Ekaputra Tupamahu

@ekaputrat.bsky.social

Associate Professor of New Testament | Author of Contesting Languages (OUP, 2022) | Indonesian | Reposts ≠ endorsements.

My book, _An Exotic Apocalypse: Revelation and the Appropriation of Judaism in the Roman Empire_, is officially forthcoming with Penn State University Press. It'll be the inaugural book in their _Religions in the Ancient Mediterranean_ series.

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"Enabled by the same functional advantages that once made it the medium of choice for universal digital communication, text becomes increasingly estranged from us as it is made into fuel for the models and machines." — @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/tex...

When Words Are No Longer for Us

Matthew Kirschenbaum announces the arrival of the “textpocalypse,” and considers what it will mean for liberal societies.

project-syndicate.org

Column: Dolly Parton inspired me with lyrics that chronicled the travails of women who endured sexism and unequal pay in the workplace. In her song “9 to 5,” Parton sang, “There’s a better life, and you think about it, don’t you?” I did.

Column | The financial (and life) lessons I learned from Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’

Facing workplace sexism and bias, Dolly Parton’s message of resilience offers the strength to keep fighting for your worth.

washingtonpost.com

I am very tired of academics and feel compelled to spend the day looking at cool manuscripts. The undertext here is John 14–15 in Christian Palestinian Aramaic (~700 CE), a dialect similar to Jewish Palestinian Aramaic written in a script resembling Syriac. The overtext is Hebrew poetry copied ~900.

Brownish parchment manuscript folio with several sections torn from the edges, sitting on a blue background. There are about 30 lines of Hebrew text in black ink, which appear upside-down from this perspective. Behind the Hebrew is about 20 lines of light-brown, much-faded Christian Palestinian Aramaic text in 2 columns. The classmark is CUL T-S 16.98 (additional images here: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-00016-00098/1)Multispectral image photograph of the same manuscript from the previous image. The Hebrew text now appears bright teal, clearly distinct from the Aramaic text behind it, which is now dark purple. The background looks grey.

I’m really pleased to receive the news that I’ve been elected as a full member of the Society for New Testament Studies (SNTS). Many thanks to Jostein Ådna and Tat-siong Benny Liew for writing letters of nomination on my behalf.

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There is a Eurocentric denialism maybe rooted in an original Greek sense of inferiority: Egyptians and Hittites produced whole written literatures while Greek peoples were still nonliterate. They left prose annals and memorial inscriptions where Greek bards left us beautiful, myth-saturated poetry.

Film criticism aside, Emily Wilson's review of the Odyssey concerned me because it misrepresents Late Bronze Age history and reinforces an old Eurocentric pattern of dismissing the experiences--and reality--of ancient peoples other than the Greeks.

Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ – a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture. ‘Our civilisation is under attack,’ Penelope wails. Odysseus comforts her by saying that ‘Bronze Age civilisation’, including literacy, will rise again from the ashes. The current consensus, as Nolan clearly knows, is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’, and that the Greek-speaking world’s shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age was caused by a range of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest. Nolan uses these competing historical theories to create a characteristic narrative twist about the identity of ‘the sea peoples’, which I will not spoil, though you can probably guess it.