Author: Hindy Najman Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139915843 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
This book explores the Jewish community's response to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The focus is 4 Ezra, a text that reboots the past by imaginatively recasting textual and interpretive traditions. Instead of rebuilding the Temple, as Ezra does in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Ezra portrayed in 4 Ezra argues with an angel about the mystery of God's plan and re-gives Israel the Torah. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, 4 Ezra is analyzed in terms of a constellation composed of elements from pre-destruction traditions. Ezra's struggle and his eventual recommitment to Torah are also understood as providing a model for emulation by ancient Jewish readers. 4 Ezra is thus what Stanley Cavell calls a perfectionist work. Its specific mission is to guide the formation of Jewish subjects capable of resuming covenantal life in the wake of a destruction that inflects but never erases revelation.
Author: Mina Monier Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1978707452 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 195
Book Description
Temple and Empire explores the theme of temple piety in Luke-Acts and 1 Clement in historical context. Mina Monier argues that situating both works in Trajanic Rome, and reading them through the lens of Roman imperial ideology explains their peculiarly positive presentation of the Temple as a form of reverence toward ancient worship and ancestral customs that would not offend, but would appeal to traditional Roman sensibilities.
Author: Anne Starr Kreps Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812298489 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 195
Book Description
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.
Author: Lynne Moss Bahr Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0567684377 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 159
Book Description
In this study, Lynne Moss Bahr explores the concept of temporality as central to Jesus's proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Using insights from continental philosophy on the messianic, which expose the false claim that time progresses in a linear continuum, Bahr presents these philosophical positions in critical dialogue with the sayings of Jesus regarding time and time's fulfillment. She shows how the Kingdom represents the possibilities of a disruption in time, one that reveals the intrinsic relation between God and humanity. In illustrating how Jesus's sayings regarding time are thus expressions of his messianic identity-as of the world and not of the world--Bahr argues that the meaning of Jesus's identity as Messiah is embedded in the disjuncture of time, in the impossibility of "now," from which the Kingdom comes . Bahr's use of critical theory in this study expands the concept of God's Kingdom beyond the traditional confines of the discipline.
Author: Amy Paulsen-Reed Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004430628 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
This book examines the multiple contexts for the pseudepigraphal Apocalypse of Abraham, including the ancient Jewish milieu in which it was originally written and its medieval Christian Slavic setting.
Author: Akiva Cohen Publisher: Mohr Siebeck ISBN: 9783161499609 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 664
Book Description
Akiva Cohen investigates the general research question: how do the authors of religious texts reconstruct their community identity and ethos in the absence of their central cult? His particular socio-historical focus of this more general question is: how do the respective authors of the Gospel according to Matthew, and the editor(s) of the Mishnah redefine their group identities following the destruction of the Second Temple? Cohen further examines how, after the Destruction, both the Matthean and the Mishnaic communities found and articulated their renewed community bearings and a new sense of vision through each of their respective author/redactor's foundational texts. The context of this study is thus that of an inner-Jewish phenomenon; two Jewish groups seeking to (re-)establish their community identity and ethos without the physical temple that had been the cultic center of their cosmos.
Author: Kylie Crabbe Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110615193 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 435
Book Description
Luke/Acts and the End of History investigates how understandings of history in diverse texts of the Graeco-Roman period illuminate Lukan eschatology. In addition to Luke/Acts, it considers ten comparison texts as detailed case studies throughout the monograph: Polybius's Histories, Diodorus Siculus's Library of History, Virgil's Aeneid, Valerius Maximus's Memorable Doings and Sayings, Tacitus’s Histories, 2 Maccabees, the Qumran War Scroll, Josephus's Jewish War, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch. The study makes a contribution both in its method and in the questions it asks. By placing Luke/Acts alongside a broad range of texts from Luke's wider cultural setting, it overcomes two methodological shortfalls frequently evident in recent research: limiting comparisons of key themes to texts of similar genre, and separating non-Jewish from Jewish parallels. Further, by posing fresh questions designed to reveal writers' underlying conceptions of history—such as beliefs about the shape and end of history or divine and human agency in history—this monograph challenges the enduring tendency to underestimate the centrality of eschatology for Luke's account. Influential post-war scholarship reflected powerful concerns about "salvation history" arising from its particular historical setting, and criticised Luke for focusing on history instead of eschatology due to the parousia’s delay. Though some elements of this thesis have been challenged, Luke continues to be associated with concerns about the delayed parousia, affecting contemporary interpretation. By contrast, this study suggests that viewing Luke/Acts within a broader range of texts from Luke's literary context highlights his underlying teleological conception of history. It demonstrates not only that Luke retains a sense of eschatological urgency seen in other New Testament texts, but a structuring of history more akin to the literature of late Second Temple Judaism than the non-Jewish Graeco-Roman historiographies with which Luke/Acts is more commonly compared. The results clarify not only Lukan eschatology, but related concerns or effects of his eschatology, such as Luke’s politics and approach to suffering. This monograph thereby offers an important corrective to readings of Luke/Acts based on established exegetical habits, and will help to inform interpretation for scholars and students of Luke/Acts as well as classicists and theologians interested in these key questions.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004432795 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 492
Book Description
The essays in Sacred Texts and Disparate Interpretations shed new light on core themes in Qumran studies, such as the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, history of the Qumran community, Hebrew philology and paleography, Wisdom and religious poetry.
Author: George J. Brooke Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110377381 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
While recent decades have seen a plethora of studies exploring the complex processes that shaped biblical books traditionally designated as Prophets, much remains to be done in order to uncover the rich history of their interpretation throughout the ages. This collection of essays aims at filling this gap by exploring different aspects of the exegesis of the Former and Latter Prophets in contexts both ancient and modern, Jewish and Christian. From the inner-biblical interpretation of the Prophets to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, Patristic writings, and contemporary rhetoric, this volume sheds light on how key figures in those books were read and understood by both ancient and not so-ancient readers.