Strategisches Erzählen und Strategiewechsel im Umfeld neutestamentlicher Erzähltexte. Das lukanische Gleichnis vom barmherzigen Samariter als Anschauungsbeispiel

This article examines the interaction between the quest for the historical Jesus in modern biblical scholarship and contemporary theologies in which race and ethnicity play a major role. While ideologies of race have certainly been formative of modern biblical scholarship, such scholarship has in turn had an important influence on the construction of various modern Jesuses, where race becomes the determinative contemporary marker for articulating the continuing reality of the historical Jesus. This essay looks at how modern biblical scholarship has contributed to the historicizing and retrojection of a racialized Jesus. In particular, two case studies of such historicizing racialization are presented: Jesus as the "black Christ," and Jesus as the "mestizo Christ." The focus here is on the important work of James Cone and Virgilio Elizondo, with attention to how the historical Jesus is idealized with a "black" or "mestizo" identity. The essentializing character of historical Jesus studies provides a springboard for Cone's parallel essentializing of Jesus as "black" while Elizondo's Hegelianesque portrait of Jesus as the "mestizo" bridge between the borderlands of Jewish and Gentile territory relies on modern biblical scholarship's construction of the historical Jesus as somehow the synthesis of both Galilean peasant and urban Greek sophisticate. Finally, attention is devoted to the role of white privilege and "white critique" when it comes to racializing the historical Jesus.

This index presents the list of terms and concepts of aural-oral narratives and Mark's memory resources. The statement that the Gospel of Mark was written to be read out (thus oral narrative) and listened to (aural narrative), rather than read to oneself, is no longer new in current biblical scholarship. What has received very little attention, however, is the fact that the Gospel of Mark was, though a written document, stored in and recalled from memory, rather than in a written form, on the part of the original audience. Modern biblical scholarship's concern about memory, however, has been focused primarily on its role in the pre-canonical synoptic transmission, failing to extend its effects into the communicative process of the canonical written Gospels.Keywords:aural-oral narrative; Gospel of Mark; modern biblical scholarship

Exile and change of location are plot devices frame narratives of Boccaccio's Decameron (a collection of one hundred stories, began 1350, finished 1353). Margaret of Navarre repeats this structure when she writes French version of this book, called Heptameron (first published 1558) because she only completed seventy-two novellas. The storytellers these two Renaissance works must leave city and go to countryside to produce and enjoy fiction, and they go there spite of themselves, only because they must. These are two aspects that I would like to study here. How do we interpret that they literally walk from one place to another? And secondly, why must there be plague (in Decameron) or flood (in Heptameron) to make characters invent, tell, and enjoy stories?The frame narratives of Decameron and Heptameron have received various interpretations. Critics attempted to uncover moral message of works. For example, Angelo Lipari supposed that Boccaccio intended Decameron [. . .] for instruction of his fellow-poets (Lipari 1945: 102). Victoria Kirkham suggests that ten storytellers of Decameron represent ten virtues and book as whole advances a point of view that approves of rational behavior and disapproves of irrational behavior. [...] reason should control appetites, not other way (Kirkham 1985:18). For Gerard Defaux and Edwin Duval conversations of storytellers Heptameron show supremacy of Gospel human stories (Defaux 2002: 40 and Duval 1993: 60), and for Paula Sommers they reveal [...] an essentially Pauline perspective (Sommers 1984: 793). Feminist critics focus on identifying oppressive gender hierarchies interactions of storytellers. Marilyn Migiel examines the strategies used to control discourses about women, their agency, and their sexuality Decameron (Migiel 2003: 4). Patricia Cholakian examines how Heptameron preexisting male narratives have been written over (Cholakian 1991: 5). But question of force majeure frame narratives remains unanswered. Why characters cannot simply gather together city for their literary pastime? I would like to show that this in spite of oneself production and enjoyment of fiction illustrates establishment of literature as legitimate practice.Let me consider first aspect of frame narratives, that storytellers walk from one place, city which they have real life, to another place, countryside, which they produce and enjoy fictional life. My goal is to show that this forced change of location illustrates experience of reading. The storytellers of Decameron must go away from city for same reason that people read fiction, to forget their present troubles. In beginning of Decameron, seven ladies, later to be joined by three gentlemen, meet church. One of ladies (Pampinea) explains to rest that they must leave city. If they do not, they shall die, either from plague which ravages Florence, or from melancholy. Everywhere they turn, they find desolation. Pampinea complains:1[W] e remain here [in church] for no other purpose than to witness how many bodies are buried [...] If we leave this church we see bodies of and sick being carried about. Or we see those who had been exiled from city by authority of laws for their crimes, deriding this authority because they know guardians of law are sick or and running around place. Or we see dregs of city battening on our blood and calling themselves sextons, riding about on horseback every direction and insulting our calamities with vile songs. On every side we hear nothing but So-and-so is dead or So-and-so is dying. [...] But if I go home there is nobody left there [...] Whether I go or sit at home I seem to see ghosts of departed, not with faces as I knew them but with dreadful looks which terrify me (8). …

