Guy Stroumsa

Guy Stroumsa, 2005

Guy G. (Gedalyah) Stroumsa (in Hebrew: גי (גדליה) סטרומזה ; born 27 July 1948 in Paris) is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Emeritus Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.^[1][2][3]

Biography

Stroumsa was born to a Romaniote family from Greece. Both of his parents are holocaust survivors; his father survived Auschwitz and his mother Bergen-Belsen; they met at a D.P. camp in Marseille.^[4] Stroumsa grew up in Paris. He studied at the Lycée Voltaire and at the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale, where he was greatly influenced by its principal, Emmanuel Levinas, who taught him philosophy and Talmud. After studying economics and law in the University of Paris, he moved to Israel. For his B.A. (1969), he studied philosophy and Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was influenced by Professor Shlomo Pines. After his military service (1969–1972), he was a graduate student at Harvard University. After the submission of his doctoral dissertation (1978) which dealt with Gnostic mythology, he was appointed a Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University. In 1991 he was appointed to the Martin Buber Chair of Comparative Religion. Stroumsa was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Christianity (1999–2005). In 2009 he was appointed Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at Oxford University and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall; he retired in 2013.^[5]

Stroumsa received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich (2005). In 2008 he was elected a Member of the Israeli Academy of the Sciences and Humanities. He won an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2008. He is Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite.^[6][7]

He is married to Professor Sarah Stroumsa, a scholar of Arabic medieval thought, who currently serves at the Rector of the Hebrew University. They have two daughters.^[8]

Research

Guy Stroumsa’s research focuses on the dynamics of encounters between religious traditions and institutions in the Roman Empire and in Late Antiquity, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. He is currently involved in the crystallization of the Abrahamic traditions in late antiquity, as a background to Islam. He sees Gnosis, Manichaeism and Early Christianity as a unique laboratory for understanding the crystallization of new religions. In his doctoral dissertation, Stroumsa studied the development of Gnostic mythology, and demonstrated its roots in Judaism and biblical interpretation. In his studies, Stroumsa seeks in his work to cross traditional interdisciplinary boundaries in order to study religious phenomena from a comparative perspective. This approach permits him to understand the mechanisms behind the religious revolution of Late Antiquity, a period which saw the cessation of a number of widespread aspects of ancient religion (such as blood sacrifice) and the development of new systems, which stand at the basis of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.^[9]

Stroumsa is the author or editor of some twenty five books, and published more than a hundred articles.^[10]

Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Leiden: Brill, 1984)

argues that Gnostic mythology was rooted in the exegesis of the first chapters of Genesis. The first Gnostics may have been Jews or individuals on the outskirts of Judaism who used exegetical tools to contend with the problem of evil through mythologization.

Savoir et salut: traditions juives et tentations dualistes dans le christianisme ancien (Paris: Le Cerf, 1992)

Deals with the interactions of Jewish, Gnostic, Manichaean and Christian traditions in Late Antiquity. In chapter 3, Stroumsa discusses parallels between the character of Jesus in Christian texts and Metatron in Jewish texts, as mediating between the transcendent God and the cosmos. He locates the roots of 4th century Christian monasticism in earlier Manichaean (and originally Buddhist) monastic institutions and traditions. He shows how the idea of the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ led to the development of a more unified concept of personhood than that current in Greco-Roman philosophy.

Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 1996; second, augmented edition, 2005)

argues that ancient religions typically had an exoteric (public) tradition and an esoteric (secret) tradition. Stroumsa shows how the esoteric traditions of early Christianity, which had Jewish roots, developed into Gnostic mythologies and conceptions. These were later rejected by mainstream Christianity as incompatible with a religion seeking universal salvation. Relics of these traditions can be found in the vocabulary of early Christian mysticism.

Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1999)

Stroumsa argues that Christianity, as it developed from the first to the 4th centuries, was a new kind of religion, which combined new anthropological and cosmological conceptions.

