the journal where editorial board and more information can be found: http://www.brill.com/products/journal/gnosis-journal-gnostic-studies

Our first two issues will be out in 2016.  They will be a special edition of the collected papers from the Gnostic Countercultures conference that we held at Rice University in March 2015. 

Here is a description of the journal.

Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies is a peer-reviewed publication devoted to the study of Gnostic religious currents from the ancient world to the modern, where ‘Gnostic’ is broadly conceived as a reference to special direct knowledge of the divine, which either transcends or transgresses conventional religious knowledge. It aims to publish academic papers on: the emergence of the Gnostic, in its many different historical and local cultural contexts; the Gnostic strands that persisted in the middle ages; and modern interpretations of Gnosticism – with the goal of establishing cross-cultural and trans-historical conversations, together with more localized historical analyses. The corpus of Gnostic materials includes (but is not restricted to) testimonies from outsiders as well as insider literature such as the Nag Hammadi collection, the Hermetica, Neo-Platonic texts, the Pistis Sophia, the books of Jeu, the Berlin and Tchacos codices, Manichaean documents, Mandaean scriptures, and contemporary Gnostic fiction/film and ‘revealed’ literature. The journal will publish the best of traditional historical and comparative scholarship while also featuring newer approaches that have received less attention in the established literature, such as cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, social memory, psychology, ethnography, sociology, and literary theory.

Please send us your submissions.  And please have your library subscribe.  And take out individual subscriptions.  And spread the word!

Finding Jesus and the Gospel of Judas

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The annual publication from the School of Humanities at Rice University, HUMANITAS: THE MEANING OF BEING HUMAN, just came out.  There is a featured article in it on my adventures on the CNN set of the FINDING JESUS film.  I took a photo of the article because it is not on line yet.  I see back issues in pdf on line, but not the 2015 magazine.

The story is meaningful to me because it contains my reminiscences of filming in Geneva and seeing the Gospel of Judas for the first time. Hope it is clear enough to read.

Book Note: Histories of the Hidden God (DeConick and Adamson)

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Click to find book on Amazon

Very excited about this new edited volume in the Gnostica Series published by Acumen.  This volume came out of a very special conference that we held here at Rice in April 2010.  At Rice we have a wonderful program we call GEM (Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism) which is an approach to religious literature and practices that takes seriously the marginalized and forbidden, what I like to call the "edges of religion".  We think it is essential to understand and incorporate the edges of religion into our histories and analyses of religion, rather than focus only on what became over time the center of religious traditions and the authoritative literature.

So the book comes out of the first international GEM conference. 

Histories of the Hidden God: Concealment and Revelation in Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions

,

edited by myself and Grant Adamson.

The papers deal with the fact that even though Western religious traditions typically portray God as a humanlike creator, lawgiver, and king, both accessible and actively present in history, there is another concurrent tradition that God hides.  This has led to a tension in the traditions.  It is the Gnostic and the mystic who capitalize on the hidden and hiding God.  It is the sage and the artist who try to make accessible to humans the God who is secreted away.  This book explores the secret God from antiquity to the present day.  The book is organized around three themes: the concealment of the hidden God; the human quest for the hidden God; and revelations of the hidden God.

In this book I have published one of my papers on the Gospel of John and Gnostic origins: "Who is hiding in the Gospel of John?  Reconceptualizing Johannine theology and the roots of Gnosticism."

Book Note: Practicing Gnosis (eds. April DeConick, Gregory Shaw and John Turner)

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I  promised to get some book notes out this week, and lo and behold, it is already Friday and I haven't had a chance to get to my blog until now.

Click here to go to Amazon

The big news for me is that the festschrift that we have been putting together for Professor Birger A. Pearson has been published by Brill.  Gregory Shaw, John Turner and I have been gathering contributions and editing this project for two years, and it feels so wonderful to see the book published in honor of such a great scholar in the field of early Christian studies and Gnosticism.

Although I was not a graduate student of Professor Pearson, I have always considered myself his student, so essential has been his research to my own.  When I was new to the field in the late 80s and early 90s, his work on Gnosticism helped to orient me and inspire me, especially his classic pieces on Philo, the Jewish nature of Gnosticism, and its Egyptian roots.  So it is with great pleasure that I joined forces with Greg Shaw and John Turner to honor Professor Pearson.