Modern biblical scholarship is largely a child of the high tech of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It developed its basic assumptions about and approaches to biblical texts in working with the print Bible, the first major, mechanically constructed book in early modernity. For this reason, the historical, critical scholarship of the Bible has risked laboring under a cultural anachronism, projecting modernity’s communications culture upon the ancient media world. However, despite its resolutely text-centered habits, historical criticism has by no means been unaware of orality’s role in the formation of biblical texts. The impact of form criticism, the method devised to deal with oral tradition, on biblical scholarship of both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament has been immense. Today, form criticism is besieged with multiple problems, the most significant of which is its complicity with post-Gutenberg assumptions about ancient dynamics of communication. Not only are biblical texts by and large located in close affinity to speech, but the form critical project has turned out to be largely misconceived. Orality studies, therefore, challenge biblical scholarship to rethink fundamental concepts of the Western humanistic legacy such as text and intertextuality, reading, writing and composing, memory and imagination, speech and oral/scribal interfaces, author and tradition. And they invite us to be suspicious of imagining tradition exclusively in closedspace, text-to-text relations, and instead to grow accustomed to notions such as compositional dictation, memorial apperception, auditory reception, and the interfacing of memory and manuscript. Contemporary research in orality is, therefore, anything but a mere embellishment of textual studies. John Miles Foley’s observation that “what we are wrestling with is an inadequate theory of verbal art” applies with particular force to biblical studies

The conclusion summarizes the new picture of Broughton offered by this book and concludes by offering reflections on three more general points arising from its analysis. The first concerns the highly prominent role that Jewish literature and languages played in Broughton’s thought. While Broughton undeniably took his interest in this area further than most scholars, the conclusion argues that he was not entirely anomalous, but rather representative of a broader tendency among reformed scholars to cultivate high levels of philological and linguistic expertise in languages of relevance to biblical scholarship, particularly Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic, and Arabic. The second concerns the role of anti-Jewish controversy in the development of Christian biblical scholarship. The importance of interfaith polemics in pushing Broughton towards historical, philological argumentation is clear throughout the book, and raises a broader possibility worthy of further exploration: that anti-Jewish priorities might have played a hitherto underappreciated role in promoting historical, philological methods in Christian theology and biblical criticism. Finally, the conclusion dwells on the significance of the book’s repeated demonstration of the extent to which scholarly culture, at least in Broughton’s lifetime, was still dominated by exegetical priorities, i.e., by the demands, habits, and expectations of biblical interpretation. It concludes by arguing that it is this ‘embedded exegetical culture’, rather than any degree of historicism or critical method, that represents the most significant difference between early modern and modern biblical scholarship.

Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, for Rabbinical Assembly and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 2001. 1560 pp. $72.50. For close to sixty years, Joseph Hertz's The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (London: Soncino Press, 1936) was a fixture in American synagogues, arguably serving as the for many, if not most, American Jews. However, Hertz has long been considered dated and its polemics against both Christianity and modern biblical scholarship out of touch with contemporary views. It is, therefore, not surprising that replacements have begun to appear. The first came from Reform movement, which published The Torah, A Modern Commentary in 1981. Although it drew on a wide range of thinkers, Jewish tradition was shortchanged, as symbolized by omission of biblical accent marks (trope), which are used for Bible's ritual chanting, and minimization of traditional Sabbath lections (parashot). Barely a decade later, Orthodox community produced an English commentary of its own. However, ArtScroll Humash (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1993) paid even less attention to modernity than Reform commentary had given to Jewish tradition. Now Conservative movement, out of which Hertz, first graduate of its Jewish Theological Seminary of America, emerged, has produced its own commentary for synagogue use. Drawing title from Proverbs 3:18, which is recited before Torah scroll during Jewish worship, its goal is to be reverential but not apologetic (p. xix) by embracing both tradition and modernity. It is also proudly Jewish. Although non-Jews are seldom mentioned by name, especially in commentary, it quotes a remarkable range of Jewish thinkers from almost every century and stream of Jewish history. Jewish practice is also regularly identified, typically as what we do, and there are frequent references to Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. Both commentary and short essays which follow are fully conversant with findings of contemporary biblical scholarship. Biblical statements are not automatically accepted as true, and readings from ancient versions are pointed out along with instances in which translation deviates from Masoretic text it supposedly follows. There are also frequent references to relevant findings from ancient Near East, although Der Allah inscription goes strangely unmentioned as does generally accepted connection between book of Deuteronomy and Judah's King Josiah. Most striking is book's openness to diversity. The organizers of this project have gone out of their way to involve a broad range of movement's constituents, including important scholars who work outside of its own institutions. Following a format that recalls Daniel Bomberg's classic Rabbinic Bible (Mikra'ot Gedolot), each page includes both Hebrew text and 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation as well as three commentaries -- one, based on recent JPS commentary series, which presents text's straightforward meaning (peshat), a second that is more homiletical (derash), and a third that describes relationship between text and Jewish observance (halacha l'ma-aseh). …

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)American Religious Liberalism . Edited by Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey . Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2012. xii + 416 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesAlmost four decades ago William Hutchison wrote then-definitive work on the modernist impulse in American religious life. He viewed religious liberalism through lens of intellectual history and focused exclusively on nation's Protestant theological heritage. Not surprisingly, Hutchison framed liberal religion as way that certain progressive ideas long-grown in Protestant theology guided those adjusting to defining features of a dawning modernity (for example, science, biblical scholarship).Leigh Schmidt and Sally Promey set out to explore broad diversity of American religious liberalism free from categories that constrained Hutchison's vision of this fluid spiritual impulse. To do this they invited sixteen scholars to contribute original essays exploring topics that might be broadly characterized as 1) spirituality in arts, 2) agendas born of religious cosmopolitanism, and 3) interactions between religious and secular forms of liberalism.It is somewhat ironic that many of strongest essays in collection echo at least parts of Hutchison's basic take on liberal strain of American religious thought. Christopher White, example, tells fascinating story of artist Juliet Thompson. Living in an era when Christian claims to superiority were undermined by increased interreligious contact and modern biblical scholarship, Thompson discovered universalist message of Baha'i' faith en route to discovering an artistic style enabling her to experience a spiritual presence through material forms. Matthew Hedstrom's article in book's second section shows that push greater interfaith connections led many Americans beyond religious parochialism to a cosmopolitan faith that dissolved fixed orthodoxies. Hedstrom focuses on wide reading audiences books that John Dewey described as written for people who feel inarticulately that they have essence of religious with them and yet are repelled by religion and are confused (221). Bestselling books, many promoted by Religious Book Club, provided new vocabularies that rendered personal faith consistent with latest scientific thinking and sensitivity to cross-cultural diversity. Yaakov Ariel's essay on Jewish liberalism similarly understands Reform Judaism in terms of same impulses Hutchison and others discern in liberal Protestantism such as embracing idea of progress, affirming scientific discoveries, and incorporating higher criticism of Bible.An insight developed through several of book's essays has to do with role that metaphysical religion has played in historical expressions of American religious liberalism. Whereas intellectual historians typically focus on highbrow sources of theology, decidedly middlebrow philosophies associated with western esotericism and New Thought have played important roles in stretching Americans' ontological imaginations in ways that encourage theological innovation. …

