In Memoriam: Alan Franklin Segal (1945-2011)

Alan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on August 2, 1945, into a Reform Jewish family. He completed an undergraduate degree at Amherst College, an MA at Brandeis University, and a Bachelor of Hebrew Letters at the Jewish Institute of Religion. In 1975, he completed a PhD dissertation at Yale University entitled “Two Powers in Heaven.” This was published two years later by Brill as his first book, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. This brilliant book prefigured Alan's work for the rest of his career on the relationships between Judaism and Christianity. Two Powers in Heaven was celebrated in a twentieth anniversary panel at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in 1997, reissued in 2002 in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition, and will be re-published in the summer of 2012 by Baylor University Press.