Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Biblical Studies - General

The form and function of the 'synagogue' in the first century CE has been the focus of a great deal of recent scholarly discussion. A previous generation of scholars would have perceived a reference to a synagogue in a New Testament text as a monolithic institution with clearly defined functions principally involving worship. More recent scholarship has questioned many of these assumptions, pointing out that in the first century CE 'synagogue' should be understood as a reference to a gathering and not a building. Similarly, it is noted that many of the reconstructions of what...

The ten studies in this book explore the phenomenon of public memory in societies of the Graeco-Roman period. Mendels begins with a concise discussion of the historical canon that emerged in Late Antiquity and brought with it the (distorted) memory of ancient history in Western culture. The following nine chapters each focus on a different source of collective memory in order to demonstrate the patchy and incomplete associations ancient societies had with their past, including discussions of Plato's Politeia, a "site of memory" of the early church, and the dichotomy existing between the...

The book is, primarily, a linguistic investigation into the possibility that the Johannine farewell discourse is the product of multiple hands. L. Scott Kellum uses the latest linguistic tools and applies them to the very old question of unity. In doing so, he accesses a large portion of Continental scholarship that is currently unavailable to English speakers. He concludes, on linguistic and literary grounds, that John 13:31-16:33 (the so-called farewell discourse) was written by one man at, essentially, one time.

The occurrence of treaties throughout the Ancient Near East has been investigated on a number of occasions, generally in order to resolve certain questions arising in the biblical field. As a result of that focus, the existence of a similar institution in a number of different cultures has not been treated as a problem in itself. Generally the existence of treaties throughout the area has been taken for granted, or a simple borrowing model has been used to explain how similar forms came to be used in different cultures. Why forms were similar across the area has not been probed....

Krause offers a reading of the second century CE pseudepigraphical letter 1 Timothy in the light of feminist critical studies and discourse analysis. Read as discourse, the claims of the letter come to life on the page and reveal contexts of great struggle within the ancient church. Demands for order, silence, and discipline are read for what they attempt to represent and for what they unwittingly reveal. From this perspective, the letter reveals the struggles of the early church regarding gender, class, church order and the meaning of tradition, and as such provides a lively ground for...

Much historical-critical work on the opponents in the Pastoral Epistles has resulted in sweeping generalizations concerning their Jewish and/or Gnostic nature. Literary analyses have been somewhat more promising in focusing on the stereotypical nature of the polemic, but either fail to do justice to the urgency of the language in the Pastorals or do not provide a convincing description of the opponents.

Here Pietersen approaches the problem of the opponents from a socio-scientific perspective. Utilizing labeling theory and social control theory from the sociology of deviance, he...

This work identifies two distinct methodological approaches in Jesus studies, as represented by the work of two prominent historical Jesus scholars, Dominic Crossan and Ben Meyer. Crossan's work is the apotheosis of a venerable approach centered on "tradition criticism." Meyer offered a critique of this approach in the form of a historiographic "holism." This work brings Meyer's proposals to light in a sharp comparison with the historiographic assumptions he criticized. It goes beyond Meyer, recognizing the full significance of narrativity in historical method.

It has long been recognized that the Greek of the Lukan infancy narrative (chapters 1-2) displays numerous Semitic features.

Although the majority of recent scholarship assumes that such features stem from an imitation of the Septuagint (imitation theory), the issue has not been settled satisfactorily. Others argue that Luke probably relied on a written source for the infancy narrative--or at least for some parts of it--and that this source material was composed in imitation of the Septuagint. Luke was not, however, merely the reviser or compiler of his source; rather, he rewrote the...