Exploring “Trinity in/and the New Testament” is a challenging task. Francis Watson points to some of those challenges when he summarizes certain trends in recent New Testament scholarship in relation to Trinity: Modern biblical scholarship has no great love for the doctrine of the Trinity. It likes to warn its customers that, if they read a biblical text in the light of what was to become the orthodox Nicene theology of the fourth century, they will inevitably be committing the sin of anachronism. The doctrine of the Trinity should be left to church historians and systematic theologians: it has no place in “our” field. Addressing the question of Trinity in the New Testament could, therefore, be seen among some biblical scholars as a retrospective act, one which entails a looking back anachronistically at first-century texts through the lens of a fourth-century doctrine. Such an approach can lead to survey articles which gather texts across the New Testament containing or hinting at “trinitarian formulae” or the naming of G * d as Father, Son, and Spirit. Recent scholarship has, however, challenged biblical scholars to undertake a more nuanced approach to the task. In this chapter, I propose to explore and lay out some of the contemporary hermeneutical and interpretive issues involved in the naming of G * d as Trinity and/in the New Testament, leading to an articulation of a multi-layered approach. The limitations of this chapter will, however, allow me the space to explore only the first layer of the approach, and I will do this through the gospel of Matthew. It is my hope that this limited beginning will encourage readers to explore further the rich and complex imaging of G * d in the New Testament, only some of which drew later theologians into naming G * d as triune.

What is the outcome of biblical criticism for systematic theology? Scholars have been pursuing their investigations concerning text and date and authorship and historical setting until it is comparatively easy to know the status of scholarship on these points. But what does it involve for our theology? This is a practical question which has not yet received its final answer. Indeed, there exists a remarkable lack of agreement on this point. Some men are growing impatient of the leisurely way in which important questions are being discussed, and are vigorously demanding that criticism shall announce its assured results so that a new dogmatics may be established which shall not need to be revised. Others, observing the wide variety of opinions among the critics, insist that the whole critical movement is so pervaded with subjective vagaries that it cannot be trusted to yield any definite results. A few scholars who employ the critical method feel that no important changes in theology are necessary. Others insist that when the full implications of criticism are understood, far-reaching alterations will take place. Some men fear that if modern biblical scholarship is allowed to go its way unhampered by doctrinal restrictions, it will prove subversive of Christianity. Others believe that we have never yet known the real essence of Christianity, and that critical scholarship will purify and enrich our faith. In view of these conflicting opinions, it is not superfluous to ask just what the outcome of biblical criticism is in so far as it affects the task of the theologian. It is the purpose of this article and of those which follow to inquire whither we are bound if we make positive use of the principles of critical scholarship. Just what difference does it make in the theologian's work if he recognizes the legitimacy of modern methods of biblical interpretation ? What ought to be the con-

In Pauline theology, Christ is the new Adam who annuls the effect of the Fall and grants humanity divine gifts. The centrality of Romans 8 in the New Testament and, more specifically, in the Pauline writings is unquestioned. In Romans 8, a unique relationship is established—all that Christ is and has done is given to humanity. Romans 8 reveals that God bestows the gifts of life, adoption, and glory on the faithful. These gifts culminate in the faithful’s conformity to the image of the Son of God. Prominent biblical scholars, each with their own focus, have established the significance of the themes of life, adoption, and glory in Romans 8. This article discusses the opinions of several scholars on these three themes in this chapter. John Chrysostom (ca. 349–407 CE) offers a detailed and eloquent exegesis of Romans 8. This article examines Chrysostom’s commentary on these themes and discusses the faithful’s conformity to the Son of God as discussed by Chrysostom and modern biblical scholars. Moreover, the article assesses the tenet of modern theological scholars who consider that Paul’s rhetoric in Romans 8 implicitly speaks of deification. The article argues that despite the paucity of technical language, Chrysostom speaks of deification in his commentary on the chapter.

Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s <em>Breakfast on Pluto</em>

