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This collection of articles analyzes the formation of antique and early medieval religious identities and ideas in rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, Islam, and Greco-Roman culture. The authors question the artificial disciplinary and conceptual boundaries between these traditions.
This book aims to provide advanced students of biblical studies, seminarians, and academicians with a variety of intertextual strategies to New Testament interpretation. Each chapter is written by a New Testament scholar who provides an established or avant-garde strategy in which: 1) The authors in their respective chapters start with an explanation of the particular intertextual approach they use. Important terms and concepts relevant to the approach are defined, and scholarly proponents or precursors are discussed. 2) The authors use their respective intertextual strategy on a sample text or texts from the New Testament, whether from the Gospels, Acts, Pauline epistles, Disputed Pauline epistles, General epistles, or Revelation. 3) The authors show how their approach enlightens or otherwise brings the text into sharper relief. 4) They end with recommended readings for further study on the respective intertextual approach. This book is unique in providing a variety of strategies related to biblical interpretation through the lens of intertextuality.
Volume 13 2017 This is the thirteenth volume of the hard-copy edition of a journal that has been published online (www.jgrchj.net) since 2000. As they appear, the hard-copy editions replace the online materials. The scope of JGRChJ is the texts, language and cultures of the Greco-Roman world of early Christianity and Judaism. The papers published in JGRChJ are designed to pay special attention to the larger picture of politics, culture, religion and language, engaging as well with modern theoretical approaches.
In The Crucified Book, Anne Kreps shows how the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, and its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity.
John's Transformation of Mark brings together a cast of internationally recognised biblical scholars to investigate the relationship between the gospels of Mark and John. In a significant break with the prevailing view that the two gospels represent independent traditions, the contributors all argue that John both knew and used the earlier gospel. Drawing on recent analytical categories such as social memory, 'secondary orality,' or 'relecture,' and ancient literary genres such as 'rewritten Bible' and bioi, the central questions that drive this volume focus on how John used Mark, whether we should speak of 'dependence,' 'familiarity with,' or 'reception,' and whether John intended his work to be a supplement or a replacement of Mark. Together these chapters mount a strong case for a reassessment of one of the key tenets of modern biblical criticism, and open up significant new avenues for further research.
What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, of the ideal impartial judge. As a work of intellectual history, the book also contributes to contemporary debates about the role of legal decision-making in shaping a just society. Chaya T. Halberstam shows that instead of modelling a system in which lofty, inaccessible judges follow objective and rational rules, ancient Jewish trial narratives depict a legal practice dependent upon the individual j...
Few scholarly constructs have proven as influential or as durable as the Johannine community. A product of the era in New Testament studies dominated by redaction criticism, the Johannine community construct as articulated first by J. Louis Martyn and later by Raymond E. Brown emerged with an explanatory power that proved persuasive to scholars deliberating on the provenance and emergence of the Johannine literature for the next 50 years. Recent years, however, have seen this once dominant paradigm questioned by many of those working with the Gospel and Letters of John. The Johannine Community in Contemporary Debate is dedicated to exploring the current state of the question while shining a light on new and constructive proposals for understanding the emergence of the Johannine literature. Some contributions accept the idea of a Johannine Community but suggest different ways we might know about the nature of that community. Others reject the existence of a Johannine Community, suggesting alternate models for understanding the emergence of these texts. These proposals are themselves set in perspective by responses from senior scholars.
Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Reformation and the liberal idea of the self-governing individual that arose from it. In Spiritual Despots, J. Barton Scott reveals an unexamined piece of this story: how Protestant technologies of asceticism became entangled with Hindu spiritual practices to create an ideal of the “self-ruling subject” crucial to both nineteenth-century reform culture and early twentieth-century anticolonialism in India. Scott uses the quaint term “priestcraft” to track anticlerical polemics that vilified religious hierarchy, celebrated the individual, and endeavored to reform human subjects by freeing them from external religious influen...
Noting that a traditional understanding of Paul as “convert” from Judaism has fueled false and often dangerous stereotypes of Judaism, and that the so-called “new perspective on Paul” has not completely escaped these stereotypes, František Ábel has gathered leading international scholars to test the hypotheses of the more recent “Paul within Judaism” movement. Though hardly monolithic in their approach, these scholars’ explorations of specific topics concerning Second Temple Judaism and Paul’s message and theology allow a more contextually nuanced understanding of the apostle’s thought, one free from particular biases rooted in unacknowledged ideologies and traditional interpretations transmitted by particular church traditions. Contributors include František Ábel, Michael Bachmann, Daniel Boyarin, William S. Campbell, Kathy Ehrensperger, Paula Fredriksen, Jörg Frey, Joshua Garroway, Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr, Isaac W. Oliver, Shayna Sheinfeld, and J. Brian Tucker.
Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity presents perspectives from an international and interdisciplinary range of contributors on the literature, history, archaeology, and religion of a major world civilization, based on an informed engagement with important concepts and issues in memory studies.