mati meyer

This article explores the major factors involved in why a sample of Messianic Jews have chosen this system of belief rather than stay within traditional Judaism or become Christian. Those interviewed are critical of their religious upbringing as Jews, although traditional aspects of Judaism remain important and relevant to their Messianic belief. The anti-Judaism present within the Church, both past and present, is their primary reason for not becoming Christian. The challenge that Messianic Jews present for both religions is how effective they are in helping people to live a faith perspective that has meaning in the complex, multi-faceted contemporary world.

Meyer suggests that gazing at images of the desirable female body portrayed in illuminated manuscripts might have invoked an amalgam of sexual desire and fears of emasculation in a presumed, otherwise unknown male readership, resulting in a mixed emotional response—pleasure coupled with shame and fear. This emotionally distressing experience, in its turn, probably entailed a feeling of anger, which led to a gendered ‘barbarism’—erasure, rubbing, and scrapping—that defaced the images in question. She suggests that these erasures reflect ingrained societal Byzantine notions that associated women with a disruptive and unsettling erotic power that was a threat to manliness and the consequential need to maintain the gender-hierarchical order.

Résumé/Abstract La représentation du péché de chair dans l'art byzantin, où un ou plusieurs serpents attaquent les organes génitaux féminins, a probablement fait son apparition dès le xe s. en tant qu'élément de la représentation des pécheurs dans la ...

Cover illustration: Huntress and male warrior depicted in a panel installed next to the conjectured eastern entrance, inside the basilical hall of the Nile Festival Building at Sepphoris. Photograph by G. Laron. With kind permission of Zeev Weiss, The Sepphoris Expedition, The Hebrew ...