The Political Issue of the Ascension of Isaiah: A Response to Enrico Norelli
Enrico Norelli argued in 2003 that the references to martyrdom in the Ascension of Isaiah are symbolic rather than actual. This article challenges his reliance on the Mishnah in support of the assertion that Isaiah dies as a martyr in the contest between true and false prophecy in the second-century church. It argues that the progress of thought in chs. 1–5 suggests that martyrdom is more obviously an actual and recent feature of the authors’ experience than a merely symbolic entity. The martyrdom of Ignatius is further considered in this context. This result is the insistence that the Ascension of Isaiah has a strong ‘political’ dimension in both of its halves. Such evidence must be inserted into the evaluation of the emerging Christian movement, not least in its response to both Jews and the Romans as factors external to, yet bearing on, the church, at the time of writing.
Only the Third Heaven?: 2 Corinthians 12.1-10 and Heavenly Ascent
CHAPTER 1 General Introduction PART 1: Texts of Heavenly Ascent CHAPTER 2 Introduction: Heavenly Ascent Texts: A History of Scholarship CHAPTER 3 Jewish Apocalyptic Texts Pre-70 AD CHAPTER 4 Jewish Apocalyptic Texts Post-70 AD. CHAPTER 5 The New Testament CHAPTER 6 Post-Biblical Early Christian Apocalypses CHAPTER 7 The Nag Hammadi Codices CHAPTER 8 The Hekhalot Literature CHAPTER 9 Conclusions to Part One PART 2: 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 and Heavenly Ascent CHAPTER 10 2 Corinthians 12: 1-10 as a Heavenly Ascent CHAPTER 11 2 Corinthians 12.1-10 as a Subversion of the Heavenly Ascent CHAPTER 12 General Conclusions.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.