F.E. PETERS: Sibling Rivalry
New York is known worldwide as a melting pot, a meeting place for people from all backgrounds and cultures, the majority of whom represent the world's three great monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Native New Yorker F.E. Peters might not be able to say how these "sibling" religions will be able to get along better than they currently do, but the historian of comparative religion can certainly offer insight into why three branches of a single family are so different and so often at odds.
Raised Roman Catholic, Peters entered the seminary at age 18 and spent nine years as a Jesuit. But he soon realized that his calling was in the classroom, not the priesthood. Returning to school, Peters earned his doctorate in Islamic studies at Princeton. He arrived to teach at New York University in 1961, and he is still there, as a professor of Middle Eastern studies, history and religion.
Peters is an expert in comparative religion, studying Judaism, Christianity and Islam throughout his long career. His two-volume set The Monotheists: Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conflict and Competition (Princeton, Nov.) looks at the history of the three religions and how they relate to each other. "When you get down to Jews, Christians and Muslims, you're talking about living issues, sibling issues," says Peters. "They care about each other in very real ways. They fight over real estate. They certainly fight about ideologies."
Peters argues that an obstacle to positive relations between Muslims and their Jewish and Christian brethren is that Islam has not experienced the secularizing influences of Western culture as Judaism and Christianity have during their longer times in America. "Judaism and Christianity have been sort of tamed by the secular state," Peters says, adding that the secularization of the two faiths was an extremely painful process for them both. "Islam hasn't grown up in those circumstances."
Part of the reason for this, he says, is that the historical foundation of Islam, the life of the prophet Muhammad, is connected with church-state unity. Muhammad was a general and political leader in Medina as well as the leader of the religious community.
Peters, who has studied the classical texts of the three faiths extensively and written about the history of Mecca, says that the "cross purposes" of trying to connect Judaism and Christianity with a religion that historically eschews church-state separation makes the current era "dangerous." "We are secular here in the West, fighting a secular war against people who are fighting a holy war," he says.
Princeton University Press, which has published Peters's work since 1982, is calling the two-volume set a "magnum opus." Following up on the starred review from PW (Sept. 29) the press is hoping to launch Peters on a radio and television tour to promote the book. "This is his life work," says Christian Purdy, who is the publicity director for the press. "For us it is the core of our religion list for the fall season."
The press believes that Peters's strength is his ability to write both accessibly and non-judgmentally. "In this day and age when there is so much specialization going on, he has the ability to write in crystal clear prose that makes his work accessible to scholars and to the general public," says Brigitta van Rheinberg, a senior history editor currently working with Peters on a new edition of his first comparative book for Princeton, Children of Abraham, originally published in 1984 and due out next fall. —Holly Lebowitz Rossi
WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: Bound to the Bible
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has spent most of his 70 years in academic environments, but there's something special about Cambridge University, where he has enjoyed six sabbaticals. "There's lots of flowers and sherry and music and tea; it's a very comfortable place to do the work," says Brueggemann, who is in Cambridge through December writing a book on Solomon. Besides the amenities, he says, there are 35 to 40 other visiting scholars rooming in his hall.
"There are lots of people from Europe and a goodly number from Asia," he notes. "It makes for good conversation. I talked to a man from Zurich the other day who is working on the pollution problem. And in my own field, I met a woman from Israel who works in the Hebrew Bible. I'd known her work for a long time, but it was good to get to know her personally."
Brueggemann estimates that he's written as many as 60 books. The most recent, Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination (Westminster John Knox Press, Oct.), was supposed to be "a retirement project, but I got it done a little ahead of time," he says. "It's really an introduction to the idea that the Old Testament isn't all about history but really is about theological interpretation." For example, in taking a historical tack to studying Jeremiah, scholars will try to determine what the prophet actually said in the book and what are later additions not from him. "But if you ask a canonical question, you ask it without reference to the person of Jeremiah," Brueggemann explains. "What is the theological shape of this book, and what kind of theological statement is it making by being put together the way it was put together?"
