The Color Purple

2021

I'm a Black liberation theologian, so don't be surprised if I say things that will upset you. " (p. 97) This may seem an odd sentence to start a book review with, but it is exactly what Anthony Reddie, Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture (Regent's Park College, University of Oxford), and Extraordinary Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of South Africa, achieves in his book. Why that is a good thing will, I hope, have become evident by the end of this review. This is the second edition of his book, which has been revised and updated, and includes a new afterword on Black Lives Matter. The book is divided into six chapters of roughly equal length. There are a few explanatory footnotes scattered throughout the chapters, and a lot more, quite well-furnished endnotes. There is also a short index, but a bibliography, which would have been useful, is missing. While not overly complicated, Reddie's style of writing is, nonetheless, quite scholarly and can, at times, be demanding. That being said, Reddie intends the book to be "a resource for ministers, local preachers, lay readers and many others who are engaged in some form of leadership role in the Church" (p. xi), and I think he has succeeded in this. Reddie writes from a British Methodist background, but that does not mean the book has nothing to say to Seventh-day Adventists, regardless of which side of the Atlantic we may find ourselves. On the contrary, given our own history of White Eurocentredness that has an effect to this day, the issues raised and tackled in this book are very relevant indeed. One may be tempted to skim the introduction or skip it altogether. However, I found it essential reading, because I, along with probably many readers of this review, am a White European, and it was important to first read Red-

chpt 6 of In the Spirit During the Passion, Christ is mocked by Roman soldiers who “platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on a purple robe, and Said, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and they smote him a purple robe” (John 19:2-3). This episode, like the other cruel events in which it figures, has suggested to some that Christ was a powerless and pathetic figure. That, for example, is certainly how Nietzsche saw the Crucified One. However, in answer to Pilate’s warning (“knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?”), Christ’s reply indicates the presence of a paradoxical power: “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee has the greater sin” (John 19:11). This chapter challenges the modern habit of equating power with self-assertion, coercion, and intimidation. What, we must ask, does true power involve if Christ, relinquishing any pretension of assertion, exemplifies it? Following Jean-Yves Lacoste’s analysis of a kenotic existence, this chapter shows how power consists in the humility of self-emptying. Rembrandt’s Christ Before Pilate and the People, Pieter Frasz de Grebber’s Christ at the Column, and Titian’s Ecce Homo serve as illustrations.

Every age crystallizes its own set of morals and the codified morals fermented into finery of religion. The basic source even for history is literature. One has to understand that the early literature has influenced the formation of religions. All religions greatly influenced subsequent literature and the holy Bible is no exception. In this paper we are trying to make an attempt to highlight how the earlier tragedies influenced the tragedy of Jesus or salvation of Jesus and how the later tragedies were influenced by the New Testament. The purpose of religion and literature is to assuage the inner turmoil and to soften the ruffled feathers of human emotions.

Paper given at 'The State Between: Liminality, Transition and Transformation in Late Antiquity and Byzantium', 22nd International Graduate Conference of the Oxford University Byzantine Society, University of Oxford, 29 February 2020. Presented in extended form as: ‘Without Theophany in Monochrome? Investigating “Theology in Colour” in 8th-Century Palestine’, The Cambridge Graduate Early Medieval Seminar, University of Cambridge, 4 March 2021.

Language and Semiotic Studies

The paper describes and analyzes the full presence of blue in the Old Testament – in Hebrew and translations. The interdisciplinary approach includes the treatment of color as a cultural unit according to of Eco’s idea, lexical and contextual semantics, distinguishing visual and verbal color languages. The interface between verbal and visual color language is the prototype. Prototypes are universal natural visual objects – sky, sea, fire, blood, the sun at noon, all plants, light, milk, snow, darkness, and coal and have evolved into cultural units (Eco 1996 [1985]) in all cultures and languages. Basic Color Terms (BCT – blue), Prototype Terms (PT – sky and sea), Rivals Terms of prototypes (RT – sapphire, blue skins), Terms for Basic Features of the Prototypes (TBFP – breadth, infinite, boundless) are examined. Translation is a criterion for semiotic value, cultural and linguistic context. Norm of Test of Free Word-Associations is a source of non-color (secondary) meanings of verbal ...

