The rhetoric of "magic" in early christian discourse: Gender, power and the construction of "Heresy"

Reviewed by: Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse by Callie Callon Colleen M. Conway Callie Callon Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse London: T&T Clark, 2019. Pp. 173. $114.00. What might a man's hair or gait convey about his Christian moral character? Quite a bit, if early Christian writers such as Tertullian or Clement of Alexandria are to be believed. In Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse, Callie Callon shows how early Christian writers shared the same "physiognomic consciousness" as their non-Christian contemporaries. Both Christian and non-Christian writers assumed that a person's physical characteristics, when read with skill, revealed the truth about his (or less often her) moral character. Given the work that has already been done on physiognomic texts in the ancient world, this is not an especially groundbreaking conclusion. Nor does Callon present it as such. But she is right in her observation that the use of physiognomic ideas in early Christian rhetoric has been underexamined. For this reason, the book is a valuable contribution in at least two ways. As Callon argues, attending to the function of physiognomic details offers a more nuanced understanding of early Christian rhetoric. And because physiognomic ideas were so closely linked to constructions of gender, the book is also a significant addition to gender critical studies of the early church. [End Page 677] Callon begins with an overview of the widespread use of ancient physiognomy across multiple genres, all of which was put to similar purpose, namely, "to help persuade an audience to either support or disdain the individual being portrayed" (21). Nevertheless, the meanings of physiognomic references were variable both in their application and interpretation. Here Callon also highlights a tension inherent to physiognomic thought. On the one hand, ancient authors refer to physical traits as though they are inherently natural indicators that reveal a man's true character, despite efforts he may make to conceal it. On the other hand, the fact that authors regularly offered instructions on how to walk, talk, or otherwise manipulate the body to achieve a desired physiognomic outcome, suggests that such traits were not natural as much as learned. While Callon suggests several ways by which this and other tensions might be resolved, more to the point is her claim that such logical inconsistencies did not threaten the legitimacy of the physiognomic enterprise in all of its variations. The rest of the book traces the different ways that references to the body functioned in early Christian rhetoric. Perhaps most obviously, a rhetorical focus on bodily defects added to the arsenal of ways writers could denigrate theological opponents. Meanwhile, highlighting positive physical features was useful for supporting claims of Christian moral superiority. As an example, Callon suggests that when the author of the apocryphal Acts of Peter contrasts Simon Magus's "shrill" or "weak and useless" voice with Peter's "strong" and "great" one, he is likely using physiognomic indicators to showcase Simon's effeminacy (47–49). Chapter Two details this and other examples of the use of physiognomy against so-called heretics. Chapter Three shows how writers drew on physiognomy to describe (and construct?) the ideal Christian, thereby solidifying group identity. Here Callon shows us Clement of Alexandria pronouncing on a range of physiognomic topics, including the proper grooming of hair, the necessity of avoiding the effeminate "mincing gait," not to mention tips for how to avoid sweating too much. Notable in this chapter is a section that discusses the somewhat distinctive admonitions to Christian ascetics. Both male and female should be aware of appearances, but in this case, pale faces and unkempt bodies reveal the truth of the ascetic's character and devotion. Chapter Four extends and confirms the work of Stephanie Cobb (Dying to Be Men: Gender in Early Christian Martyr Texts [New York: Columbia University Press, 2008]). Here Callon explores how physical descriptions of martyrs such as Polycarp, the Martyrs of Lyon, and Prudentius affirm their masculinity, while descriptions of their torturers were often rhetorically effeminizing. As Callon puts it, "The tortured Christian can 'win' physiognomically via bodily...

Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity

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...

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...

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.

