Otto's Barlaam is 16,500 lines of poetry, one third of which concerns the religious and baptismal instruction, usually in dialogue form, of Josaphat by Barlaam. Otto often compares Barlaam to Saint Anthony the Great for their shared asceticism. Josaphat gives long speeches to his angry father, the king, and to the people. The most interesting aspect to the modern reader is Otto's description of different religions: Chaldaean "astrology and occult arts", Greek anthropomorphism, Egyptian cults of plants and animals, and euhemerism. In this, he relies on earlier Christian writings, notably John of Damascus and perhaps also Lactantius (an influential Christian euhemerist).[1]
Notes
1 2 Siegfried A. Schulz, "Two Christian Saints? The Barlaam and Josaphat Legend", India International Centre Quarterly8, 2 (1981): 137.
Barlaam and Josaphat, also known as Bilawhar and Budhasaf, are legendary Christian saints. Their life story was based on the life of the Gautama Buddha, and tells of the conversion of Josaphat to Christianity. According to the legend, an Indian king persecuted the Christian Church in his realm. After astrologers predicted that his own son would some day become a Christian, the king imprisoned the young prince Josaphat, who nevertheless met the hermit Saint Barlaam and converted to Christianity. After much tribulation the young prince's father accepted the Christian faith, turned over his throne to Josaphat, and retired to the desert to become a hermit. Josaphat himself later abdicated and went into seclusion with his old teacher Barlaam.
Josaphat can refer to:
Barlaam was originally the name of a Christian saint, St. Barlaam, in a legend of Indian origin where he was a companion to St. Josaphat. It may also refer to:
Count Engelbert II of Berg, also known as Saint Engelbert, Engelbert of Cologne, Engelbert I, Archbishop of Cologne or Engelbert I of Berg, Archbishop of Cologne was archbishop of Cologne and a saint; he was notoriously murdered by a member of his own family.
Adolf of Altena, Adolf of Berg or Adolf of Cologne, was Archbishop of Cologne from 1193 to 1205.
Rudolf von Ems was a Middle High German narrative poet.
Aristides the Athenian was a 2nd-century Christian Greek author who is primarily known as the author of the Apology of Aristides. His feast day is August 31 in Roman Catholicism and September 13 in Eastern Orthodoxy.
Manegold of Berg was abbot of St. George's Abbey in the Black Forest, Kremsmünster Abbey and Tegernsee Abbey, and Bishop of Passau.
The term Christianized calendar refers to feast days which are Christianized reformulations of feasts from pre-Christian times.
The house of Limburg Stirum, which adopted its name in the 12th century from the immediate county of Limburg an der Lenne in what is now Germany, is one of the oldest families in Europe. It is the eldest and only surviving branch of the House of Berg, which was among the most powerful dynasties in the region of the lower Rhine during the Middle Ages. Some historians link them to an even older dynasty, the Ezzonen, going back to the 9th century.
The Margraviate of the Nordgau or Bavarian Nordgau was a medieval administrative unit (Gau) on the frontier of the German Duchy of Bavaria. It comprised the region north of the Danube and Regensburg (Ratisbon), roughly covered by the modern Upper Palatinate stretching up to the river Main and, especially after 1061, into the Egerland on the border with Bohemia.
Joasaph is a masculine given name. Joasaph is another name for Josaphat, the legendary martyred prince in the story of Barlaam and Josaphat; according to E. A. Wallis Budge, this name Joasaph ultimately originated as a mistranslation of Bodhisattva. The Ethiopic form of the name is Yewasef. People with this name include:
Pachomius the Serb, also known as Pachomius Logothetes, Russian: Пахомий Логофет, Greek: Παχώμιος Λογοθέτης) was a 15th-century Serbian hagiographer who, after taking monastic vows, was schooled on Mount Athos and mastered the ornate style of medieval Serbian literature. He is credited by the Russian Early Texts Society for the Serbian version of Barlaam and Josaphat from Old Greek.
Gui de Cambrai, was a medieval writer from northern France who used vernacular French rather than Latin language. He wrote Le Vengement Alixandre, an 1806-line epic poem.
Henry I, Count of Berg-Schelklingen was a Bavarian nobleman who ruled Berg Castle in Ehingen, Bavaria. His parents were Poppo, Count of Berg-Schelklingen, and his wife Sophia, who is sometimes claimed to be a Princess of Hungary - an otherwise unattested daughter of Solomon, King of Hungary and Judith of Swabia, but this is highly unlikely for chronological reasons. The historian Christoph Friedrich von Stälin theorised that their great political power despite humble origins was due to kinship with Bishop St. Otto of Bamberg, who was also Judith's chaplain after her marriage to Władysław I, Duke of Poland, with whom she had a daughter Adelaide, who married Henry's brother-in-law Diepold III, Margrave of Vohburg and gave birth to Adelaide of Vohburg, the first wife of Frederick Barbarossa.
Jesus in Indien. Das Ende einer Legende is a 1985 book by the German indologist Günter Grönbold investigating the Islamic, Christian and Buddhist source material used by the Ahmaddiya Muslim founder Ghulam Ahmad in his book Jesus in India. The book is Grönbold's best known book among the general public in Germany, and is the most cited scholarly text about the sources of Ahmad's interpretation and the Roza Bal shrine among subsequent academic and popular writing. Following consideration of the original context and history of the literary sources cited by Ahmad and later Ahmaddiya supporters of the theory that Jesus of Nazareth survived the crucifixion and made a journey to India and was buried in Srinagar Kashmir, Grönbold concludes that Ahmad misidentified material about the putative Christian saint "Yuzafa" from the Barlaam and Josaphat traditions telling a Christianized version of the life of Siddhartha Gautama, as being material concerning Jesus of Nazareth. Grönbold's work was revisited, cited and developed by Norbert Klatt (1988) and Mark Bothe . Bothe regarded Grönbold as the first and only scholar in the area to have developed a history of the origination of the various "Jesus in India" legends.
Diepold Count von Berg, also: Theobald, was the 11th Bishop of Passau from 1172 to 1190.
Heinrich von Berg was Bishop of Passau from 1169 to 1171 and Bishop of Würzburg from 1191 to 1197.
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