Event

At first blush, we might want to reject the idea of ancestral fault, the idea of visiting upon the sons the sins of the fathers (e.g., Deut. 5:9–10), from generation to generation. Such an idea is used to distasteful ends: we can think of the story of the man blind from birth (John 9:1–12), whose disability is configured as perhaps due to the sin of his parents, whose individual person becomes a mere test case in a larger understanding of intergenerational responsibility. The idea of ancestral fault offends modernist Western ideas of free will and the self-sufficient Man.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, we find the idea of ancestors and descendants judging the souls of those who commit fault—swarming them like bats, in the words of Plutarch. We find the idea of reliance upon the good that ancestors have done—a great cloud of witnesses, in the phrasing of the Epistle to the Hebrews. This talk explores the idea of ancestral fault as a possibly positive value. It uses the ancient Mediterranean world as a laboratory of ideas, in conversation with critics like Sylvia Wynter, who have exposed how the independent Man is the product of racialized (white), gendered (male), and colonialist power: not a universal human, nor a goal of the independent and strong self, but a historically constituted and maladapted ideal. The talk explores ideas of ancestral fault, inheritance, and ancestral power, including in the modern university.

Laura Nasrallah’s research and teaching bring together New Testament and early Christian literature with the archaeological remains of the Mediterranean world, and often engage issues of colonialism, gender, race, status, and power.