Prof. Dr. Guy G. Stroumsa

Guy Stroumsa is Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
After studies at the Faculté de Droit et des Sciences Economiques in Paris and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Stroumsa received his M.A. in Comparative Religion at Harvard University, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in 1978. In the same year Stroumsa became Lecturer and subsequently Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he held the Martin Buber Chair of Comparative Religion since 1991. From 1999 to 2005 Stroumsa was the founding director of Center for the Study of Christianity at Hebrew University and held a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem in 1999/2000. Since 2009 Stroumsa is Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford.
He held various prestigious guest professorships and fellowships. Stroumsa received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Zurich in 2004 and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2008. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2008.


God’s Rule in Late Antiquity
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Guy G. Stroumsa, 14 February 2011, 6:00 p-m. (s.t.) Lichtenberg-Kolleg / Historic Observatory

In all societies, the relationship between religious authority and political power is always a complex and dynamic one. Societies based upon the Abrahamic religions have seen the emergence and development of various forms of theocracy. In late antiquity, Jewish theocracy (the term theokrateia itself is a neologism created by Josephus Flavius) belongs to the past. After the destruction of the Temple and the catastrophic result of the Jewish wars, Jewish life, also in the Holy Land, has become quite entpolitisiert, to use a Weberian term. In early Christianity, one can distinguish the pre-Constantinian period, in which there is a radical opposition to the state, to that after Constantine, where religion and power learn to accommodate themselves to one another. A watershed similar to that of Constantine does not exist in Islam, a religion which, more clearly than the two other Abrahamic religions, political power is quite straightforward. The paper will seek to identify and analyze some of the proximate channels through which the late antique discourse on theocracy had an impact on early Islam.