Browse the “Museum of All”
Use the Entangled Traditions database to search for (para-)biblical characters by motif, date and place of origin, artist, and more!
The image of biblical figures in Judaism and Christianity: Discover their Entangled Traditions
The Bible serves as mutual ground that both Judaism and Christianity are emerging from, forming Entangled Traditions. It’s hard to exaggerate the role that biblical figures play in shaping Abrahamic cultures. The long and complicated cultural exchange between the sister religions shaped and re-shaped those figures over and over again according to various historical, social, and political parameters – and thereby created “Entangled Traditions”. In our project, we wish to stand on the imagined borderline between the two cultures and to think about the place and development of prominent biblical figures in both religions.
Trespassing imagined borders
We refer to this border as “imagined” since both are intertwined deeply and hard to separate from each other. Claiming for a clear-cut border between the two cultures reflects more than a real political border the political point of view of the people who draw it in the first place. Each scholar that deals with those two religions will draw a different borderline between them. Therefore, we are not interested in the border itself, but more in the concept of a border, and how it serves different political, cultural, and religious agendas.
A new approach: The “Museum of All”
The project would like to have a fresh and new look at prominent biblical figures from both cultures and track the unique paths that each of them went through in both cultures from Late Antiquity until our days. Complying only with representations of these figures in written texts obstructs the ability to perceive, describe and exegete their cultural meaning. This is where the idea of a “Museum of All” comes from: All sources are of equal rank here.
All sources count the same within “Entangled Traditions”
As scholars whose work is strongly informed by a cultural and literary perspective, our approach is to view culture as an integrative, heterogeneous, polyphonic textual whole. Rather than hierarchize sources and their respective degrees of authority, we view them as parts of equal standing. What interests us in this project is precisely the combination and integration of these different voices into a multi-vocal, complex cultural composition: It reflects the biblical character as it appears in many various contexts and communities (Callagher/Greenblatt 1999).
“Entangled Traditions” therefore utilizes the widest possible range of sources: Jewish and Christian canonical texts, Rabbinic texts, ancient Christian writings, Roman historians, medieval chronicles, Halachic texts, magical writings and artifacts, myths, novels, popular literature, children’s books, textbooks, essays, newspaper articles, posters, postcards, social media posts, works of art (mosaics, murals, panel paintings, and drawings), etc. We wish to subject all of these to a close and detailed reading and analysis, in order to weave details into a comprehensive image reflecting diverse and varied cultural, religious, and political contexts.
Entangled Traditions is part of the DFG funded Centre for Advanced Studies “Beyond Canon_” (Uni Regensburg)
Entangled Traditions@Beyond Canon
Universität Regensburg
Universitätsstraße 31
93053 Regensburg