We choose to create a volume around a specific theme, Gnostic rituals and practices, because there is such a gap in our knowledge when it comes to what the Gnostics were actually doing and why they were doing it.  While the book is not comprehensive - how could it be? - we were able to cover five main areas of practice in the volume: initiatory, recurrent, therapeutic, ecstatic, and philosophic practices.

This is the volume in which I have published my paper on the

Ophian Diagram

, and I am particularly proud of it because I believe that I have actually solved its mystery.

List of articles:

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Initiatory Practices

April D. DeConick, The Road for the Souls is through the Planets: The Mysteries of the Ophians Mapped

Roger Beck, Ecstatic Religion in the Roman Cult of Mithras

Bas van Os, Gospel of Philip as Gnostic Initiatory Discourse

Elliot Wolfson, Becoming Invisible: Rending the Veil and the Hermeneutic of Secrecy in the Gospel of Philip

Erin Evans, Ritual in the Second Book of Jeu

Nicola Denzey Lewis, Death on the Nile: Egyptian Codices, Gnosticism, and Early Christian Books of the Dead

Recurrent Pratices

Einar Thomassen, Going to Church with the Valentinians

Madeleine Scopello, Practicing ‘Repentance’ on the Path to Gnosis in Exegesis on the Soul

Edward Butler, Opening the Way of Writing: Semiotic Metaphysics in the Book of Thoth

Fernando Bermejo Rubio, “I Worship and Glorify”: Manichaean Liturgy and Piety in Kellis’ Prayer of the Emanations

Jason BeDuhn, The Manichaean Weekly Confessional Ritual

Jorunn Buckley, Ritual Ingenuity in the Mandaean Scroll of Exalted Kingship

Therapeutic Practices

Naomi Janowitz, Natural, Magical, Scientific or Religious? A Guide to Theories of Healing

Grant Adamson, Astrological Medicine in Gnostic Traditions

Marvin Meyer, The Persistence of Ritual in the Magical Book of Mary and the Angels: P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685

Rebecca Lesses, Image and Word: Performative Ritual and Material Culture in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls

Ecstatic Practices

John D. Turner, From Baptismal Vision to Mystical Union with the One: The Case of the Sethian Gnostics

Niclas Förster, Marcosian Rituals for Prophecy and Apolytrosis

James Davila, Ritual Praxis in the Hekhalot Literature

Philosophic Practices

Zeke Mazur, The Platonizing Sethian Gnostic Interpretation of Plato’s Sophist

Michael Williams, Did Plotinus’ “Friends” Still Go to Church? Communal Rituals and Ascent Apocalypses

Kevin Corrigan, The Meaning of “One”: Plurality and Unity in Plotinus and Later Neoplatonism

Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Platonist’s Luminous Body

Spaying the Mother God

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Biblical Archaeology Review

38:05, Sep/Oct 2012 just published a short piece of mine about the feminine and God.

"Is God gendered as a male in the Bible? What about Jesus’ words in John 4:23–24 where he says that “God is spirit”? In the same passage, however, Jesus calls God “Father.” Does he do so in reference to an actual masculinity of God? Is this a manifestation of male domination and patriarchy? Ben Witherington doesn’t think so. According to him, Jesus calls God “Father” and not “Mother” only because he did not have a human father, while he did have a human mother. Witherington thinks that, at least in the New Testament, God is not perceived to be male, but a genderless divine essence. He says that we are too quick to read into the Bible our own over-sexed and gender-language-sensitive culture. But are we? Or are we trying to apologize for the misogyny in the Bible because of our religious belief in the sacred nature of the Bible?"

READ FULL ARTICLE ONLINE HERE...

To subscribe to BAR, follow this

LINK

.  I love this magazine and fondly remember buying it on the newstand when I was a teenager. So I am proud to be able to write a column for it occasionally.

