New in 2023!
Angela Kim Harkins. An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas: The Book of Visions and its Role in Moral Formation. Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture Series. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2023. ISBN: 9781800503274
This book uses cognitive literary theory, specifically the approach known as enactive reading, to investigate why a work that was exceedingly popular among readers in antiquity has failed to receive the same reception by modern scholars. The study focuses on the first section of the Shepherd known as the Book of Visions, which narrates Hermas’s visionary experiences in first-person voice.
The book argues that enactive reading can help to generate immersive experiences of Hermas’s visions and explain the success and appeal of the Book of visions among ancient readers. Cognitive approaches also highlight how modern scholars trained to read apocalypses ‘against the grain’ to search for historical or theological information fail to notice and appreciate the very things that made apocalypses engaging and entertaining to a broad range of ancient readers and hearers.
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Edited Volume 2022
Angela Kim Harkins and Harry O. Maier (ed.). Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas. Ekstasis 10. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. ISBN: 9783110780741
The Shepherd of Hermas is one of the oldest and most well-attested Christian works. Its popularity arguably exceeded that of the canonical Gospels. Many early Christian thinkers regarded the Shepherd as authoritative and cited it in their own writings, even though its status as Scripture was controversial. This volume treats religious experience in the Shepherd, a topic that has received little scholarly attention. It complements a growing body of literature that explores the Shepherd from various social-historical perspectives.
Leading scholars approach it from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including critical literary theory, anthropology, cognitive science, enactivism, affect theory, gender studies, intersectionality, and text reception: Giovanni Bazzana, Jung Hyun Choi, B. Diane Lipsett, Harry O. Maier, Luca Arcari, Angela Kim Harkins, Aldo Tagliabue, Jason Combs, Brittany Wilson, Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, and Dan Batovici.
2022
Angela Kim Harkins. Experiencing Presence in the Second Temple Period: Revised and Updated Essays. Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology 111. Leuven: Peeters, 2022. ISBN 978-90-429-4706-1
This volume of updated and revised essays consolidates the work that I have done on religious experience in ancient Judaism and Christianity. Building on the text-centered work that characterizes much of Second Temple studies, these essays reintegrate ancient Jewish and Christian texts with various aspects of the flesh-and-blood experience of religion. In these essays, I aim to overcome the mind-body dualism that dominates the study of ancient texts by offering ways to imagine the phenomenological experience of these texts by ancient peoples. This volume includes a previously unpublished essay, “Sticky Emotions from Second Temple Prayers: A Study of Paul’s Grief in 2 Corinthians.”
2021 Edited Volume
Angela Kim Harkins and Barbara Schmitz (ed.). Selected Studies in Deuterocanonical Prayers. Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology series 104. Leuven: Peeters Press, 2021.
This collection brings together several essays that were part of a collaboration between the Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature and Prayer in Antiquity program units of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2018. The eleven essays in this volume offer various exegetical or theological insights into select prayers from the deuterocanonical books. Authors discuss the larger literary contexts for these prayers and also raise text-critical questions.
Contributions by Samuel E. Balentine (Union Presbyterian Seminary, USA), Matthew E. Gordley (Carlow University, USA), Bradley C. Gregory (Catholic University of America, USA), Beate Ego (Ruhr-University, Germany), Jennie Grillo (University of Notre Dame, USA), Noah Hacham (Hebrew University, Israel), Andrew R. Krause (Trinity Western University, Canada), Joseph P. Riordan, S.J. (Pontifical Biblical Institute, Italy), Barbara Schmitz (Julius-Maximilian University, Germany), Lawrence M. Wills (Stonehill University, USA), Werner Urbanz (Private University, Austria).
2018 Paperback; 2012 Hardback
Published as volume 3 in the Monograph Series, Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Berlin: De Gruyter Press, 2012, 2018.
In this monograph, I use performance studies and emotion studies to examine how the vivid imagery found in the ancient Jewish collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (Engl., Thanksgiving Hymns) were experienced. This project considers how the physical apparatus of the scroll guides the serial reading of these prayers. Critical spatial theory is used to argue that the prayers are arranged progressively with a general vertical orientation toward the heavens.