2022

The Bible is one of the books that has aroused the most interest throughout history to the present day. However, there is one topic that has mostly been neglected and which today constitutes one of the most emblematic elements of the visual culture in which we live immersed: the language of colour. Colour is present in the biblical text from its beginning to its end, but it has hardly been studied, and we appear to have forgotten that the detailed study of the colour terms in the Bible is essential to understanding the use and symbolism that the language of colour has acquired in the literature that has forged European culture and art. The objective of the present study is to provide the modern reader with the meaning of colour terms of the lexical families related to the green tonality in order to determine whether they denote only color and, if so, what is the coloration expressed, or whether, together with the chromatic denotation, another reality inseparable from colour underlies/along with the chromatic denotation, there is another underlying reality that is inseparable from colour. We will study the symbolism that/which underpins some of these colour terms, and which European culture has inherited. This lexicographical study requires a methodology that allows us to approach colour not in accordance with our modern and abstract concept of colour, but with the concept of the ancient civilations. This is why the concept of colour that emerges from each of the versions of the Bible is studied and compared with that found in theoretical reflection in both Greek and Latin. Colour thus emerges as a concrete reality, visible on the surface of objects, reflecting in many cases, not an intrinsic quality, but their state. This concept has a reflection in the biblical languages, since the terms of colour always describe an entity (in this sense one can say that they are embodied) and include within them a wide chromatic spectrum, that is, they are mostly polysemic. Structuralism through the componential analysis, although providing interesting contributions, had at the same time serious shortcomings when it came to the study of colour. These were addressed through the theoretical framework provided by cognitive linguistics and some of its tools such as: cognitive domains, metonymy and metaphor. Our study, then, is one of the first to apply some of the contributions of cognitive linguistics to lexicography in general, and particularly with reference to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Bible. A further novel contribution of this research is that the meaning is expressed through a definition and not through a list of possible colour terms as happens in dictionaries or in studies referring to colour in antiquity. The definition allows us to delve deeper and discover new nuances that enrich the understanding of colour in the three great civilizations involved in our study: Israel, Greece and Rome.

Postscripts, 2023

Postscripts 14.1 (2023) 95–128. In his letters to Roman aristocratic women about the proper use of scripture, Jerome dismissed purple makeup and any adornment of books with luxurious materials as wasteful distraction from the content of the text. He contrasts makeup and precious clothing with the textual correctness of his scholarly emended manuscripts and with corporal mortification and ascetic practices. Jerome’s dismissal of the materiality and sensuality of books goes hand in hand with a binary gender model that associates the philological work upon the text and the renunciation of its adornment with male scholarship. In order for women to become equal to men through the study of scripture, Jerome extols the performance of a tex-tual asceticism that suppresses the makeup of books and of female bodies alike. His makeup criticism is part of a larger discourse that expresses a persistent fear of a sensual engagement with the materiality of scripture in binary gender stereotypes. A close reading of the purple metaphors employed by Jerome reveals their roots in the rhetorical appraisal of elo-quence and poetic language precisely through the materiality of the text.

Sefarad. Revista de Estudios Hebraicos y Sefardíes, 2017

The study of color allows us to make assumptions about the correlation (and no correlation) between psychological, social, symbolic elements and language itself. And the Hebrew Bible does not escape from this. With regard to the magnitude of this project, this paper reflects the first stage of my work studying colors in the Masoretic text, specifically on לָבָן, term commonly translated as “white”. In addition, there are various verbal forms containing the verbal root לבן. If we compare לָבָן with the rest of terms of color, we find that this is the most common of them all, which makes it to be considered a primary and widely documented term. But its antiquity is also proof of its opacity. A detailed reading of לָבָן reinforces the idea that the translation of this term as “white” is incomplete. It actually refers to something whose chromatism is low but bright at the same time. Such “vague nature” is what makes לָבָן so present throughout the Hebrew Bible. This paper aims to provide a complete picture of the לָבָן in the Hebrew Bible, establishing the sensory chromatic perception of the term.

Salana, 2022

In this contribution, I offer a semiotic study of seven terms for the color red in the Hebrew Bible. I contend that such an approach allows us to recognize that the terms convey far more than mere hues in that they appear in texts that cluster references to stigmatized sexual behavior and blood and/or that involve implicitly bloody contexts. I first examine eleven texts in which the cluster appears, and then sixteen more that employ the cluster in more subtle ways. Afterwards, I offer an explanation for the cluster by examining the sympathetic and performative aspects of color in the wider Near East – specifically, how red, as the color of blood, encodes notions of protection, fertility, and defilement. Finally, I demonstrate how recognizing this code sheds light on a number of other biblical texts.