Humanities 110

Paper Topic #3

Spring 2005

Length 1500 words

 

Due Saturday, April 23^rd,  5 P.M. in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.

 

1.              The Golden Ass may be read as an allegory for what we might call "personal development."  Is such a reading plausible?  What would the moral of the story (if any) be?

 

2.              Compare and contrast a a passage from the Gospels of Matthew and John describing the same episode of Jesus's life, and discuss the significance of their similarities and differences for understanding the early history of the Jesus movement.

 

3.              How do perceptions of non-Romans in works that you've read this term (e.g. Tacitus, Josephus, Virgil, Livy) reflect on Romans' conception of their own national character?

 

4.              Choose three of the following texts and discuss how each conceives the ideal human life: Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of John, Tractate Avot, The Golden Ass, Life of St. Anthony, Plotinus, and the Martyrdom of Perpetua.

 

5.              At verse 114 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that "every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."  How does this understanding of women differ, if at all, from the view that one finds in a "canonical" text such as the Gospel of Matthew.  What are the implications of the differences (or similarities) that you discover?

 

6.              Find and develop one or two important aspects of comparison and contrast between Plotinus' Good (or the One) and either the God of the Torah or the God of the New Testament.

 

7.              In consultation with your instructor, devise a topic of your own.