MF CASR Lunch Talk with Matthew Chalmers - Why Samaritans in the study of premodern religions?

Samaritan Israelites are an Israel-facing ethnoreligious group who, like Jews and Christians, trace their identities and traditions to ancient Israel. 

Both professional scholars and the broader educated public have neglected them to excess. In this talk, I address the two-fold methodological difference that attention to Samaritans brings to the scientific study of religion, history, and the Bible. I discuss one case in which Samaritan Israelites are present in our evidence and neglected (the history of late antique religion in Palestine) and another in which Samaritan Israelites are significant in an imagined sense (how to understand the Babylonian Talmud and its production of Jewish identity). 

Matthew Chalmers (UPenn) presents from his research connected to the PERSIAS project