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: The Identity of John the Evangelist: Revision and Reinterpretation in Early Christian Sources by Dean Furlong Christopher W. Skinner dean furlong, The Identity of John the Evangelist: Revision and Reinterpretation in Early Christian Sources (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020). Pp. 191. $95. This reception-historical study is a revision of the author's doctoral research at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (2017), and attends to a number of debates that existed among early Christian writers. Furlong is not concerned with the historicity of the traditions surrounding the evangelist. Instead, he argues that the view that equates John the Evangelist with the son of Zebedee stands at the end, rather than the beginning, of a long and somewhat convoluted evolutionary process; it was not an assumption shared by the earliest sources commenting on the Johannine tradition. The identification of John the Evangelist with the son of Zebedee spawned a number of inconsistencies among early Christian writers discussing the Johannine texts. These include whether "John" was exiled during the reigns of Claudius, Nero, or Domitian—all of which are suggested in early Christian texts—and whether he suffered a martyr's death earlier in the first century or died of natural causes under Trajan's reign after previously recovering from being placed in a vat of boiling oil. According to F., two Johns appear in the earliest texts and they eventually become conflated, giving rise to these inconsistencies. The book is divided into three sections of nearly equal length. The first section is entitled "The Identity of the Evangelist" and consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, F. argues that Papias—the earliest author to discuss the identity of John—is best interpreted as having spoken of two different Johns, both of whom were followers of Jesus. One is identified as the apostle and the other as the elder. In chap. 2, F. examines the competing narratives regarding John's death and seeks to resolve the tension between those authors that narrate John's martyrdom and those that speak of John's natural death. F. concludes that a resolution can be found by recognizing that these two stories originally had reference to two different individuals. The final chapter of the first section is devoted to exploring the earliest presentations of John the Evangelist. The second section of the book is entitled "Conflated Figures, Revised Narratives" and also consists of three chapters. In chap. 4, F. deals with sources that date John's exile and death during the reign of Claudius (41–54 c.e.) and, in chap. 5, looks at the dispute between Hippolytus of Rome—who attributed the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse to the apostle John—and his opponent, Gaius, who attributed them to the heretical teacher Cerinthus. After surveying the evidence, F. concludes that the claim for apostolic authorship by John the son of Zebedee could have been an intentional ploy aimed at (1) establishing the [End Page 136] apostolic authority of the two works, and (2) putting to rest lingering doubts raised by Gaius and others. The final chapter of the second section examines the traditions surrounding John's exile under the reign of Domitian. F. concludes that Eusebius is responsible for creating this "fiction" by misinterpreting and misrepresenting a handful of statements from various early authorities. The third and final section of the book consists of four chapters and represents F.'s own reconstruction of the earliest traditions surrounding John and the authorship of the Johannine literature. As stated above, his substantial concern across these chapters is to establish his thesis that the identification of the evangelist with the son of Zebedee is a late tradition, resulting from a complex process that included an admixture of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, conflation, and apologetic. A great deal of information is found in this volume, and F. should be commended for his detailed engagement with a host of ancient sources. While in places his prose is dense and reads like a dissertation, he ultimately provides a valuable service for advanced students and scholars, first by examining all of this information in one place and, second, by offering a compelling narrative that accounts for the emergence of these contradictory...

In most modern interpretations of Paul's writings and early Christian history, ethnicity is implicitly or explicitly defined as natural, inherent, immutable, or otherwise given. Paul's letters are often read to support the view that the identities of Christ-believers, in contrast to other Jews, transcend fixed, bodily characteristics we associate with ethnicity and race. After all, Paul's writings include such powerful passages as Gal 3:28: There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus. This verse is frequently invoked to support reconstructions of an inclusive and egalitarian impulse in the Jesus movement. For example, Rosemary Radford Ruether echoes Gal 3:28 when she writes that class, ethnicity, and gender are . . . specifically singled out as the divisions overcome by redemption in Christ.1 Our goal is to challenge the conceptualizations of race and ethnicity in such interpretations of Paul and early Christianity. This task arises out of our own interest in the politics and ethics of interpretation, specifically from the view that all reading is ideological.2 As scholars culturally marked as white and Christian, we feel an obligation to struggle against both racist and anti-Jewish interpretive frameworks that have served to mask and sustain white Christian privilege.3 This twofold ethical commitment leads us to favor a view of race and ethnicity that is widespread today but not typically used to interpret Paul's writings or early Christian self-definition.4 Specifically, instead of presuming that ethnicity and race are fixed aspects of identity, we approach these concepts as dynamic social constructs.5 We see them as characterized by an interaction of appeals to fluidity and fixity that serve particular political and ideological interests. Using this dynamic approach allows us to transform the ways we have been trained to think about race and ethnicity and their saliency for interpreting Paul. Our proposed model encourages a rethinking of traditional interpretations in which the understanding of ethnicity or race as given operates as a foil for a non-ethnic, all-inclusive Christianity. In this binary understanding, earliest Christianity is conceived of as a universal, voluntary movement that specifically rejected the significance of ethnoracial identification for membership and thereby broke from its Jewish roots.6 Since the universalizing image of Christianity is emphatically portrayed as voluntary or achieved, the implied or explicit contrast is a form of community that is involuntary and particularboth features frequently attributed to ethnicity and race. This understanding of early Christianity has had paradoxical effects.7 On the positive side, if Paul is interpreted as having defined religiosity as distinct from ethnoracial identifications, then Christian practices and structures that contribute to racist and ethnocentric oppression can be viewed as contravening universalitic and egalitarian ideals inherent in earliest Christianity. This kind of universal and inclusive vision of early Christianity has enabled antiracist reforms and has been central to the biblical interpretations of many ethnic and racial minorities.8 When ethnoracial differences are understood as natural and are used to explain and justify social inequalities, then it can be liberative to argue that some of Paul's teachings-and subsequent Christian interpretations of them-offer an alternative vision for human community, in which such differences are transcended, made irrelevant, or obliterated. On the negative side, however, this understanding of Christianity can have both racist and anti-Jewish effects. The view of early Christian universalism as non-ethnic can lead us to ignore the racism of our own interpretive frameworks and overlook how early Christian discourse relies on ancient modes of othering. Gay Byron's recent study demonstrates the polemical use of color symbolism in early Christian writings, including polemics that uncomfortably anticipate modern forms of racism. …

Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity

Reviewed by: Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West by Philippe Buc Michael Stewart Buc, Philippe, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West (Haney Foundation), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; cloth; pp. 496; R.R.P. US$49.95, £32.50; ISBN 9780812246858. No topic from medieval historiography sparks as much controversy in today’s world as Western Christianity’s historical attitudes towards holy war, martyrdom, and terror. Unquestionably, developments since the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 have highlighted the importance of understanding the origins of religiously sanctified warfare, martyrdom, and [End Page 274] terror. Into this divisive environment arrives the timely new monograph by the medieval historian Philippe Buc. In a rich and sophisticated study, Buc explores what he describes as the long roots of ‘Western violence’ through a dizzying array of texts, time-periods, and historical cultures as diverse as the late Roman Empire, crusader Catholic Europe, Revolutionary France, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and George Bush’s post-9/11 United States of America. Confessing that he will be focusing primarily on the ‘dark side of Western Christianity’, Buc relies on what he sees as the commonalities and not the diversities among these premodern and modern societies’ attitudes towards violence, maintaining that the ‘degree of regularity’ in their views makes his macro-approach credible and, indeed, necessary. Countering current thinking, which postulates that a more militant and more violent Christianity was a particular feature of the post-Constantine Church, Buc argues forcefully that Christianity had always paired irenic and militant ideologies. While this thesis is less revolutionary than his bibliography suggests, it is this yin and yang of pacifism and bloody militarism that forms the monograph’s core. His disparate chapters illustrate that despite outwardly irenic tendencies, the smouldering embers of intolerance could be, and often were, stoked by Christian intellectuals into conflagrations of brutal intolerance. As Buc rightly cautions, in early Christian rhetoric, ‘peace, pax, did not mean the absence of conflict but victorious conflict leading to right order and justice, iustitia’. So, while many Christian rulers and intellectuals preached pacifism and religious tolerance, they spent much of their time engaging in spiritual and material warfare. Certainly, a deft intermingling of spiritual and physical warfare had always played a role in Christian ideology. The Church Fathers were fully aware of the paradoxical pairing of militarism and pacifism in scripture. Devout fifth-century Christian intellectuals like Augustine had famously come to accept (though perhaps not as enthusiastically as Buc suggests) that ‘good’ Christians could serve in the military and destroy Rome’s enemies without committing sin. This position was not limited to a Christian society’s foreign enemies. Buc argues that from its origins, ‘Christendom struggles simultaneously against physical enemies outside, against vices inside the human being and against vicious men inside Christendom – for instance, resident Jews, false brethren (falsi fratres, see Galatians 2. 4), bad clergy, perverts, heretics – and against demons’. Buc posits that it is only by understanding these ancient Christian attitudes that we can begin to appreciate the lingering vitality of such views in both the Christian and post-Christian West. Chapter 1 reveals how American [End Page 275] war ideologies echo these early Christian militant themes. This helps to explain why America has frequently fought ‘moral wars’ against internal and external enemies. I would agree with Buc that the Christian Roman Emperors, Constantine and Justinian, would have understood the notions of exceptionalism and the easy mingling of ‘mildness and strength’ preached by American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. While recognising the innovative aspects of medieval crusade, Chapter 2 rightly points out the dangers of underestimating the extent to which these earlier militant Christian ideologies motivated eleventh-century Western crusaders. According to Buc, ‘late antique holy war slowly morphed into high medieval crusade’. So, rather than considering the indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim men, women, and children in the First Crusade of 1096–1100 as an aberration of a violent age, Buc believes we should seek its origins in the late Roman and early medieval Christian worlds. Moreover, we should not underestimate the extent to which Western crusaders were motivated by...