The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; original in French)

Examines the shift from the religions of Antiquity to those of Late Antiquity through the prism of the cessation of sacrifices. For Stroumsa, that this transformation can be shown to have four main aspects: a new understanding of the person; the new central place of the book in religion; the cessation of the ritual of sacrifice itself; and the new role of the religious community.

A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

Is an epistemological and historiographical study, which sets out to examine the birth of the study of religion in the modern period. Stroumsa argues that the roots of the discipline of historical comparative of religion can be found in the 17th and 18th centuries, long before the establishment of academic chairs for Religious Studies in the second half of the 19th century. He locates its origins in the great geographical discoveries of the period, the birth of modern philology and the study of Eastern languages and religions, and the Wars of Religion following the Reformation, all of which led Protestant and Catholic scholars to recognize the limitations of Christianity.

Publications

Books authored

1. Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Nag Hammadi Studies 24; Leiden: Brill, 1984)
2. Savoir et salut: traditions juives et tentations dualistes dans le christianisme ancien (Paris: Le Cerf, 1992)
3. Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Studies in the History of Religions 70; Leiden: Brill, 1996) [revised and augmented paperback edition, 2005] = La sapienza nascosta: Tradizioni esoteriche e radici del misticismo cristiano (Rome: Arkeios, 2000)
4. Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999)
5. with Jacques Le Brun, Les juifs présentés aux chrétiens: textes de Léon de Modène et de Richard Simon, introduits et commentés (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1998)
6. La formazione dell'identita cristiana (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1999)
7. Kanon und Kultur: Zwei Studien zur Hermeneutik des antiken Christentums (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1999)
8. La fin du sacrifice : Mutations religieuses de l'antiquité tardive (Collège de France; Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005) = La fine del sacrificio: Le mutazioni religiose della tarda antichita (Turin: Einaudi, 2006) = The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009)
9. Le rire du Christ et autres essais sur le christianisme antique (Paris: Bayard, 2006)
10. A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Books edited

1. With Sh. Shaked and D. Shulman: Gilgul: Transformations, Revolutions and Permanence in the History of Religions, in Honor of R. J. Z. Werblowsky (Suppl. to Numen 50; Leiden: Brill, 1987)
2. With Sh. Shaked and I. Gruenwald: Messiah and Christos: Studies in the Jewish Origins of Christianity, presented to David Flusser at the Occasion of his Seventy Fifth Birthday (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992)
3. With O. Limor: Contra Judaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics Between Christians and Jews (Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism: Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck; 1995)
4. With H. G. Kippenberg: Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions (Studies in the History of Religions 65; Leiden: Brill, 1995)
5. Shlomo Pines, Studies in the History of Religion (The Collected Works of Shlomo Piines, volume IV; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996), edited by Guy G. Stroumsa
6. With G. Stanton: Tolerance and Intolerance in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1998; Paperback edition, Cambridge, 2008)
7. With A. Kofsky: Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, 1st.-15th century (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi; 1998)
8. With A. Baumgarten and J. Assmann, Soul, Self, Body in Religious Experience: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1998)
9. With D. Shulman: Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
10. With J. Assmann, Transforming the Inner Self in Ancient Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1999)
11. With D. Shulman, Self and Self Transformation in the History of Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Paperback edition, Oxford, 2002)
12. With Jan Assmann, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2002), "Das 17. Jahrhundert und die Ursprünge der Religionsgeschichte" (Munich, Leipzig: Saur)
13. With M. Finkelberg, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, 2; Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003)
14. With O. Limor, Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)
15. Gershom Scholem and Morton Smith: Correspondence, 1945-1982 (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture; Leiden: Brill, 2008)
16. With Markus Bockmuehl, Paradise in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Views (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
17. with R. Bonfil, O. Irshai and R. Talgam, eds., Jews of Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture: Leiden: Brill, 2011)

Stroumsa is also the author of about 120 scholarly articles.

References