Subject: Re: Andrew Welburn's scholarship
From: Horace Jeffery Hodges (jefferyhodges@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Sep 26 2004 - 18:59:17 EDT
Dierk van den Berg <haGalil@gmx.net> wrote: >>What about Manfred Clauss_The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries_Routledge 2001? Different to Ulansey, Clauss handles Tarsos with much more caution concerning Plutarch's reference to Cilician pirates (allied with Mithradates of Pontus) in Vit.Pomp 24.5, pointing merely to coins of the mid 3rd c CE (!) dedicated to Mithras. A progress in research or a 'back to the future'?<< I don't know. What about it? Plutarch is not central to Ulansey's primary argument, so I'm not sure how Clauss's arguments on this point affect Ulansey's thesis. I have read Ulansey but not Clauss. My understanding is that Clauss is a critic of Ulansey, but whether or not he accepts of rejects Ulansey's main point about Mithraism using Hipparchus's discovery of the precession of the equinoxes to demonstrate the power of Mithra to shift the cosmos on its polar axes, I do not know. I've published an article if Vig. Chr. (1997) on a Gnostic use of Hipparchus's discovery, so I'm interested in this issue, but I'm not up on the scholarship. Anyway, if your point is that Welburn would need to have dealt with all of the major recent scholarship on Mithraism, then I agree. If Welburn hasn't treated Clauss, then his scholarship is flawed. Is that what you were asking about? Jeffery Hodges ===== University Degrees: Ph.D., History, U.C. Berkeley (Doctoral Thesis: "Food as Synecdoche in John's Gospel and Gnostic Texts") M.A., History of Science, U.C. Berkeley B.A., English Language and Literature, Baylor University Email Address: jefferyhodges@yahoo.com Office Address: Assistant Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges Department of English Language and Literature Korea University 136-701 Anam-dong, Seongbuk-gu Seoul South Korea Home Address: Dr. Sun-Ae Hwang and Dr. Horace Jeffery Hodges Seo-Dong 125-2 Shin-Dong-A, Apt. 102-709 447-710 Kyunggido, Osan-City South Korea
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