2015 Edited Volume on Religious Experience
Dead Sea Discoveries, Vol. 22.3 (2015)
This collection was edited with Mladen Popović and includes essays by Judith H. Newman, “Embodied Techniques: The Communal Formation of the Maskil’s Self,” Daniel K. Falk, “Liturgical Progression and the Experience of Transformation in Prayers from Qumran,” Angela Kim Harkins, “The Emotional Re-experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives found in the Admonition of the Damascus Document,” Maxine L. Grossman, “Religious Experience and the Discipline of Imagination; Tanya Luhrmann Meets Philo and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Rodney A. Werline, “Ritual, Order and the Construction of an Audience in 1 Enoch 1-36,” Michael E. Stone, “Enoch and the Fall of the Angels: Teaching and Status.”
2014 Edited Volume
Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautch, and John C. Endres, S.J. (ed.). The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014.
The essays in this collection were originally presented in the Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity Task Force of the CBA held during 2008-2012. Authors bring the ancient Jewish myths about the fallen angels into conversation with other biblical texts, situate them within their own Second Temple milieu, and investigate the reception of these angel traditions into the late antique period.
Contributors include: Leslie Baynes, Silviu N. Bunta, Joshua Ezra Burns, Randall D. Chestnut, Jeremy Corley, John C. Endres, S.J., Ida Fröhlich, Karina Martin Hogan, Scott M. Lewis, S.J., Eric F. Mason, Anathea Portier-Young, Chris Seeman, Kevin Sullivan, and Samuel Thomas.
2014 Edited Volume
Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautch, and John C. Endres, S.J. (ed.). The Fallen Angels Traditions: Second Temple Developments and Reception History. CBQMS 53. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Biblical Association, 2014.
This collection includes the following essays: James C. VanderKam, “Genesis 6:1-4 and the Angel Stories in the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36)”; Angela Kim Harkins, “Elements of the Fallen Angels Traditions in the Qumran Hodayot”; Todd R. Hanneken, “The Use of the Book of the Watchers in the Book of Jubilees”; Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “The Fall and Fate of Renegade Angels: The Intersection of Watchers Traditions and the Book of Revelation”; John C. Reeves, “The Watchers Traditions in Late Antiquity”; Silviu N. Bunta, “Dreamy Angels and Demonic Giants: The Watchers Traditions and the Origin of Evil in Early Christian Demonology”; Pheme Perkins, “The Watchers Traditions in the Apocryphon of John: Fallen Angels and the Arrogant Creator in Gnostic Mythology”; and Franklin T. Harkins, “The Magical Arts, Angelic Intercourse, and Giant Offspring: Echoes of Watchers Traditions in Medieval Scholastic Theology”.
2012 Festschrift for
James C. VanderKam
Eric F. Mason (general editor), Kelley Coblentz Bautch, Angela Kim Harkins, Daniel A. Machiela (ed.). A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam. Volume 2. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 153/11. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
This is the second of two volumes in honor of my teacher, James C. VanderKam, who was the John A. O’Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures (now emeritus), at the University of Notre Dame. It includes essays on Early Judaism (Gary A. Anderson, Hanan Eshel, Rob Kugler, Adela Yarbro Collins, Samuel I. Thomas, Tzvi Novick, Andrei A. Orlov, Martha Himmelfarb); Studies on Enoch and Jubilees (Ida Fröhlich, George W. E. Nickelsburg, Leslie W. Walck, Henryk Drawnel, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Daniel A. Machiela, John J. Collins, James Kugel, John C. Endres, Devorah Dimant, Leslie Baynes), and The New Testament and Early Christianity (George J. Brooke, John P. Meier, David E. June, Curt Niccum, Eric F. Mason, William Adler, Michael E. Stone).
My essay, “Who is the Teacher of the Teacher Hymns? Re-examining the Teacher Hymns Hypothesis Fifty Years Later,” (pp. 449-67) was published in the section on Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls that was published in volume 1. In this essay, I challenge the long-standing practice of reading the Thanksgiving Hymns historically as evidence for the Teacher of Righteousness.