Traditionally, he says, "Scholarship was interested in historical questions. But canon is a theological question. There are still a lot of scholars who are very suspicious of the idea of canon." But, Brueggemann adds with a smile in his voice, "I'm not an objective scholar. I'm a scholar for the church, so I don't mind asking theological questions."
Westminster John Knox believes the book can become the standard Old Testament introductory textbook at seminaries. "Professors wanted to see more textbooks out of us, and then we bring one out by someone with Brueggemann's stature and name recognition," says Bill Falvey, director of product management. "So we're confident that this will be one of our bestselling books in years."
Brueggemann grew up like many an American boy in the mid-20th century, in his case, in rural Blackburn, Mo. His early jobs were baling hay and pumping gas, and his hobbies were playing basketball and reading books. The latter usually involved the Bible and Christian texts because of the study demands of his father, who was pastor of St. Paul's Evangelical and Reformed Church. For his son's confirmation verse, his father chose Psalm 119:105: "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." Fittingly, Confirmation Day was when Brueggemann became permanently "bound" to the Bible.
Brueggemann graduated from Elmhurst College in 1951; the distinguished theologian H. Richard Niebuhr was the commencement speaker. He studied at Eden Theological Seminary near St. Louis, completed his doctoral work at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where Niebuhr served on the faculty; and was ordained a minister in the United Church of Christ. He taught at Eden for 25 years and then at Columbia. And he wrote and wrote and wrote.
"My wife says I've written too many books," says Brueggemann, a self-described workaholic who still teaches a full load at Columbia Theological Seminary, in Decatur, Ga. "The only one that really interests me is the one I'm working on." —Dale Buss
STEPHANIE WELLEN LEVINE: In Step with Hasidic Girls
When Stephanie Wellen Levine was growing up in a liberal, non-observant Jewish family, she found herself "simultaneously fascinated by and jealous of religious faith." She sought every opportunity to talk to religious people about their beliefs, quizzing them about their commitments and experiences. "I would love to believe," says Levine, who now teaches English at Tufts University. "But I've never been able to convince myself."
Levine's quest for religious understanding led her to study Hasidism in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, because in addition to her religious curiosity, she also wanted to know if there was any truth to the stereotype that in Hasidic communities, "women are treated like garbage." Her new book, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls (NYU Press, Nov.), might shake up that image forever. Levine argues that on the contrary, Hasidic girls are often more confident, frolicsome and assertive than their mainstream teenage counterparts, exhibiting a real vibrancy and lack of inhibition.
"I found that a gender-segregated environment can be very great for some girls," Levine says. "There can be a real tendency [in mainstream education] for boys to take the lead in conversation, but in Crown Heights that couldn't happen because there were no boys around. And while these girls had many of the same body issues as girls in secular society, I would say that the problem is a little less invasive. These girls don't have boys in their lives who are constantly judging them, or the competition to get boyfriends." She adds, "The Lubavitcher Hasidim have a notion that every aspect of a person—physical, intellectual, whatever—is from God and exists for a reason. Even acne has a spiritual purpose, so at a certain level that might help them feel more at peace with their appearance."
To do her research, Levine wanted to follow the laws of the ultra-Orthodox as much as possible, so she lived in Crown Heights for a year and traded in her sweatshirts and jeans for modest long skirts that swished around her ankles. Sometimes she would forget a rule and be "mortified"—like when she served herself bread before prayers at table, or arrived at Shabbos lunch with wet hair, clearly having violated the ban on showering on the Sabbath. "The strangeness of observance never went away," she reflects, "but it was a strangeness that evolved into a sort of beauty. God was in the air at all times."
Levine interviewed 32 girls, seven of whom are profiled in the book. They run the whole spectrum of Lubavitcher observance: one is so religious and mystical that she's regarded as something of an oddball by her peers, while another works as a waitress in a strip club. Venturing into a strip club to follow this girl and her friends was certainly an unexpected research experience for Levine, who had "never seen such overt, blatant sexuality in my whole life. It was so ironic to be having that experience under the auspices of studying the Hasidim!"