A Book Review of Holy Misogyny

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This nice write up on my book,

Holy Misogyny

, was just published by

Midwest Book Review

:

The earliest decades of the Christian movement saw the beginnings of gender role conflicts exemplified by Paul's exhortation against women preaching in church gatherings. The suppression of women's roles in favor of male ecclesiastical privilege continued to strengthen in the succeeding early centuries and still have immense ramifications in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant congregations and churches today. "Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter" is a superbly researched 200-page compendium by April D. DeConick (Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies, Rice University) presenting the origins of such Christian doctrinal issues as to why God is male, the association of women with sin, the denial of priesthood to females, and more. Informed and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, "Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter" is a strongly recommended read for anyone concerned with the origin of gender equality issues within the contemporary Christian community.

A first review of Holy Misogyny

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I want to thank Ms. Jasmine Wilson for her thoughtful

review of

Holy Misogyny

on the Englewood Review of Books website

.   This is a very interesting and brave website I think.  It is written for a Christian-centered audience, but its reviewers comment on books that are not necessarily written from that same perspective.  I especially appreciated what she had to say toward the end of the review, which I quote here:

It seemed she was writing to a wider audience of those interested in gender studies, not just Christians who were interested in redeeming their own muddled history toward women. Because of that, she does not take at face value that the Scriptures have any sort of spiritual identity, and might make some Christians uncomfortable because of that. However, if readers recognize that she is writing toward a wider audience, I do think her account is appropriately dangerous, and can hopefully jar Christians into action to reverse the long tradition of misogynistic interpretation of Scripture and misogynistic action in the church.

Holy Misogyny is out!

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CLICK TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

Finally, finally...

Holy Misogyny

is published.  I just received a couple of author copies in my mailbox.  So if you pre-ordered my book, it should be arriving at your home or office very soon.  I don't yet see the Kindle button activated, so please, if you want to purchase my book in e-form, click the "we want this in Kindle" button.  I was told that it will be available electronically, but I figure that it never hurts to keep reminding the powers that be that we would like this asap.

I am really pleased with the book.  It is a book that began 25 years ago when I agreed to teach a class on gender and the bible at Albion College.  That was a long time ago.  Back then I didn't have the faintest idea that I would want to write a book on gender, let alone do it.  I did not study gender in graduate school.  This only became an interest of mine when I began teaching.  Each time I taught the class and revised it, I became more and more shocked at what I was finding in the early Christian literature, and was frustrated that this material was not being covered in books authored about early Christianity.  I couldn't understand why because the material was so important.  So eventually I overcame my own anxieties about not having been formally trained in gender studies, and wrote the book myself.

I hope you like it, or at least, I hope it gives you something to think about.

"An intriguing, important, and appropriately dangerous book. DeConick brings her study of the difficult canonical and apocryphal texts into conversation with contemporary concerns in a satisfying and accessible way. Her style is both technical and easy-going. This is a book for the general public as well as the academic classroom. I learned a great deal from it and am left with many questions to chew on happily and to discuss. The reader is aided in the search for 'Lady God,' and in the struggle to create societies that abhor and reject violence to the female body." — Jane Schaberg, Professor of Biblical Studies and Gender/Women’s Studies, University of Detroit Mercy, USA

Kindle Edition of Holy Misogyny

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For those of you who are asking, yes,

Holy Misogyny

, will be available in Kindle Edition.  I had this conversation with my editor on a couple of occasions, and this week he confirmed that the copy was sent out to be processed in electronic format as well as traditional hardcover. 

Another endorsement:

"April DeConick, a world class scholar, has written a must-read book for those interested in gender issues in relationship to God.  By integrating her vast knowledge of extracanonical and canonical texts, she expansively analyzes the effect of misogyny on conceptions of the female body and the profound difference such marginalization has made, even today, for women's ecclesiastical leadership and ordination."  Ann Graham Brock, Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, Iliff School of Theology, USA

Starting up the new academic year with a new book

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Welcome to the new religious studies PhD students at Rice!  We started classes and advising last week, so I am getting back into the swing of things here on campus. 

