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

Journal Article RELIGIONS OF WESTERN ANTIQUITY Get access The Covenant Formulary in Old Testament, Jewish, and Early Christian Writings. By KLAUS BALTZER. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971. xiii+221 pages. $12.00 hb. L.C. No 75-123504. THOMAS W. MANN THOMAS W. MANN Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume XLII, Issue 3, September 1974, Pages 586-a–586, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/XLII.3.586-a Published: 01 September 1974

Books Discussed:McFague, Sallie. Literature and the Christian Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966.. Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology. Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1975.. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1982.. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1987.. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993.. Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1997.. Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2001.. A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2008.. Blessed Are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2013.Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world. (Robert Frost)In a career spanning four decades years and encompassing nine monographs, Sallie McFague has pursued a consistent set of theological questions and critical social issues, articulating strategies for linking the study of religious language to contemporary political threats ranging from nuclear annihilation (Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age, 1987) to environmental degradation (A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, 2008) to economic collapse (Blessed Are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint, 2013). While other contemporary theologians have responded to these challenges by arguing for environmental ethics, McFague reaches her conclusion (kenotic theology) from a very different intellectual trajectory.1For thirty years McFague taught at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, where she served as Carpenter Professor of Theology. For the past fourteen years, she has been a Distinguished Theologian in Residence at Vancouver School of Theology. Few scholars remain professionally active in their ninth decade of life, but blessed are the readers who have such a companion and guide.Her most recent work, Blessed Are the Consumers (2013), addresses not just theologians but clergy and fellow citizens who seek to understand how faith communities can engage with a broken world in ways that respect the gravity of the problems and the urgency of religious and spiritual convictions. While politics, economics, and ethics are never far from her purview, she avoids specific programs of reform a la Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, political parties, or the work of church organizations and NGOs. Her chapter titles are beguiling invitations to dialogue and reflection (see chapter 1, 'But Enough about Me:' What Does Augustine's Confessions Have to Do with Facebook? and chapter 6, 'It's Not About You': Kenosis as a Way to Live).McFague has devoted her career to asking hard questions about what early Anglicans called the godly, righteous, and sober fife and what modem Americans just call living well. Throughout her oeuvre she turns to the parable of the Good Samaritan to meditate on our relationship to the planet-to all of the people and forms of life on earth. Who, indeed, is my neighbor?When we consider the development and range of her scholarship, we see a theologian whose theology is grounded in timeless issues (the nature of God, creation, humanity, sin, salvation) but adapted to timely contemporaiy themes. With a finely nuanced, reflective voice, and deep sensitivity to the role of language in shaping and reflecting our world, she situates current political and economic crises in their inescapably theological context. Global warming is a theological problem; so are hunger and poverty. To borrow the tide of a recent book (2008), she has helped to create a new climate for theology. …

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...

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.

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).

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

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

Understandings of the Church. Edited by E. Glenn Hinson. Sources of Early Christian Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. x + 116 pp. - Early Christian Spirituality. Edited by E. Glenn Hinson. Sources of Early Christian Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. viii + 119 pp. - Volume 57 Issue 2

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.

This paper considers the role of the Spirit within early Christian writers’ use of prosopological exegesis, an interpretive method which seeks to identify various persons (prosopa) as the “true” speakers or addressees of a Scriptural text in which they are otherwise not in view. While scholars are increasingly recognizing that, for some early Christian writers, the Spirit could himself be a speaking agent, there remains no systematic analysis of the texts in which the Spirit speaks from his own prosopon. After making just such an analysis, focusing on key texts in the writings of Tertullian and Justin Martyr, this paper concludes that the need for divine testimony concerning both the Father and the Son was the central motivating factor for assigning ot quotations to the prosopon of the Spirit. In particular, this paper argues that this emphasis on the Spirit’s role as one who testifies is a direct outgrowth of the portrayal of the Spirit in the Johannine corpus and arose in the context of conflict with Judaism concerning the cessation of the Spirit. By making this connection, we have a new means by which to glimpse the theological dynamics at work in the pre-Nicene period that would contribute to the development of a distinctively Trinitarian, and not merely binitarian, view of God.

The use of scriptural names is a basic building block of ancient paideia as it is represented by Philo and Christian ecclesiastical writers after him. After learning letters, and then syllables, students would learn words (ὀνόματα), including through lists of onomastica intended to aid students both in learning to write and in ordering the world. I argue that the grammatical-ethical instruction that is found in Philo’s and early Christian writers’ investment in the practice of writing names in the process of paideia is also evident in the paratextual practice of marking sacred names. Lists variously attributed to Pseudo-Dorotheus, Pseudo-Epiphanius, and Pseudo-Hippolytus attest to the onomastic tradition preserved in manuscripts, while the names of scriptural figures have been marked almost as nomina sacra in the texts of 3 Corinthians, Jude, and 1 and 2 Peter, which were bound with the Bodmer Composite Codex.

Gwatkin's Early Christian Writers - Selections from Early Writers, illustrative Church History to the time of Constantine, by H. M. Gwatkin, M.A. Macmillan & Co.1893. Pp. ix. 167 price 4s. net. - Volume 8 Issue 3

Some remarks on the Christological interpretation of Scripture as hermeneutical key of New Testament authors Some remarks are made in the following article regarding the christological use of Scripture by the early Christian writers. It is argued that the origin of this approach was found by the New Testament writers in Christ’s own interpretation of these Scriptures. Acts 8:26-40 is used as an example of how a “different” meaning was given. It is further stated that the early Christian writers could easily bridge the gap to Jesus of Nazareth being the Lord and Messiah with terminology in the LXX which lends itself to this purpose. After indicating personal preferences for and/or accessibility of some of these Scriptures, the article concludes that the early Christian writers continued the tradition that these Scriptures were God’s word and authoritative, but they interpreted them christologically.