Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Spring 2010 | Paper 6

Due Saturday, April 24th, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Length to be determined by your conference leader

  1. Discuss how Romans and Roman power are represented in three of the Judaic and Jesus-Movement texts we have read this term (Josephus' Jewish War, Matthew, John, Romans, and the Tractate Avot). How do Romans behave, and what are their characters? To what extent is the world of these texts represented as a part of the Roman world or seen as organized around a Roman center?

  2. Analyze the idea of sin in Romans. To what extent is this concept found in early Judaic culture and early Imperial Roman culture? For your answer, consider one text from each culture, for example Genesis or Isaiah for the early Judaic and the Aeneid or the Golden Ass for the Imperial Roman.

  3. Why do early Judaic and Christian texts so often foreground problems of interpretation, and how do they resolve them, if at all? Focus your analysis on one interpretive problem each in three of the following texts: Genesis or Exodus, Isaiah or Amos, Matthew or John, Romans, the Tractate Avot, the Dura Europos synagogue.

  4. Compare how two or three texts from two different cultures represent the relationship between moral and intellectual virtue. (Some possible texts: Aristophanes' Clouds, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Lucretius, Seneca, Germania, Genesis, Romans, John, Tractate Avot, Golden Ass.)

  5. Analyze representations of family and community in Genesis, Matthew, and Perpetua and Felicitas. How is the relationship between the two figured? When is the community an extension of the family, and when do they present competing loyalties?

  6. In the Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether something is pious because god commands it, or whether god commands it because it is pious. Reworking this question, we might ask whether something is ethical because god commands it, or whether god commands it because it is ethical. Drawing on this distinction, explore the conflict between ethical behavior and obedience to a deity in one early Judaic text and one first-century Jesus-Movement text.

  7. In "Religion as a Cultural System," Clifford Geertz identifies "bafflement, suffering and a sense of intractable ethical paradox" as fundamental challenges that all religious systems must address. Examining texts from two religious or philosophical systems that we have studied, analyze how these systems address one Geertzian challenge and seek to resolve it.

  8. Examine the ways in which city and country are conceived of and opposed to each other in our Late Imperial and Late Antique sources: the Golden Ass, the Dura Europos synagogue, and Anthony.

  9. What is the relationship between the epic hero, the Christian martyr, and the ascetic? Drawing on either the Aeneid or Lucretius' On the Nature of the Things, as well as two later Judaic and/or Christian texts, perform a comparative analysis of these three figures.

  10. Your Tacitus reading included a scene in which Seneca's wife, in contrast to some of the earlier wives in the Annals, insists on committing suicide by her husband's side. Discuss representations of the relationship of husband and wife, and/or other close male-female relationships, in Romans, Perpetua and Felicitas, and the Golden Ass.

  11. In consultation with your conference leader, write on a topic of your own devising.