Anti-Judaism in Early Christian Writings

300Reviews The bilingual dictionary receives cursory treatment in this book even though the writing of bilingual dictionaries usually preceded the writing of monolingual dictionaries in the early history of lexicography. Dozens and dozens of problems unique to bilingual lexicography are neglected or ignored in this book even though the bilingual dictionary is an important tool for international understanding by virtue of its contribution to translation and interpretation. The title of the book might well have included the word "monolingual" in order to read Dictionaries. The Art and Craft of Monolingual Lexicography. Nevertheless, Landau has created what may be the best book ever published for the teaching of lexicography. It has just the right mix of simplicity and complexity. The author combines accessibility for the novice with professional considerations of interest to those already in the discipline. Roger J. Steiner University of Delaware * * * A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Arndt, William F., F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Frederick W. Danker. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. xl + 900 pp. $42.50. Shorter Lexicon of the Greek New Testament. Gingrich, F. Wilbur, and Frederick W. Danker. 2d ed. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1983. xii + 221 pp. $20.00. Why make a dictionary for the Greek words of the New Testament and other early Christian writings? Why not use existing dictionaries of ancient Greek? One reason is that including only the words of these Christian writings makes possible more thorough treatment than could be given in the same space to a more comprehensive vocabulary. But a more important reason is that the Greek of these writings is not classical Greek. At least as long ago as the seventeenth century, Reviews301 scholars noticed the differences between the Greek of the New Testament books and that of most literary writings of the first century, which used much the same Greek as the writings of the Classical period several hundred years earlier. Some ascribed the differences to the influence of Hebrew on Christian writers; others contended that it was a purer Greek, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It was not until the 1890s, when non-literary writings in first-century Greek were discovered, particularly in Egyptian papyrus records and letters, that the Greek of the New Testament was recognized for what it was—the everyday Greek of the Hellenistic world of the first century A.D., known as koine, "the common language." As the English of today differs from that of Chaucer, Koine differed from Classical Greek in vocabulary, word forms, and grammar. To help read Koine Greek, grammars and dictionaries have been made, though none yet covers the whole corpus of writings in Koine. The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (hereafter GELNT) is the latest product of a long line of philological dictionaries developed by New Testament scholars and their critics. The first dictionary of New Testament Greek was a Greek-Latin glossary published in 1 522. New Testament words were first explained in English in 1639. The present work is a lineal descendent of a Greek-German dictionary published in 1910. This was revised, first in 1928, by another German scholar, Walter Bauer, and his editions with their thorough scholarship came to dominate the field. The first edition of GELNT (1957) was a translation and adaptation of Bauer's fourth edition (1952). The present work is augmented in part from Bauer's fifth edition (1958). It is the product of more than fifteen years of revision by W. Wilbur Gingrich, professor emeritus of Greek and religion at Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania, and by Frederick W. Danker, a professor in the Department of Exegetical Theology, New Testament, at Christ Seminary-Seminex and at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. How well does GELNT meet the needs and expectations of its prospective users? As a measure of this, the reviewer will use the findings of a survey that he conducted in 1967 to learn what users of New Testament lexicons wanted. 302Reviews Does the dictionary cover all the texts being studied by scholars of the New Testament and Early Christian writings? All respondents to the survey, of...

The Covenant Formulary in Old Testament, Jewish, and Early Christian Writings. By Klaus Baltzer Translated by D. E. Green Pp. ix+221. Philadelphia: Fortress Press; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971. £3.75 Get access The Covenant Formulary in Old Testament, Jewish, and Early Christian Writings. By Klaus Baltzer Translated by D. E. Green Pp. ix+221. Philadelphia: Fortress Press; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971. £3.75. A. S. Herbert A. S. Herbert Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume XXV, Issue 1, January 1974, Page 251, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/XXV.1.251 Published: 01 January 1974

