This book about receptions of Simon Magus uncovers further facets of one who was held to be the evil archetype of heretics. Ephraim Nissan and Alberto Ferreiro explore how Simon Magus has been represented in text, visual art, and music. Special attention is devoted to the late medieval Catalan painter Lluís Borrassà and the Italian librettist and musician Arrigo Boito. The tradition of Simon Magus' demonic flight, ending in his crashing down, first appears in the patristic literature. The book situates that flight typologically across cultures. Fascinating observations emerge, as the discussion spans flight of the wicked in rabbinic texts, flight and death of King Lear's father and a Soviet-era Buryat Buddhist monk, flight and doom of the fool in an early modern German broadsheet, and more. The book explains and moves beyond extant scholarly wisdom on how the polemic against Mani (the founder of Manichaeism) was tinged with hues of Simon Magus. The novelty of this book is that it shows that Simon Magus' receptions teach us a great deal about the contexts in which this archetype was deployed.&nbsp;

Receptions of Simon Magus as an Archetype of the Heretic

Literature & Fiction

Ferreiro, Alberto

Nissan, Ephraim

History & Criticism

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Counter-hagiography and counter-biography besmirch foundational figures held dear by different religious, political, or social groups. Such phenomena figure prominently in the history of religion and conflicts. For example, what we know of the Mazdakite revolution in pre-Islamic Iran/Iraq comes from revilers. The anti-Judaic polemicist from ninth-century Afghanistan and Iraq, Hiwi ("Snake"), was actually called &#7716;&#601;yy&#257;w&#299;&nbsp;(still a name among Iraqi Jews). The reputation of the great Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) thinker Moses Mendelssohn was damaged among the Orthodox by how Haskalah extremists portrayed him in their image. In 1869, a Genoan politician, Cesare Cabella, fulminated against Esther and Mordecai. In the Letter of Haman&nbsp;in rabbinic homiletics, Jews parodized hostile representations of their sacred history. Gerson Rosenzweig parroted in&nbsp;his 1892 talmudic-style Tractate America, anti-immigrant rhetoric from New York newspapers.&nbsp;Roman-age rabbis responded to claims about the protagonist of the Book of Joshua, "Joshua the Robber" as per a North African inscription early Byzantine Procopius of Caesarea alleged to have seen.

Besmirching the Denominational Enemy Within and Outside: Counter-history or Its Parody

History

Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan

Europe

Computer Applications for Handling Legal Evidence, Police Investigation and Case Argumentation (Law, Governance and Technology Series, 5)

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

Springer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nissan, Ephraim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nissan, Ephraim