Sugya Schools of thought
Schools of thought
The through-lines of the corpus: each scholarly reading belongs to a camp. A school gathers the readings that share a thesis, across every passage they touch, with the lineage of which school answers which.
- Jewish-background / Wisdom-Logos 4 readings · 1 passage
Locates the Logos within Second-Temple Jewish thought -- the Aramaic Memra, Philonic Logos, and personified Wisdom (Prov 8, Sirach 24) -- denying a pagan-Greek origin.
Daniel Boyarin · Thomas H. Tobin · James D. G. Dunn · Martin Hengel
- Literary / exegetical-allegory 3 readings · 1 passage
Reads the pardes baraita as a literary-exegetical construction (an allegory of the dangers of esoteric exegesis, or of the rabbinic invention of the heretic) rather than a transcript of ecstatic ascent.
David J. Halperin · Peter Schäfer · Alon Goshen-Gottstein
- Comparative self-disclosure 3 readings · 1 passage
Reads the hidden-treasure motif comparatively (against Chinese / Taoist cosmology) and traces its origin and development as a doctrine of the love that motivates creation.
Toshihiko Izutsu · Sachiko Murata · Moeen Afnani
- Qualitative-grammar consensus 2 readings · 1 passage
Reads the anarthrous theos of John 1:1c as qualitative (the Logos shares the divine nature), against both the definite and indefinite extremes. The dominant modern grammatical reading.
Philip B. Harner · Daniel B. Wallace
- Divine-identity / Nicene 2 readings · 1 passage
Reads 'the Word was God' as including the Logos within the unique identity of the one God (the Creator-side of the Creator/creation divide); the through-line from Athanasius's homoousios to Bauckham's divine-identity Christology.
Arius vs. Athanasius (the Arian controversy) · Richard Bauckham
- Hymn-source redaction criticism 2 readings · 1 passage
Treats the Prologue as a pre-existing hymn reworked and prefaced to the Gospel; disputes whether the hymn was pre-Christian (Bultmann) or early-Christian and Johannine (Brown).
Rudolf Bultmann · Raymond E. Brown
- Experiential merkavah-ascent 2 readings · 1 passage
Reads the pardes baraita as a record of genuine, perilous visionary ascent; the marble / water-water test is an experiential trial within real merkavah-contemplation.
Gershom Scholem · Hai Gaon
- Late dating (Syriac / Islamic milieu) 2 readings · 1 passage
Dates the work to the 7th-9th c., in a Syriac-Christian or early-Islamic milieu of letter-speculation, against Scholem's late-antique dating.
Tzahi Weiss · Steven M. Wasserstrom
- Rational / numerical reading 2 readings · 1 passage
Reads the ten sefirot belimah as counting or dimensions in a rational, non-mystical work -- not yet the divine emanations of later Kabbalah.
Yehuda Liebes · Joseph Dan
- Early medieval commentary 2 readings · 1 passage
The 10th-c. Geonic and Byzantine-Italian commentators (Saadia, Donnolo) who first read SY philosophically/scientifically and brought it into the Hebrew literary tradition.
Saadia Gaon · Shabbetai Donnolo
- Hadith criticism (isnad) 2 readings · 1 passage
The hadith critics who judge the saying by chain of transmission: it has no established isnad (sahih or daʿif) and so is not an authoritative prophetic report.
Shams al-Din al-Sakhawi · Ibn Taymiyya
- Akbarian affirmation by unveiling 2 readings · 1 passage
Ibn Arabi and his expositors affirm the saying sound in meaning by kashf (unveiling) even though it is not established by transmission, making it the locus of divine self-disclosure (tajalli).
Ibn al-'Arabi (Muhyi al-Din) · William C. Chittick
- Minority 'a god' reading 1 reading · 1 passage
Accepts the qualitative analysis but carries it into English as 'a god' / 'divine', distinguishing the Logos from ho theos; charges mainstream versions with doctrinal bias.
Jason David BeDuhn ↳ answers Qualitative-grammar consensus
- Textual criticism 1 reading · 1 passage
Treats the cruxes of the Prologue as questions of punctuation and transmission (the 1:3/1:4 division) rather than of variant text, the manuscripts being largely unpunctuated.
Bruce M. Metzger
- Text-critical (the recensions) 1 reading · 1 passage
Treats Sefer Yetzirah as a fluid text surviving in distinct recensions (long, short, Saadyan); the task is a critical edition, not a single authoritative text.
Ithamar Gruenwald
- Late-antique dating 1 reading · 1 passage
Dates Sefer Yetzirah to late-antique Palestine (roughly 3rd-6th c.), against a Hellenistic Neoplatonic/Pythagorean background and prior to Islam.
Gershom Scholem
- Foundational reading (al-Jili as systematizer) 1 reading · 1 passage
The foundational English-language reading (Nicholson): al-Jili is the great systematizer of the Perfect-Human doctrine he inherits from the Akbarian tradition -- the four Illuminations and the microcosm-mirror.
Reynold A. Nicholson
- Revisionist reading (al-Jili's distinctiveness) 1 reading · 1 passage
The recent revisionist reading (Morrissey): al-Jili's distinctive contribution has been overlooked; he develops rather than merely transmits the doctrine, at points explicitly differing from Ibn Arabi.
Fitzroy Morrissey ↳ answers Foundational reading (al-Jili as systematizer)