Session 1 – Musical Reception
Paul Middleton, University of Chester, ‘On gods of brass and concubines: Music as Reception in William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast’
Musical setting of Biblical texts is a relatively underexplored area of biblical reception. Even where it occurs, the focus tends to be on libretto or lyrics rather than the way in which musical choices interpret or reread the text. This paper takes William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1931) as a test case to demonstrate ways in which music can act as a mode of reception history. To be sure, the (mainly) Biblical libretto by Osbert Sitwell merits study, especially by his liberal interpolation of Book of Revelation into the Hebrew Bible story of the Feast. Challenging the view of many music critics that Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast was the first non-religious Biblical oratorio, I will argue Walton’s music rereads and transforms this Old Testament story into a tale demonstrating the superiority not only of the Christian God but the Christian Empire.
Tobias Ålöw, University of Oslo, ‘“Given to You by Mother Earth” Entextualization and Ideological Inversion of 1 John 2:16 in Ghost’s “Umbra”’
This paper examines the entextualization of 1 John 2:16 within the music video for Ghost’s “Umbra.” Drawing on Bauman & Briggs’s framework for mapping the dimensions of transformation and exposing the political economy of the text, I analyze how the biblical verse is decontextualized from its epistolary setting and recontextualized within a contemporary audiovisual medium. More specifically, I note how the video not only appends to the quotation the interpretive gloss – “Yes, it is given to you by Mother Earth.” – but also further elaborates this reframing through its lyrical discourse and visual semiotics. Through this intermedial re-performance, in which scriptural discourse is not merely cited but re-signified within a new aesthetic and commercial register, what was framed as prohibition by John is refigured as affirmation by Ghost. Arguably, this movement across media, markets, and interpretive communities is not simply intertextual play. Rather, Ghost mobilizes the cultural capital of the canonical text to intensify affective and symbolic resonance. Biblical meaning is thereby commodified, functioning as an artistic resource that generates value within a transgressive fanbase.
Julia Lindenlaub and Charlotte Naylor-Davis, ‘The “Perennial” Sophia from Ancient Gnostic Literature to Modern Metal Music: The Sophia Myth and the Dragon Rouge in Therion’s Gothic Kabbalah (2007)’
This paper explores the gnostic and occult confluence in the Sophia myth of the Swedish symphonic metal band Therion’s album Gothic Kabbalah (2007). Employing methodological insights from musicology and metal music studies, we examine lyrical and harmonic motifs attesting a creative alchemy of gnostic mythology and Left-Hand Path esotericism. This method reveals how Therion’s portrait of Sophia transforms recognisable roots for her story in early gnostic literature via the aesthetics of heavy metal and the philosophy of the Dragon Rouge, an esoteric society founded by band lyricist Thomas Karlsson and of which the band’s principal composer, Christofer Johnsson, is a member. We argue that the Sophia of Gothic Kabbalah appears stripped of the negativisation widely found in Nag Hammadi and related sources and elevated above these origins – evincing the influence of the Dragon Rouge’s ‘dark feminine’ approach to magic and heavy metal’s commitment to transgression of sonic and religious boundaries.
Session 2 – Panel Discussion (Joint with NT & Christian Theology section)
Theology in/as Reception
Session 3- Modes of Interpretation
Siobhán Jolley, University of Manchester, and Maryanne Saunders, The National Gallery, ‘Curséd Is the Fruit: Afterlives of Eden in depictions of Anne and the Magdalene’
This paper explores the use of fruit and flowers as a metaphor for knowledge in depictions of Saint Anne and Mary Magdalene. Drawing on the reception of canonical and apocryphal gospels, we propose a triadic framework with the Virgin (moving beyond Marina Warner’s [1976] “whore/virgin” binary), in which the three women express distinct but interrelated modes of knowing: Anne represents intellectual, institutional knowledge; the Magdalene embodies experiential, affective knowledge; and the Virgin exemplifies idealised spiritual knowledge. In Anne imagery, fruit functions as a didactic object, mediating and stabilising inherited knowledge of the Fall. In Magdalene imagery, fruit and foliage represent embodied and interiorised knowledge, reflecting penitence, memory, and anticipation of Christ’s suffering. Across both figures, post-Edenic arboriculture operates not as a simple marker of sin or mortality but as a nuanced visual mechanism through which knowledge of the Fall is transmitted, lived, and reimagined. This triadic framework illuminates the complex ways Christian art negotiates the relationships between female agency, knowledge, and piety.
Zavi-I Nisa, University of Edinburgh, ‘Cognitive Processes in Reading and Interpreting the Demoniac’s Plight and Jesus’s Compassion in Mark 5:1-20’
In engaging with a group of South Asian readers whose lives have been shaped by political violence and conflict, their implicit memory processes and accumulated autobiographical memory inform their response to Mark 5:1-20. Studies in cognitive processes show that readers experience narratives in distinctive ways, shaped by their accumulated memories and the knowledge they have acquired through interactions with other narrative worlds. These memories surface in readers’ thoughts and responses as they engage with the text. For these readers, two elements of the story emerge as significant: the demoniac’s plight and Jesus’s compassion that brings healing. The narrative activates memories of trauma, suffering, and compassion, while also prompting readers to include information about the characters’ emotions into their mental representations, alongside information formed earlier in the unfolding narrative of Mark’s Gospel. Drawing on cognitive studies, this paper explores how readers’ mental representations identify and interact with, and empathise with the demoniac’s plight, as well as how they respond to Jesus’s compassion.
Ninnaku Oberholzer, King’s College London and University of Pretoria, ‘The forgotten weeper: Reconsidering the woman in Luke 7:36-50 through Reparative Visual Criticism’
This paper revisits the Lukan account of the anointing woman in Luke 7:36–50 through Reparative Visual Criticism. While the figure of the ‘sinful woman’ (often conflated with the Magdalene) has long been interpreted through sin and forgiveness, this study challenges such readings by foregrounding the narrative’s unresolved tensions and its complex visual afterlives.
Drawing on scholarship that reads Luke’s account as a conflation of multiple memory strands (anointing and weeping) the paper argues that the woman’s identity is multivalent: she is an anointer, mourner, penitent, and figure of protest. These overlapping roles destabilise reductive interpretations centred on sinfulness. Placing the Lukan text in dialogue with seventeenth-century European artworks and contemporary South African pieces, notably by Berni Searle and Majak Bredell, the study demonstrates how visual traditions both reinforce and disrupt inherited exegetical assumptions. Particular attention is given to weeping, often marginalised in textual readings but foregrounded visually as a form of embodied agency negotiating systems of purity, exclusion, and power. Engaging visual and textual traditions together enables a reparative remembering of the unnamed woman, opening new interpretive possibilities for contemporary contexts of gender, embodiment, and marginality.