The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s First-Person Narratives Elke D’hoker (bio) In narrative terms, the transition from Victorian tale to modern short story in Anglophone literature has often been characterized as a movement from ‘telling’ to ‘showing.’ Anthony Alpers refers to this development as “getting rid of the narrator” (The Life 238), while Clare Hanson describes it as moving “from ‘teller’ to indirect free narration, and from ‘tale’ to ‘text,’” as part of a larger shift from “‘discourse’ to ‘image’ in the art and literature of the period” (1). In the nineteenth-century tale, indeed, a first-person narrator—often a polished version of the author (Shaw 114–15)—guides the reader through the story, guaranteeing its authenticity and providing a certain moral framework. The hallmark of most nineteenth-century tales, this narrative mode is reminiscent of the tale’s origins in communal, oral storytelling traditions. A desire to question narrative authority and remove the teller gradually from the tale characterizes the so-called modern short story, the origins of which—at least in Britain—are usually traced to the 1880s. Early experiments with this other narrative mode, in which focalization alternates with narration,1 can be found in the proto-impressionist psychological sketches of George Egerton, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ella D’Arcy, and Ernest Dowson (Korte 103–107; Malcolm and Malcolm 12–13). Yet only with the figural narration of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and—especially—Katherine Mansfield does the modern short story really come into its own. In such a story, the narrator virtually disappears behind [End Page 149] the characters’ voice and inner consciousness, mostly rendered through free indirect discourse. In the absence of a narrator to guide, instruct, or communicate with the reader, the emphasis invariably shifts from plot and (moral) message to suggestion, symbolism, and mood. This modernist development in the shaping of the short story, in which Mansfield played a crucial role (Dunn 202, Van Gunsteren 108–115), became especially influential, to the extent that focalization, interior monologue, symbolism, epiphany, and slice-of-life are still among the defining features of the short story today. Nevertheless, this general development should not make us forget that proto-modernist and modernist writers also adopted other narrative modes to turn the moralizing and plot-bound Victorian tale into a literary form suited to the modern age and its aesthetics. Indeed, several writers experimented with first-person narration, the reigning mode of the nineteenth-century tale: Rudyard Kipling introduced uncertainty and ellipsis in his otherwise traditional and plot-bound first-person narratives; Joseph Conrad undermined narrative authority by multiplying his narrators and narrative frames; and Virginia Woolf staged excessively hesitant and self-reflexive narrators in stories such as “An Unfinished Novel,” “The Mark on the Wall,” or “The Lady in the Looking-Glass.” Mansfield’s short fiction contains a surprising number of first-person narratives as well—surprising, because her short stories are, like those of Joyce, often cited as textbook examples of free indirect discourse and focalization. Moreover, in the span of her short career, Mansfield’s first-person narratives undergo a considerable alteration: from satirical and autobiographical first-person narration to a subtle and highly flexible narrative form that perfectly realizes her poetics of impassioned objectivity and cultivation of an intensely felt impersonal style (Head 110; Coelsch-Foisner 98–99). Mansfield’s short fiction thus shows that the short story’s movement from telling to showing need not involve the extinction of the narrative ‘I.’ The “Vignettes” and other prose poems that Mansfield wrote and, to some extent published, in 1907 are the first texts in which an ‘I’ appears. Yet because of their poetical quality (they are collected in Vincent O’Sullivan’s edition of Mansfield’s poetry) and relative absence of narrative development, their ‘I’ resembles more the ‘I’ of lyrical poetry than that of an actual first-person narrator. As in lyrical poetry, moreover, the speaker seems quite close to the actual author. Several small details suggest this [End Page 150] connection: “Vignette III” alludes to Mansfield’s cello, and “Vere” in “Westminster Cathedral” and “Carlotta” in “Summer in Winter” refer to actual persons (86). In general, the “Vignettes” revolve around small...

To write a book is to create a dwelling. Ali Smith’s novels are equal parts narrative and blueprint in the sense that they usher the reader into spaces, homes, habitats, and residences. Thus, an author is surely an architect – someone who designs and plans stories on top of stories – someone concerned with form and function, esthetic and purpose. Smith’s 2014 novel How to Be Both abounds with images of homes and roofs and doors. This essay is interested in architectural and literary thresholds, thresholds that welcome movement and exchange. Such spaces facilitate a type of narrative reciprocity between the novel’s two sections. Smith thus expands the concept of the traditional frame narrative and creates what I call a reciprocal frame narrative focused on exchange instead of embeddedness. In this essay, I explore the architecture of and in How to Be Both to better understand the connections between the two protagonists, George and Francescho.

Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa

In modern descriptions of biblical theology, attempts to distinguish it from dogmatic or systematic theology have often focused on the latter’s use of extrabiblical or “philosophical” concepts and categories in expounding Christian doctrine. In his recent volume entitled Biblical Theology: The God of the Christian Scriptures, John Goldingay initially affirms this method of distinguishing between the disciplines, but his subsequent treatment of the Bible’s teaching about God affords an excellent opportunity to discuss whether this approach to the distinction is in fact practicable. Through an appreciative engagement of Goldingay’s work, this essay will discuss (1) the need for an alternative way of distinguishing biblical theology from dogmatic theology and (2) how Goldingay’s treatment of scriptural teaching on God in particular might help to address perceived tensions between the Bible’s portrayal of God and classical accounts of God that are frequently viewed with suspicion in modern biblical scholarship.