The purposes of this study were to gather descriptive information on male rape victims and to compare male and female victims in regard to victim and assault characteristics and immediate postrape symptoms. Data were analyzed from 74 male and 1,380 female rape victims seen at a hospital-based rape crisis program over an 8-year period. Male and female victims were similar in terms of age, race, and prior victimization, although characteristics of male and female assaults differed somewhat. Specifically, male victims were more likely to have been raped by more than one assailant and by a Caucasian assailant, and were less likely to have been physically harmed. Male victims also were rated as more depressed and hostile immediately postrape than female victims. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

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.

Reviewed by: A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism Richard Valantasis Simone Pétrement . A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism. Translated by Carol Harrison. San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1990 Pp. 486. $35.00. In this book, originally published as Dieu séparé: les origines du gnosticisme (Paris: Cerf, 1984), Pétrement argues, contrary to the current scholarly consensus, that gnosticism originated in Christianity, and that therefore gnosticism properly [End Page 468] speaking is a Christian heresy. She argues this position from two perspectives (constituting the two parts of the book): the first explores the principal gnostic myths and doctrines and their foundation in Christian writings, and the second delineates a development of Christian gnosticism. The cornerstone to Pétrement's discussion involves the "gnosticizing" tendencies of both the Pauline and the Johannine writings which contain the elements of the gnostic myth, the basic components of gnostic theology, and the theology of "grace" which prepared the way for the separation of the God of the Old Testament from the Father of Jesus Christ. Gnosticism, it is claimed, emerged from the creative interpretative reflection upon these texts. Pétrement explores four myths of gnosticism in this context: the demiurge who emerges as the creator from the radical separation of Judaism and Christianity; the seven creator angels who are personifications of the seven days of creation; the Mother who is the Spirit; and the god "Man" which (to my mind quite peculiarly) devolved from the Christological title "Son of Man." Similarly, Pétrement discusses six gnostic doctrines which also derive from Christian writings: salvation by "knowledge," which is little distinguished from salvation by faith among early Christians and early gnostics; the revealer who, as the Christian savior depicted in the Gospel of John, saves by teaching; a wide variety of gnostic docetisms about which the gnostics were not consistent (that Christ only appeared to suffer, or that Christ only appeared to be a man, or that the human Jesus was to be distinguished from the divine Christ, or that the God Christ did not have a material body); realized eschatology, a primary characteristic of gnosticism which is found also in Paul, the fourth gospel and the synoptic gospels, and which is understood as the belief that the resurrection has already happened in the life of the believer; dualism, which is the separation of God from the world into what appear as separate spheres; and freedom by grace (to my mind the most eloquent argument in the book) which refers to the liberating effect of the new revelation and the new nature bestowed on believers by the savior. Having established the possibility of finding the origins of gnostic theology and mythology in early Christian writings, Pétrement proceeds to an exposition of the development of gnosticism within Christianity. Beginning in the gnosticizing tendencies of Pauline Christianity, gnosticism developed through a number of phases. After dismissing the argument about the origin of gnosticism in Simon Magus (Simon Magus in Acts 8.9-24 was actually looking to become a bishop in a Samaritan church not aligned with Jerusalem, and his offer of money was parallel to Paul's collection for Jerusalem!), and rewriting the conflict at Corinth between Paul and Apollo as mere gnosticizing "tendency," Pétrement identifies the second phase of gnosticism in the Gospel of John which, although not itself a gnostic document, created the pool of ideas for emergent Christian gnosticism because it appears to deny the humanity of Christ. The next phase is that of the Simonian School of Antioch under the leadership of Menander who relies heavily on Johannine themes. Menander's disciples, the Christians Satumilus and Basilides, develop the first fully articulated gnostic theologies with all the themes and doctrines present. From Basilides emerges the Christian gnosticism of Valentinus, who is portrayed [End Page 469] as a theologian conciliating Platonic philosophy with Christian gnosticism, using the images and metaphors of the Old Testament as a field of speculation. And finally, Valentinianism explains the subsequent development from Christian gnosticism of Barbelognostic, Sethian, Ophite and other brands of gnosticism whose speculative systems only make sense in light of the removal of Christian references from Christian Valentinian gnosticism and...

This chapter, dedicated to a scholar who wrote on use of the Old Testament in the New, reexamines the historical relationship between the public reading of authoritative texts in the gatherings of the earliest church and early Judaism. It commences with a review the evidence about the reading of Scripture in the Church until about 400, concentrating on the Christians' use of OT writings. The chapter lists passages in early Christian writings that mention Scripture readings either from both the OT and the NT, or from the OT alone. The collects as many references as possible to the reading or possible reading of the OT in the gatherings of the early Church and Christian assemblies. This survey shows that in the Christian gathering the Law was not read until well into the third century, beginning with Origen and that Christians probably began to read OT prophets in late first century. Keywords:Christian assemblies; early Judaism; Old Testament; OT writings; scripture readings