Courtesy of Cliopatria, I just saw that one of the greatest historians of religion in our age, Jaroslav Pelikan, has passed away. Pelikan was the author of dozens of books and articles which influenced many students of religion, one of his last being Whose Bible Is It? : A Short History of the Scriptures (one can read an article about the book here). Pelikan criticized the "amnesia...of Christians about their Jewish heritage," and also mentioned that he and Abraham Joshua Heschel were planning on writing a book together about "the unrecognized intellectual exchange that has taken place in both directions between Judaism and Christianity as two children of Abraham, — as well as between both of them and the Greek and Latin traditions, as well as between both of them and Islam as the third child of Abraham — which only historical analysis can uncover," with Heschel's death in 1972 preventing it from coming to fruition. One can also read his short article "Jesus as Rabbi". You can also see here for the question as to why the death of this eminent historian has gone unnoticed by many major newspapers.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006)
Posted by
Menachem Mendel
at
10:10 AM
Subscribe to:
Comment Feed (RSS)
|