Earliest Christianity within the Boundaries of Judaism PDF Download

Author: Alan Avery-Peck
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004310339
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Twenty-two essays, written by top scholars in the fields of early Christianity and Judaism, focus on methodological issues, earliest Christianity in its Judaic setting, Gospel studies, and history and meaning in later Christianity. These essays honor Bruce Chilton, recognizing his seminal contribution to the study of earliest Christianity in its Judaic setting. Chilton’s scholarship has established innovative approaches to reconstructing the life of Jesus, a Jew whose religious ideology developed and therefore must be understood within the Judaism of the first centuries. Following upon Chilton’s approaches and insights, the essays collected here illustrate the centrality of the literatures of early Judaism to the critical exegesis of the New Testament and other writings of early Christianity.

Author: William E. Klingshirn
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813214866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Written by experts in the field, the essays in this volume examine the early Christian book from a wide range of disciplines: religion, art history, history, Near Eastern studies, and classics.

Author: Kimberley Stratton
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004334491
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This volume celebrates the scholarship of Alan Segal. During his prolific career, Alan published ground-breaking studies that shifted scholarly conversations about Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, Hellenism and Gnosticism. Like the subjects of his research, Alan crossed many boundaries. He understood that religions do not operate in academically defined silos, but in complex societies populated by complicated human beings. Alan’s work engaged with a variety of social-scientific theories that illuminated ancient sources and enabled him to reveal new angles on familiar material. This interdisciplinary approach enabled Alan to propose often controversial theories about Jewish and Christian origins. A new generation of scholars has been nurtured on this approach and the fields of early Judaism and Christianity emerge radically redefined as a result.

Author: Karin Hedner Zetterholm
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1978715072
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
This book charts the shifting boundaries of Judaism from antiquity to the modern period in order to bring clarity to what scholars mean when they claim that ancient texts or groups are “within Judaism,” as well as exploring how rabbinic Jews, Christians, and Muslims have negotiated and renegotiated what Judaism is and is not in order to form their own identities. Belief in Jesus as the Messiah was seen as part of first-century Judaism, but by the fourth or fifth century, the boundaries had shifted and adherence to Jesus came to be seen as outside of Judaism. Resituating New Testament texts within first- or second-century Judaism is an historical exercise that may broaden our view of what Judaism looked like in the early centuries CE, but normatively these texts remain within Christianity because of their reception history. The historical “within Judaism” perspective, however, has the potential to challenge and reshape the theology of contemporary Christianity while at the same time the long-held consensus that belief in Jesus cannot belong within Judaism is again challenged by the modern Messianic Jewish movement.

Author: Karl P. Donfried
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1592444423
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Rome, as the center of the first-century world, was home to numerous ethnic groups, among which were both Jews and Christians. The dealings of the Roman government with these two groups, and their dealings with each other, are the focus of this engaging book. Peter Richardson shows that inscriptions expand considerably our knowledge about synagogues in Rome. L. Michael White discusses what the archeological epigraphic evidence reveals about the synagogue and society of Ostia. Graydon F. Snyder explores the them of inculturation, looking closely at the level of interaction of Jews with non-Jews in Rome and of Christians with Roman culture. Leonard Victor Rutgers examines the inconsistent nature of Rome's legal policies toward the Jews. Rudolf Braendle and Ekkehard W. Stegemann detail the formation of the first Christian congregations already present. James S. Jeffers describes the family life of Jews and Christians in Rome. Carolyn Osiek discusses, from an insightful and unique perspective, the social character of Roman Christianity. James C. Walters considers the evolving relations between Christians and non-Christian Jews in Rome and how their interactions were affected by Roman intervention. William L. Lane traces the continuities and discontinuities in Roman Christianity in the period from Nero to Nerva. Finally, Chrys C. Caragounis, finding clues in Romans and '1 Clement', challenges much of the consensus concerning the social situation of Roman Christianity. Based on the latest biblical and historical scholarship and archaeological evidence, this volume will be a valuable resource for students of first-century Judaism and Christianity.