Reviewed by: Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings by Jennifer Otto Todd Berzon Jennifer Otto Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 Pp. 256. $84.50. Jennifer Otto's detailed yet eminently readable monograph sees in Philo of Alexandria a hermeneutic of collective identity for three early Christian writers, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius of Caesarea. Philo's own identity, as a Jewish biblical interpreter and Platonic thinker, afforded these authors the conceptual space in which to elaborate the contours of Christianness vis-a-vis a proximate Jewishness (the author generally avoids the terms Christianity and Judaism because, she says, they anachronistically connote the category of religion). Otto further contends that Philo was harnessed by Christians not simply to elaborate the differences between Jewishness and Christianness, but also "to establish Christianity as a virtuous way of life, parallel to the pursuits of the philosophical schools" (2). Otto's book thus concerns itself with the circumstances in which early Christians invoked Philo as an interpreter who could link facets of Christianness, Jewishness, and (pagan) philosophy and yet simultaneously differentiate them. The Introduction situates Philo's Christian reception in relation to a number of highly contentious issues in the study of early Christian representations of Jewishness. Otto conceptualizes Philo as a lens for revisiting questions about the parting of the ways, the differences in Christian usages of the terms Ioudaioi, Hebraioi, and Israel, the relationship between ancient notions of ethnicity and way of life, and the idea of Christianity as a philosophy. Otto's survey of the relevant scholarly literature is helpful and clear, though the various sub-sections of the Introduction have a disjunctive flow. It is only in the ensuing chapters that the relationship between these questions becomes slightly clearer. In Chapter One, Otto elaborates how Clement likely came to possess Philonic texts. Her aim is to rebut the dominant scholarly theories which argue that Clement's source must have been either a Jewish teacher in Alexandria or a school tradition with Jewish roots. But if, as Otto insists, the Alexandrian Jewish community was virtually decimated after the Trajanic revolt of 115–117, Clement would have needed an alternative source. Otto thus proposes that Clement came into contact with Philo's works through the vibrant (non-Jewish) philosophical networks in Alexandria. Because the philosophical schools of Alexandria were open to consulting outside works, Philo's writings were almost certainly part of the city's broader philosophical exchanges. While Otto is correct that the consensus theory about Clement's acquisition of Philo (via some sort of connection to Jews) necessitates a fair amount of speculation, her alternative suggestion is no less speculative. There is simply no direct evidence to support her claim, and it is not clear how it materially affects her analysis in subsequent chapters. Chapters Two, Three, and Four examine how Clement, Origen, and Eusebius describe Philo's exegetical skills and ethnic identity. Chapter Two investigates Clement's four overt references to Philo. In two of those cases, Clement calls Philo "the Pythagorean" even where he is also called an expert interpreter of the [End Page 342] Mosaic law and/or historian of the Jewish people. Why, Otto asks, would Clement describe Philo this way? Her answer is that the ascription "Pythagorean" worked to present Philo as a barbarian sage who blended the wisdom of Hebraism and Hellenism. Philo's exegetical skills "can thus be wielded by Clement both against Christians who protest the validity of Greek education and against philosophers who denigrate the teachings of the ekkelsia as a novelty" (89). Chapter Three focuses on Origen, who drew upon Philo's biblical allegorizing to bolster Christian efforts to uncover the veiled intent of scripture. For that reason, Origen often (and anonymously) refers to Philo as a predecessor, literally as "one of those who came before us." But in calling Philo his predecessor, Origen is not rendering him into a proto-Christian; rather, in Otto's estimation, the term "signals Origen's awareness of Philo as an interpreter of old who . . . correctly perceived the hermeneutical depths of the narratives recorded in Israel...

Book Review| October 01 2004 The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World, Richard A. Horsley Neil Asher Silberman. Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (2004) 123 (3): 564–568. https://doi.org/10.2307/3268058 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte; The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 January 2004; 123 (3): 564–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3268058 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Philo of Alexandria and the construction of Jewishness in early Christian writings. By Jennifer Otto. (Oxford Early Christian Studies.) Pp. xii + 231. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. £65. 987 0 19 882072 7 - Volume 70 Issue 3

