The History of the Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism: Exploring the Philosophy of Douglas Hedley ed. by Christian Hengstermann, and: Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity by Candida R. Moss, and: Broken Bodies: The Eucharist, Mary, and the Body in Trauma Theology by Karen O'Donnell, and: The Cappadocian Mothers: Deification Exemplified in the Writings of Basil, Gregory, and Gregory by Carla D. Sunberg (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The History of the Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism: Exploring the Philosophy of Douglas Hedley ed. by Christian Hengstermann, and: Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity by Candida R. Moss, and: Broken Bodies: The Eucharist, Mary, and the Body in Trauma Theology by Karen O'Donnell, and: The Cappadocian Mothers: Deification Exemplified in the Writings of Basil, Gregory, and Gregory by Carla D. Sunberg
• Frank England

Hengstermann, Christian, ed. 2021. The History of the Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism: Exploring the Philosophy of Douglas Hedley. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1350172968. Pp. 249. $102 (hardcover), $39.95 (paperback). Moss, Candida R. 2019. Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300179767. Pp. 208. $40.01 (hardcover). O'Donnell, Karen. 2018. Broken Bodies: The Eucharist, Mary, and the Body in Trauma Theology. London: SCM. ISBN 978-0334056249. Pp. 256. $37.97 (hardcover), $37.44 (paperback). Sunberg, Carla D. 2018. The Cappadocian Mothers: Deification Exemplified in the Writings of Basil, Gregory, and Gregory. Cambridge: James Clarke. ISBN 978-1498282437. Pp. 254. $54 (hardcover), $34 (paperback).

Imagining Bodies

Matter matters. In recent years, the awareness that bodies are matter that matters, and that bodies matter in meaning making, interpretative scrutiny and critique, and in the acquisition of knowledge, has achieved prominence in Anglo-American academies. Book cover photographs of authors often depict somewhat pleased countenances basking in their "new" discoveries of material existence and "4E Cognition" (for a recent and judicious appeal, see Watts 2021). Indeed, their posture, wide smiles, and self-congratulatory anticipation of expected approval is itself embodied mattering. But an occasional meeting with a distant southern colleague who greets them with a bear hug and then holds their hand for an entire conversation, or their participation in a peace-exchanging social scrum during the Eucharist in a local parish church of their same icily detached northern denomination, may lead them to question the "newness" of embodied meaning—at least, in pre- and post-Covid-19 times. In this respect, there is a forlorn corner of NT research in which matter matters so much that, not infrequently, it is politely ignored. [End Page 361]

In the Apostles' Creed, Christians continue to affirm their faith in "the resurrection of the body." But what does this mean? Exploring this question in a first-century context, Candida Moss returns to the post-death appearances of Jesus and the gospel notions of Divine Bodies (2019). Her intense investigation (the notes rival the text in length) is based upon a reexamination of the tradition's long acceptance and portrayal, especially in artworks, of a resurrected Jesus with open wounds—placeholders for doubt, initially "literal" for Thomas, and then metaphorically appropriated by his successors, whose unbelief too requires assistance. However, as Moss argues, the necessity of placing τὸν δάκτυλόν μου εἰς τὸν τύπον τῶν ἥλων and μου τὴν χεῖρα εἰς τὴν πλευρὰν αὐτοῦ (John 20:25) elucidates conceptions of the human person of that context. Therefore, she transposes Caravaggio's resplendent dust jacket painting of The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601–1602) into a new interpretive chiaro that has long receded into the tradition's oscuro, by interrogating the textual wounds rather than assuming them to be literal: What do "the mark of the nails" and the action of εἰς convey? John provides less assistance than may be supposed. "Marks" on the flesh are, well, "on the flesh," and εἰς may also mean "on"; and, in the delayed appearance to Thomas, they could be scabs that are drying or dried, which have left scars. Scars are antiquity's identity markers, and certainly more informative about identity than gaping wounds. Consider identical twins distinguished by a scar on the rugby-playing brother's forehead as the evidence of an illegal tackle, which raises an unexplored suggestive literary conceit that "by his scars, we know him"—that is, Jesus distinguished from Thomas, his "twin."

To be injured, to bear the scars of scabbing wounds, is pursued by Moss when turning to Mark 9:43–47, which reveals that bodily integrity is not a prerequisite for eternal life. On the contrary, sinful humans are sinful, and if a body part is complicit in their sin, then that part (not the other...