Drawing from Michel Foucault's understanding of power, David A. Kaden explores how relations of power are instrumental in forming law as an object of discourse in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Letters of Paul. This is a comparative project in that the author examines the role that power relations play in generating discussions of law in the first century context, and in several ethnographies from the field of the anthropology of law from Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and colonial-era Hawaii. Discussions of law proliferate in situations where the relations of power within social...

In this study, Jiri Dvoracek focuses on the usage of the -Son of David- title in Matthew's Gospel. He assumes that Matthew's image of the healing Son of David can be explained from the existing Jewish concepts - in particular in the light of the Solomon as exorcist tradition. In the first part, he examines important texts concerning the Son of David. The author argues that in the first century C.E. the designation -Son of David- could have referred not only to the triumphant royal Davidic Messiah - but within an exorcistic and healing context, it could have referred also to Solomon, himself a...

What was Paul's attitude toward his own death? How did he act and what did he say and write in view of it? What hopes did he hold for himself beyond death? Alexander N. Kirk explores these questions through a close reading of four Pauline letters that look ahead to Paul's death and other relevant texts in the first two generations after Paul's death (AD 70-160). The author studies portraits of the departed Paul in Acts, 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp's letter To the Philippians, and the Martyrdom of Paul. He also examines portraits of the departing Paul in 1 and 2 Corinthians,...

In the search for Matthean theology, scholars overwhelmingly approach the Gospel of Matthew as the -the most Jewish Gospel.- Studies of its Sitz im Leben focus on its relationship to Judaism, whether arguing from the perspective that Matthew wrote from a cloistered Jewish community or as the leader of a Gentile rebellion against such a Jewish community. While this is undoubtedly an important and necessary discussion for understanding the Gospel, it often assumes too much about the relationship between Judaism and Hellenism (via Martin Hengel). Robert S. Kinney argues for a hybridized...

In this study, Robert B. Foster explores the intersection between the interpretation of Scripture and the construction of communal identities. He argues that in Rom 9, Paul applies prophetic texts from Malachi, Hosea, and Isaiah to the story of Abraham's children in Genesis. These interpretive maneuvers enable Paul to extrapolate from the patriarchal narratives a specific construal of election: it is the ironic privilege of being simultaneously God's chosen and rejected people. This understanding of election he in turn applies to Gentile Christ-followers, the remnant, and all Israel in order...

Jordash Kiffiak offers the first concentrated study of a motif ubiquitous in the miracle stories of the gospels, namely the descriptions of characters' speech, feelings, physical actions and the like in response to miracles. Conventional wisdom sees the response motif as a means of casting the miracle worker in a positive light. However, the author's narrative-critical analysis argues that within each gospel the motif is employed creatively in a variety of ways. Responses serve to characterize various individuals and groups, both positively and negatively, sometimes in a more complex manner....

This collection of essays originates from the 2014 Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity conference hosted by the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St Mary's University, Twickenham. Featuring an international collection of senior and junior scholars, it represents the cutting edge of scholarship on portrayals of evil in the Second Temple period and the earliest centuries of Christianity. The individual essays consider the significance of -evil- as it relates to a diverse set of topics, including Qumran and its texts, images of disability in 2 Maccabees,...