The extraordinary success ofThe Da Vinci Codehas dramatically intensified interest in the mysterious origins of Christianity. But in fact there has always been huge curiosity about a wide range of contentious issues concerning Jesus and early Church history. Who was the 'real' Jesus? How much do we really know about his disciples? What is written in the 'secret' early Christian writings, such as the Gnostic Gospels? How did the Church Fathers decide which beliefs were heretical and which weren't? Who were the first Popes and how did they take control of the early Church?Decoding Early Christianityaddresses all such questions, separating truth from legend, and showing how the early Church Fathers and Popes interpreted competing views and traditions to produce, over time, an approved and codified view of Jesus and his followers, and developed an accepted liturgy with which to worship him. Expertly written by a team of highly distinguished authors, it is a clear and engaging exploration of fact and fiction for anyone who wants to be reliably informed on the subject. The authors show how speculative fancies arise from a mixture of tenuous evidence and wishful thinking, and bring the issues back to the solid - but no less extraordinary - evidence in the main canon of the Gospels and the Acts. After Leslie Houlden's Introduction, which briefly explores the nature and context of the different issues, nine chapters, each written by an expert, tackle the evidence: 'What Did Jesus Do and Teach?' (Leslie Houlden), 'Who Were the Disciples?' (Stephen Need), 'Who Were the First Popes?' (Graham Gould), 'What is the Apocryphal New Testament?' (Stuart Hall), 'What was Gnosticism?' (Stuart Hall), 'What Was the Qumran Sect and Did Jesus Share their Beliefs?' (Stephen Need), 'How Did the Early Christians Worship?' (Graham Gould), 'Who Were the Heretics and What Did they Believe?' (Lionel Wickham) and 'What Did Constantine Do for Christianity?' (Graham Gould).

Reviewed by: In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity by Patricia Cox Miller Steven D. Smith Patricia Cox Miller. In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 271. $79.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-5035-0. Miller's book is a welcome contribution to the growing field of animal studies in antiquity. Over the space of an introduction, five chapters, and a brief afterword, Miller masterfully elucidates a tension in early Christian literature between an anthropocentric rhetoric that disparages non-human animal life and a persistent tendency in these same texts to think about animals "in terms of their emotional, ethical, psychological, and behavioral continuities with human beings" (4). Miller's brilliant close readings of patristic texts are thoroughly informed by a broad range of theoretical insights from leading thinkers in the field of animal studies. Miller appears equally at home with the works of Jean-Christophe Bailly, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as she is with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens, all of whom here enter into a rich dialogue with the likes of Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nyssa, among others. The Introduction lays out the problem of the conflicting attitudes towards human-animal relationality in early Christian thought and literature and nicely situates the book's theoretical orientation. Chapter 1, "Animals and Figuration," uses birds as a case study for the various roles (spiritual, ethical, Christological) that animals play in the zoological imagination of early Christian writers. Miller's discussion of the dove is especially interesting, because she shows how Christian writers de-eroticized and spiritualized what was traditionally a symbol of potent sexuality. Chapters 2 and 3 share the title "The Pensivity of Animals," with a focus on "zoomorphism" and "anthropomorphism," respectively. Chapter 4, "Wild Animals," engages with the figuration of animals in the literature of monastic asceticism; Miller's recurring interest in the subversive quality of animal fabulae works well with the book's overall thesis. Chapter 5, "Small Things," employs the insights of "new materialism" to focus on the "vibrant materiality" of worms, mosquitos, flies, and frogs within the early Christian zoological imagination. In the brief afterword, Miller brings together her various readings of the ambiguous attitudes towards non-human animals in patristic literature and synthesizes them under the sign of a Christian kosmos that harmonizes and seeks affinity between its dissimilar parts. The great value of Miller's work is its delineation of how early Christian literature provides evidence of a lively discourse that ran contrary to and even disrupted the conventional anthropocentric view of the kosmos, a view inherited from the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. The passages that Miller collects and analyzes in this volume illustrate without a doubt that patristic writers celebrated human entanglement with non-human animal life, "even when those relations are paradoxically presented as both positive and negative in the same text" (192). But early Christian writers were not alone in antiquity in presenting such an ambiguous or paradoxical relationship with non-human animal life. Though she deftly traces continuities between the patristic texts and modern ideas about human-animal entanglement, Miller misses an important opportunity to engage more deeply with the inheritance of non-Christian writers from the Roman Imperial period who sometimes shared with their Christian counterparts a sympathetic fascination with the natural world that contrasted sharply with the [End Page 374] conventional disparagement of non-human animals as "irrational creatures" (ἄλογα ζῷα). Miller duly notes parallels and differences between passages from patristic texts and similar passages from non-Christian writers such as Pliny and Aelian. But if, as Miller concludes, early Christianity heralded "a rhetoric of cosmic resemblance, connection, harmony, and affinity that does not debase animals but includes them . . . in the material and spiritual enchainments that are the created order" (194), then the book would have benefitted from a more searching inquiry into how the Christian writers were responding to, modifying, or consonant with their non-Christian counterparts in the creation of this new rhetoric. Finally—and it may seem churlish to note this, but it must be said—a more careful editorial...