Levine's book has met with early critical acclaim—an agent contacted her within days of seeing a starred review in PW (Sept. 29) and has an initial print run of 10,000 copies, which is about two to three times the normal size for an academic book by a first-time author. NYU Press editor Jennifer Hammer says the publisher had initially planned on a "somewhat smaller print run" but upped the number due to strong response to pre-publication promotions. She expects that the book will be of interest to "a broad spectrum of readers," including those interested in adolescence and girls' development, as well as those wanting a window into Hasidic life.
For her part, Levine is publicizing the book aggressively, speaking at the Miami Book Fair, the 92nd St. Y in New York City, the Harvard Coop in Cambridge, and at various synagogues in the Boston and New York metropolitan areas.
She is also casting an eye toward her next project. "I've always been very intrigued by convents and in particular by the difference between the cloister and mainstream life," she explains. She's not yet sure if her next book will be fiction or nonfiction, but one thing is certain: it will continue the theme of religious exploration. "Whether I'm looking at real people or fictional characters, I'll focus on people in religious groups who are seeking." —Jana Riess
KAREN KING: Contrary Mary
When Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code became a national bestseller, Karen King's telephone started ringing. Journalists all over the country wanted to know why the novel was such a raging success, and what truth, if any, a real religion scholar would find in its tale of early Christian feminism and the alleged conspiracies of the Catholic Church.
Not a lot, it turns out. King, the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University in the Divinity School, thought that the book was entertaining and will make a great movie. But "it's best read as fiction," she cautions. "There are a lot of historical difficulties. For example, there is no evidence in the early materials that Mary Magdalene and Jesus had a child." Although there are hints in the Gospel of Philip that Jesus used to kiss Mary on the mouth, King says that because of a lacuna in the text, the word "mouth" may very well mean something else, and in any case, the kiss probably is a metaphor for the transmission of knowledge.
Despite her historical concerns about the novel, she appreciates the attention it has brought to her field of early Christianity and gnosticism. "It's been a great boon to academic studies of Mary Magdalene and these ancient texts, and for that I'm very grateful," she says. "Hopefully, it will lead people to read these materials for themselves, and to make their own judgments about their value."
That's where King's own book comes in. In The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Polebridge, Nov.), she explores the Gospel of Mary, the only gospel to have been written in the name of a woman. "We know the gospel was in circulation for three or four hundred years," King explains. "But then it fell into disuse. In the ancient world, you didn't need a conspiracy for things to be suppressed; you simply stopped copying them." She thinks that the gospel was lost because it advocated women's authority and leadership, and because it became associated with theological teachings that came to be seen as heretical. "It argues for the eternity of the soul, rather than the resurrection of flesh. The Gospel of Mary emphasizes the interior teaching, the gospel within. That eventually became subordinated to a theology of sin and atonement as the church developed."
King first became interested in gnostic texts while an undergraduate at the University of Montana. The quest for understanding led her to undertake doctoral work at Brown University and to research her dissertation in Berlin in 1982 and 1983. Berlin was a repository for many of the Nag Hammadi materials, so King honed her Coptic skills and spent many hours having her papers examined at the checkpoint between West Berlin, where she was living, and East Berlin, where her adviser worked. All the time she was there, she says, she never realized that the original manuscript of the Gospel of Mary was in the city. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the gospel was moved from the east to the west and became available for scholarly research.
The book is being released by Polebridge Press, the publishing arm of the Westar Institute (of Jesus Seminar fame), which will do an initial print run of 6,000 copies, the largest in the press's history. Because of interest trickling down from The Da Vinci Code, says Polebridge chief operating officer Char Matejovsky, advance orders have been very strong. "Barnes & Noble took a big order, and they told us they did that because of The Da Vinci Code," Matejovsky says. Polebridge has hired an outside publicist for the first time ever, a move that is paying off in media exposure: The book was reviewed in the Arts & Ideas section of the New York Times on October 25, and King was featured in an hour-long ABC network special that aired in November.
King wonders whether all the publicity might result in the missing pages of the Gospel of Mary finally being recovered. "I don't know why not," she muses. "They should be intact; the codex was in incredibly good condition. It's a long shot, but who knows? Who would have thought the Berlin Wall would come down?" —Jana Riess
