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Biography
B.A., summa cum laude, Illinois Wesleyan University 2003; M.A., Columbia University 2005; M.Phil., Columbia University 2007.
Jared Calaway is a Ph.D. candidate in the subfield of the History of Religions in Late Antiquity in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His general interests include the interaction and interrelationship between various religious groups and ideas in the ancient Mediterranean, particularly but not exclusively between Jews and Christians. Among these interactive ideas, he is currently especially interested in the use and conceptions of the time and space among ancient groups as can be found in architecture, liturgy, apocalypticism, and mysticism. He also has a strong interest in ancient Coptic literature, such as the Nag Hammadi Library, Berlin Codex, and most recently the Tchacos Codex (most famous for its copy of the Gospel of Judas). In this connection, he has been working on a co-written translation and introduction to the Coptic text, The Thunder: Perfect Mind. In addition, he has organized a graduate student conference dedicated to methodological, theoretical, and, especially, institutional issues in the study of religion/s, entitled, “Instituting Religion: Investigating Trajectories of the Study of Religion in Institutions of Higher Education” (April 2008). He is also a participating member of the ongoing Society of Biblical Literature Seminar, The New Testament Mysticism Project (www.newtestamentmysticism.com/).
His dissertation investigates the evolving interrelationship between the Sabbath and the Sanctuary in ancient Jewish and Christian literature, focusing upon how the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Masada and the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament both reconfigure this interrelationship in terms of heavenly realities, which becomes interwoven with increasingly complex implications for how interactions between divine beings and humans become conceptualized in terms of mimesis and exhortation. While the Sabbath/Sanctuary connection has long been noted in the Pentateuch and in Rabbinic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic sources all the way down to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous depiction of the Sabbath as a “palace in time,” no one has traced the developments of this relationship in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian sources and its transformation into a heavenly conception in this period. These ancient sources not only prefigure the ways in which the Sabbath and Sanctuary were reconceptualized in Kabbalah, but also has significant parallels and impact in late antique Christian circles, partially in the Nag Hammadi Literature and, perhaps most significantly for later generations, Augustine’s City of God.
Dissertation Title:
“Heavenly Sanctuary, Heavenly Sabbath”
Publications:
The Thunder: Perfect Mind (Polebridge Press, forthcoming) with Hal Taussig, Justin Lasser, Celene Lillie, and Maia Katrosits
Doctoral Fellowships:
Graduate Faculties Alumni Fellow 2007/2008, Morton Smith Fellow 2005/2006, 2006/2007, Faculty Fellow 2003/2004, 2004/2005
Language Proficiency:
Ancient Languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic
Modern Languages: German, French, Modern Hebrew
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