This chapter argues that designation the disciple Jesus loved is closely associated with his role as authenticator of Gospel of John. The Beloved Disciple's portrayal in Johannine empty tomb stories involves many difficulties of interpretation. John 20:2-10 is based either directly on short account of Peter's visit in Luke 24:12,41 or on a tradition similar to it. In John 21: l-14, Beloved Disciple is portrayed as one who recognizes risen Jesus before other disciples (John 21:7). The affinities between portrayals of Jesus and Beloved Disciple are strong enough to suggest a deliberate literary device in John. Special disciples are often characterized with language implying a relationship of love between them and their teachers not only in other early Christian writings but also in contemporary Jewish and Greco-Roman texts.Keywords: Beloved Disciple; early Christian writings; Gospel of John; Greco-Roman texts; Jesus

How did New Testament authors use Israel’s Scriptures? Use, misuse, appropriation, citation, allusion, inspiration—how do we characterize the manifold images, paraphrases, and quotations of the Jewish Scriptures that pervade the New Testament? Over the past few decades, scholars have tackled the question with a variety of methodologies. New Testament authors were part of a broader landscape of Jewish readers interpreting Scripture. Recent studies have sought to understand the various compositional techniques of the early Christians who composed the New Testament in this context and on the authors’ own terms. In this landmark collection of essays, Matthias Henze and David Lincicum marshal an international group of renowned scholars to analyze the New Testament, text-by-text, aiming to better understand what roles Israel’s Scriptures play therein. In addition to explicating each book, the essayists also cut across texts to chart the most important central concepts, such as the messiah, covenants, and the end times. Carefully constructed reception history of both testaments rounds out the volume. Comprehensive and foundational, Israel’s Scriptures in Early Christian Writings will serve as an essential resource for biblical scholars for years to come

Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity

This chapter seeks to answer the question is why certain early Christian writers do not enlist the stereotype of the dangerous female sorceress evident elsewhere, especially given the widespread rhetorical war on “heretical” movements, groups that supposedly favored women’s participation and leadership. Instead early Christian writings depict women consistently as victims of men’s magic rather than as magicians themselves. In an effort to understand this peculiarity of early Christian rhetoric, the chapter first provides a context for it by surveying depictions of magic from a variety of ancient non-Christian sources. Next, it examines depictions of magic from diverse early Christian sources, drawing attention to the pattern of male magician and female victim that emerges throughout. Finally, the chapter considers the ideological function of “magic” in early Christian rhetoric and explores possible reasons why Christian writers gendered magic the way they did.Keywords: early Christian writings; female sorceress; gender; magic

Positive psychology offers two visions for human life: a hedonic path that focuses on the seeking of pleasure and happiness, and a eudaimonic journey that involves the development of virtues conducive to a good life. Early Christian thought offers a sophisticated critique of the strengths and weaknesses of these visions because it responded to similar ideas that were present in classical philosophical systems like Stoicism. Early Christian writers rejected hedonic understandings of human flourishing (as did most people in the classical period) and approved of a focus on virtue as necessary to a good life. They also would join with positive psychologists and criticize a narrowly medical model view of mental health. However, there are also important differences between early Christian thought and eudaimonic positive psychology. Early Christian authors had a different understanding of virtue as holistic and relational, in contrast to the more fragmented and individualistic picture of virtue and health found in most positive psychology research. These Christian writers also had a different view of suffering as having positive potential or a ‘medicinal’ quality, while positive psychology writers generally see suffering as something undesirable that needs to be eliminated. Overall, some aspects of positive psychology are not incompatible with the vision of life, struggle, and helping that was developed by early Christian writers. However, the differences are probably more notable than the similarities.