Author: Aaron Milavec
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 9780814659892
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Growing up in an ethnic suburb in Cleveland, Aaron Milavec was an impressionable adolescent whose religious and cultural influences made it natural for him to pity, blame, and despise Jews. All of that began to change in 1955 when Mr. Martin, a Jewish merchant, hired Milavec as a stock boy. Milavec's initial anxieties over working for a Jew surprisingly gave way to profound personal admiration. This, in turn, plunged Milavec into a troubling theological dilemma: How could God consign Mr. Martin to eternal hellfire due to his ancestral role in the death of Jesus when it was clear that Mr. Martin would not harm me, a Christian, even in small ways? This book is not for the faint-hearted. Most Christians imagine that the poison of anti-Judaism has been largely eliminated. In contrast, Milavec reveals how this poison has gone underground--disfiguring not only the role of Israel in God's plan of salvation but also horribly twisting the faith, the forgiveness, and the salvation that Christians find through Jesus Christ. This painful realization serves as the necessary first step for our healing. At each step of the way, Milavec's sure hand builds bridges of mutual understanding that enable both Christians and Jews to cross the chasm of distrust and distortion that has infected both church and synagogue over the centuries. In the end, Milavec securely brings his readers to that place where Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity can again be admired as sister religions intimately united to one other in God's drama of salvation.

Author: Peder Borgen
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Christian converts from Judaism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"Professor Borgen introduces fresh perspectives into debates on central issues: assimilation and separation, mission and proselytism, John and the Synoptics, exegesis of the Old Testament, Jewish and Christian 'mystical' ascent and their religious and political functions. He explores the complexity of Judaism both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, and looks at the variety of tendencies which existed within Christianity as it emerged from Judaism and spread out into other nations." "In studies on Paul's letters and the Acts of the Apostles, he deals with catalogues of vices and the so-called Apostolic Decree, and on different views on the role of the reception of the Spirit by Christian converts. Finally, Professor Borgen draws on extensive material from Jewish sources to illuminate themes related to the Book of Revelation; and makes comparison between the reports by Philo and John the Seer on their own heavenly visionary ascents."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: Andrew S. Jacobs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206517
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
In the first full-length study of the circumcision of Jesus, Andrew S. Jacobs turns to an unexpected symbol—the stereotypical mark of the Jewish covenant on the body of the Christian savior—to explore how and why we think about difference and identity in early Christianity. Jacobs explores the subject of Christ's circumcision in texts dating from the first through seventh centuries of the Common Era. Using a diverse toolkit of approaches, including the psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist, he posits that while seeming to desire fixed borders and a clear distinction between self (Christian) and other (Jew, pagan, and heretic), early Christians consistently blurred and destabilized their own religious boundaries. He further argues that in this doubled approach to others, Christians mimicked the imperial discourse of the Roman Empire, which exerted its power through the management, not the erasure, of difference. For Jacobs, the circumcision of Christ vividly illustrates a deep-seated Christian duality: the fear of and longing for an other, at once reviled and internalized. From his earliest appearance in the Gospel of Luke to the full-blown Feast of the Divine Circumcision in the medieval period, Christ circumcised represents a new way of imagining Christians and their creation of a new religious culture.

Author: Kyu Seop Kim
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900439494X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Despite scholars’ ongoing historical and sociological investigations into the ancient family, the right and the status of the firstborn son have been rarely explored by NT scholars, and this topic has not attracted the careful attention that it deserves. This work offers a study of the meaning of the firstborn son in the New Testament paying specific attention to the concept of primogeniture in the Old Testament and Jewish literature. This study argues that primogeniture was a unique institution in Jewish society, and that the title of the firstborn son indicates his access to the promise of Israel, and is associated with the right of the inheritance (i.e., primogeniture) including the Land and the special status of Israel.

Author: Jennifer Slater O.P.
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1477226958
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The author explores the Christian identity characteristics of Pauls letter to the Galatians. By so doing, she presents Pauls struggle to work out a form of Christianity, which includes Jews and Gentiles, males and females, free and slave, on the basis of their common baptism in Christ. While the Roman Empire struggled to include many different ethnic groups, Paul in Galatians makes a bold breakthrough to a new inclusivity in Christ and his Holy Spirit. This solution holds major social implications: it can help overcome divisions of race, culture, nationality, or ethnicity. The author endeavours to affirm certain equality among people while also realizing that this equality is not absolute in every respect. The results of the study of Galatians confronts the situation in the new Republic of South Africa where, despite the ultra-liberal constitution, the country still needs the inclusive and ethical message of Galatians to address the new problems of blackon-black racism, xenophobia, homophobia, violence against women, great corruption in government, and irresponsible exercise of authority and freedom. Galatians remains crucial for its insistence on social inclusivity and liberating, yet real, ethics. The author is convinced that the eternal truths of Christianity, as displayed in the Jesus Movement of antiquity, are still relevant in addressing contemporary life issues that aggrieve people in post-Apartheid South Africa.