This semester I am teaching Coptic to a class of seven, including two undergraduates.  I am looking forward to returning to teaching the language that opens Pandora's Box.  I am returning to using Lambdin since I have found that there are two important elements to teaching this language: 1. lots of exercises; 2. breaking down the system into small details and delivering it in pieces.  Lambdin does this very well.  Lambdin doesn't present Coptic as a whole system very well though.  For that Layton's

20 Lessons

and Brankaer's

Learning Grammar

are much better.  So I will supplement next semester by using Layton and Brankaer to show the students the bigger picture, once they have been through the details.

I am also pleased that our Mellon seminar,

Mapping Death

, was so successful last year, that we are continuing it this year as a Writing Workshop.  We will be meeting regularly to assess and critique our individual work projects.  I need to get my paper on the Ophians ready for publication, write a piece on the Naassenes, and get going on my next book called

The Ancient New Age: Gnostic Spirituality and the Beginnings of Christianity.

The biggest news for me is that my book

Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter

is slated to come off the presses at the end of September.  I am thrilled that this project is on its way to a physical reality with a book jacket and all that!

Advanced copies were sent to readers and here is some of the feedback the book received:

The near-programmatic downgrading and degrading of women is one of the most shameful aspect of traditional Christianity.  In this powerful book, DeConick rejects conventional theological and hermeneutical attempts to soften the absence of the divine and human female by challenging head-on the vilification of women and the othering of their bodies in early Christianity.  This bold discussion makes for uncomfortable but essential reading - and rightly so.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible, University of Exeter, UK.

more advanced reviews of the book in my next post...

Holy Misogyny cover

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I just received the cover art for my new book,

Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter

. I am very excited about the book and its name change. I am lucky to have a great editor who goes to bat for me. Name changes can be hard to do at this late stage, but this new name came to me in a moment of epiphany and it really encapsulates what the book is about. The book is supposed to be published in September.

Here is the publisher's description of the book:

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In Holy Misogyny, bible scholar April DeConick wants real answers to the questions that are rarely whispered from the pulpits of the contemporary Christian churches.Why is God male?Why are women associated with sin?Why can’t women be priests? Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the early Christian literature, she seeks to understand the conflicts over sex and gender in the early church – what they were and what was at stake.She explains how these ancient conflicts have shaped contemporary Christianity and its promotion of male exclusivity and superiority in terms of God, church leadership, and the bed.

DeConick’s detective work uncovers old aspects of Christianity before later doctrines and dogmas were imposed upon the churches, and the earlier teachings about the female were distorted.Holy Misogyny shows how the female was systematically erased from the Christian tradition, and why. She concludes that the distortion and erasure of the female is the result of ancient misogyny made divine writ, a holy misogyny that remains with us today.

The Codex Judas Papers

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What to my wondering eyes should appear but

The Codex Judas Papers

! It arrived this morning in my mailbox, all 650 pages of it, and remarkably published in the year after the Codex Judas Congress had convened here at Rice University (March 13-16, 2008).

April DeConick (ed.). 2009.

The Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13-16, 2008.

Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 71. Leiden: Brill.

It is an expensive volume so you might need to check it out of your library. See my

earlier post about the book for ordering information

.

The papers in it are of the highest quality, and the volume represents a landmark in Gnostic studies and our understanding of the

Gospel of Judas

. Scholars address issues of identity and community, portraits of Judas, astrological lore, salvation and praxis, text and intertext, and manuscript matters. Although the contributions show a variety of interpretations of the Tchacos texts, several points of agreement emerge, including the assessment that the Codex belonged to early Christians affiliated with classic Gnostic or Sethian traditions who were in conflict with other Christians belonging to the apostolic or conventional church.

Contributors include (in order of their appearance): Alastair Logan, Karen King, Johannes van Oort, Marvin Meyer, Gesine Schenke Robinson, John Turner, Birger Pearson, Fernando Bermejo Rubio, Kevin Sullivan, Ismo Dunderberg, Pierluigi Piovanelli, April DeConick, Nicola Denzey Lewis, Grant Adamson, Niclas Förster, Franklin Trammell, Elaine Pagels, Bas van Os, Johanna Brankaer, Tage Petersen, Louis Painchaud, Serge Cazelais, Matteo Grosso, Lance Jenott, Simon Gathercole, Gregor Wurst, Wolf-Peter Funk, Antti Marjanen, James Robinson.