Reviewed by: The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts by Ronald Charles Mary Ann Beavis ronald charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World; London: Routledge, 2020). Pp. xvii + 272. $124. This book sets out to examine a wide range of early Jewish and Christian texts in which enslaved figures are represented and, according to Charles, rendered silent, by their authors, “who had no intrinsic interest in slaves . . . used, abused, and silenced their enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions” (p. 1) The Jewish texts considered all belong to the so-called Pseudepigrapha: Sibylline Oracles, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Testament of Job, Letter of Aristeas, Jubilees, Joseph and Aseneth, and Wisdom writings that include Ahiqar, 3 Maccabees, Pseudo-Phocylides, and the Sentences of the Syriac Menander. The early Christian writings are both canonical and extra-canonical: 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, the Gospels, Acts, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Acta Perpetuae, Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, and the Acts of Andrew. C. approaches these texts through the lenses of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing [End Page 330] the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), and Subaltern studies, to “uncover small tales constructed around slaves, or better, to consider how particular narratives could be understood differently if the reader pays attention to enslaved persons in their characterizations in the texts” (p. 12). Not surprisingly in a project that covers so much ground, the results are uneven. In my reading, several “small tales” stand out: the slave woman in the Testament of Job who gives her own loaf of bread to Satan, disguised as a stranger, when Job snubs him (7:5). Admittedly, the woman is rebuked for her kind act, but by Satan, hardly a reliable character. C. pays special attention to the slave characters—an unnamed slave girl and Malchus, the male slave of the high priest named in John 18:10—who figure in the scene of the denial of Peter (Mark 14:66–68; Matt 26:69–71; Luke 22:56; John 18:15–26), meticulously detailing the unique features of each narrative. C. highlights both the devalued figure of Rhoda (Acts 12:1–16) and the unnamed fortune-teller of Acts 16:16–18, characters often neglected by interpreters. Although all act/speak truthfully (and, in the case of the slave woman in Testament of Job, righteously), their words are dismissed, like the true words of the women disciples in Luke 24:11. Similarly, the slave Felicitas is sidelined by the freeborn Perpetua in the Passion, and both women are silenced in the Acts. In the Acts of Andrew, the body of the slave woman Euclia is used, abused, and discarded to preserve the chastity of her Christian mistress Maximilla: “The body of the elite woman is protected, while the body of the slave is exploited” (p. 196). Several of C.’s interpretive moves are less compelling. Some of the references to slaves in the pseudepigraphal writings he includes are slight or nonexplicit, as with the figure of Hermon in 3 Maccabees 5, who “is not explicitly called one [a slave] in the text” (p. 47). The observation that “he is an administrative person, who is in danger of being killed because of the king’s caprice” (p. 47), suffices to explain his vulnerability. C. adopts the traditional, but highly contested, hypothesis that Onesimus (Phlm 10) was a runaway slave, although why a fugitive slave would seek refuge by visiting a Roman prisoner is not explained. C. assumes that Epaphroditus (Phil 2:19, 25; 4:18) was a freedman (and thus outside the scope of the study), although he could just as likely have been enslaved or freeborn. To be sure, Eusebius’s construction of Blandina as a Christ figure whose death has cosmic significance (p. 182) subordinates her to a “highly theologized salvation history” (p. 183), but this is no different from his portrayal of other martyrs, enslaved or free. Charles’s study features a conclusion that thoroughly summarizes his analysis, chapter by chapter, seemingly in response to the critiques of...

The chapter focuses on Bernard of Clairvaux’s inclusion of the Name ‘Jesus’ as part of a series of effusive sermons based on the Song of Songs. It then considers whether early Christian writers’ interest in the different names given to the second person of the Trinity shows sign of an emerging devotion to the Name of Jesus. Origen noticed how Christians chose the name ‘Jesus’ exclusively as invocation, in contrast to pagans who used a multiplicity of magical spells. John Chrysostom and Ephrem paid serious attention to the act of naming, but without focusing especially on the name ‘Jesus’. The Greek ‘Office of the most sweet Jesus’ and Anselm of Canterbury’s Meditatio ad concitandum timorem clearly show a sensibility towards the power of the Name of Jesus. The emergence of the devotion is therefore noticeable both in the Eastern and Western Christian traditions.

The theme of this paper is the exegesis of Gen 2:1-3 in selected writings of the Church Fathers and early Christian writers. The Early Church authors pon­dered over the passage in question, seeking to find the meaning of God’s resting on the seventh day from all his work of creation of the world and man. In their statements, early Christian writers clearly stated that the Biblical text should be read spiritually while treated as a metaphor. For God does not need rest, but man. It is for man that the Creator made the Sabbath day, and made it holy, and since the Resurrection of Christ, Sunday has been a holy day designated for rest and celebration. Concurrently, it was the announcement of the eighth day, or eternity, in which a man, free from all the trouble and bodily decay, will forever rest in God and live a true union with Him.