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C.H.BECK
C.H.Beck Fall 2022, 1 year ago

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C.H.BECK
Anna-Sophia Mäder
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German
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https://www.chbeck.de/schaefer-d …

The Guile of the Serpent

Peter Schäfer

The Creation of the World and its People – ancient tales

Peter Schäfer compares different ideas about the creation of the world and its people, ranging from the biblical and the Near Eastern, the platonic and the epicurean, as well as Jewish and Christian beliefs. His work demonstrates that the Fall and Original Sin are Christian inventions while the Jewish tradition recognises the serpent as ‘smart’ and Man as liberated.

One of the key issues at the heart of ancient scholarship was speculation as to the origin of the world and man’s position within it. Peter Schäfer takes different teachings and looks at them in relation to one another in the most fascinating way! Imagine being able to look at biblical narratives, myths from the ancient orient, Plato’s angle on the creation of the world and Philon’s interpretation of the Bible, Aristotle’s teaching on ‘the unmoved mover’ and Lucretius’ materialist world view, first rediscovered in the Renaissance, all in one volume. Both Christianity and Judaism adopted and adapted these teachings but did so without the emergence of any ‘Jewish-Christian’ tradition, as his expose so masterfully shows us. In rabbinical Judaism man becomes man as a result of the serpent’s guile while in the Christian tradition man is seen to have been beguiled by the devilish snake and has to live out his life with Original Sin.

These starkly contrasting images of man continue to have an impact in the modern world, from the Enlightenment to the antidemocratic theology of Carl Schmitt.

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Book

Published 2022-09-15 by C.H.Beck , ISBN: 9783406790423

Main content page count: 448 Pages

ISBN: 9783406790423