Doktorand
Having been trained for pastoral ministry in USA, for biblical scholarship at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and introduced to doctoral studies at the University of Helsinki, I now look forward to completing my postgraduate degree in Biblical Studies (NT) at EHS.
My dissertation work will focus on the activities of praying and prophesying in 1 Cor 11:2-16 through the lens of ritual studies and within the framework of ritual theory. I work with the assumption that since the addressees’ praying and prophesying in this pericope is regulated along the lines of gender (men/women) and sartorial decorum (uncovered head/covered head), the text addresses certain rituals or ritualized activities. Of importance for this study is the fact that the contemporaneous Greeks and Romans also participated in acts of devotion that required the head to be covered or uncovered depending on the circumstances. Especially important for my research are such ritualized prayers and divinatory acts in which gender determined the ritual behavior. I will therefore first attempt to collect and organize available descriptions and depictions of such rituals from the relevant time period (~200 BCE – ~200 CE) and then analyze the data from the perspective of ritual studies. The analysis is then applied to the study of 1 Cor 11:2-16 to answer the question of why some early Christians thought it necessary to require specific activities of praying and prophesying to be regulated along the lines of gender and the appearance of the head. As such, the dissertation work also requires familiarity in topics such as praying, prophesying, gender and sartorial decorum in antiquity.