The GIF-seminar series  is a cooperative programme between the Topoi Excellence Cluster (to which Florentina Badalanova Geller has belonged since 2010) and a GIF (German-Israel Fund) Project, Visitors from Heaven, Visitors to Heaven: Judeo-Christian Encounters and the Last Lingua Sacra of Europe.  This is a joint project with the FU Berlin (Rainer Kampling and Florentina Badalanova Geller) and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Alexander Kulik and Moshe Taube, the latter of whom will also be a Topoi Fellow this year).The GIF seminar series follows on from a very successful seminar on the same topic last semester featuring Jewish and Christian examples of apocalyptic texts. The topics this semester will also include sources in Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic, in addition to Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic, as well as more in-depth discussion of esoteric texts.    

Program

25.10.2016
18:00 - 20:00
Leviathan: the Afterlife of a Monster in Judaism and Modern Culture?
Bob Becking
1.11.2016
18:00 - 20:00
Gnostic, Magic, or Christian? The Lives of the Great Angel Eleleth in Egyptian Literature of the First Millennium CE
Dylan Burns
8.11.2016
18:00 - 20:00
Is There a Heavenly Jerusalem in Early Islam?
Angelika Neuwirth
15.11.2016
18:00 - 20:00
The Idiosyncrasies of the Slavonic Version of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum
Moshe Taube
22.11.2016
18:00 - 20:00
Hans Jonas‘ Gnostic Visitations
Elad Lapidot
29.11.2016
18:00 - 20:00
Ancient Jewish Angelology in Byzantine Iconography and Its Re-Emergence in Medieval Jewish Mysticism
Klaus Herrmann
6.12.2016
18:00 - 20:00
The Angel Gabriel and Two Very Different Apocalypses: Book of Daniel and Third Baruch
Vadim Vitkovskiy
10.1.2017
18:00 - 20:00
The Quest of the Historical Metatron: Enoch or Jesus
Daniel Boyarin
17.1.2017
18:00 - 20:00
A Journey Beyond the Boundaries of Sensual Experience: The Coptic Dialogue on the Eighth and Ninth Sphere from Nag Hammadi Codex VI
Tonio Sebastian Richter
24.1.2017
18:00 - 20:00
Encounters in Eden: Stories of Prophets and Patriarchs in the Apocalypse of Paul
Emiliano Fiori
31.1.2017
18:00 - 20:00
Christ Descending in Disguise: an Origenist Idea in the Syriac Physiologus?
Adrian Pirtea
7.2.2017
18:00 - 20:00
Visiting the Heavens on Earth: on the Functions of Scholarly Representations of the Heavens
Sonja Brentjes
14.2.2017
18:00 - 20:00
Isaiah 14 and the Tradition of the Fallen Angel
Bernd U. Schipper