Authority Of Bible Research Articles

Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America

In Messianic Fulfillments, Hayes Peter Mauro combines art history, religious studies, and Native American history to examine four strains of evangelical Christian visual and textual representations of Native Americans, from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Each chapter covers a particular group: Puritans, Quakers, Mormons, and progressive Social Gospel Christians. Mauro walks the reader through forty-six illustrations (paintings, lithographs, engravings, life masks, and photographs), explaining the artists’ training, backgrounds, and composition choices, along with the reception and provenance of their works. He discusses the visual languages of the artists and especially their “chromatic metaphors,” which not only helped solidify racial categories but also granted them spiritual meaning (213). Because the small illustrations are black and white, the reader must find larger color illustrations to do his explanations justice. The section on Mormons curiously relies on twenty-first century reproductions of nineteenth century works. Mauro focuses on the depictions of the conversion processes, arguing that “the ‘deviant’ Indian and the ‘normative’ Anglo were polarizing constructs that were metaphorically staged in image and text and especially in material culture” (2). These traditions all “advocate[d] forms of Christian American triumphalism” (5), and many within these traditions made “‘empirical’ claims that such physiological racial distinctions had a direct correlation with intellectual and moral capacities as well as a relative need for Christian salvation” (7).His definition of “evangelical Christianity” emphasizes evangelism—that is, conversion efforts—but not evangelicals’ privileging of biblical authority. Latter-Day Saints, due to their addition of the Book of Mormon to the body of scripture, would usually be excluded from most definitions of that phrase. While some Quakers took steps toward evangelicalism in the nineteenth century, many Quakers did not. While these denominations may fall under a very broad definition of “evangelical Christians,” the emphasis on these groups means that many prominent evangelical missionary groups are excluded from discussion. Within his description of Calvinism, some readers may find his close association of “works” with salvation among the Puritans unsettling. To most Puritans, fulfillment of the law and completing one’s calling through work were outward manifestations of a justification that an individual has little role in—salvation was the work of God alone. His analysis of New England’s visual compositions is more convincing, especially in terms of Puritans as inspirational subjects for Second Great Awakening artwork and its celebration and reinterpretation of John Eliot’s evangelism.The chapter on Quakers explores the art of Benjamin West, Edward Hicks, and others. Quaker artists idealized Native American–Quaker interactions but tended to “depict encounters between Quaker exemplars and racial Others” and tied their religious conversion to their full inclusion in the emerging market economy (63). Academically trained Mormon artists used their conventions to convey the subjugated place of racial Others, especially Lamanites (ancestors of Native Americans), in the Mormon worldview. To early Mormons, this helped justify violence against Utes and Paiutes who resisted the invaders of their Utah homelands. Mauro interprets Social Gospel Christianity as the inheritor of earlier evangelical trends and argues that the Hampton and Carlisle Institutes manifested Social Gospel evangelicalism. The transformation of “Others” into commercial and industrious people who would resemble Euro-Americans to the extent possible was all part of their salvation, though their racial distinctiveness was always emphasized in the institutions’ staged photographs.In his analysis of specific works, and the visual traditions they reflected, Mauro’s analysis of composition, chromatic metaphors, and artists’ racial assertions will be instructive to ethnohistorians, anthropologists, text-based historians, and art historians.

Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives by Ranjan Ghosh

MLR, .,   Judy A. Hayden and Daniel J. Worden put Emperor into the context of contemporary mockery at the seriousness of men of letters (rather than the Royal Society itself), interpreting the play as an attack on the belief in a plurality of worlds. Behn references Lucian’s Icaromenippus, Godwin’s e Man in the Moone, de Villars ’s Count of Gabalis, and Wilkins’s e Discovery of a World in the Moon, and knew Fontenelle’s Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes, which she translated in the following year. ere she may criticize Fontenelle’s failure ‘to recognise scripture and church authorities on the issue’ (p. ), but the editors do not mention her questioning of biblical authority in matters of science in the preface to her translation, nor the common strategy of avoiding charges of blasphemy by paying lip-service to religious orthodoxy. Importantly, they highlight the play’s gender aspect, drawing attention to Behn’s belief in women’s intellectual equality with men, and to Emperor’s commonsensical female and foolish male characters. However , Balliardo’s fantastic theories also illustrate the fact that art, science, alchemy, and magical thinking did not yet occupy separate realms in Restoration thinking, as Elaine Hobby and James Hogarth point out in their forthcoming edition of Emperor (e Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn,  vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vol. ). Whether ‘Behn’s political voice resounds loudly’ (p. ) in this farce is a matter of contention among scholars. Hayden and Worden interpret Balliardo’s patriarchal ‘autocracy’ as a ‘trope’ for the ‘tyranny’ of the royal ‘patriarch’, James II, whose promotion of Catholics and attempts at religious toleration ‘miscalculated his people’s wishes’ and threatened to rush him ‘headlong towards self-destruction’ (p. ). Behn, however, was generally not a follower of Filmer’s ideology which likened the monarch’s power over his subjects to that of a father over his family. Two appendices give brief biographical information about Behn and Fatouville. As the volume is addressed to both students and scholars (p. ), the annotations might have benefited from more explanations of obsolete words, and especially of changes in the meaning of words confusing to modern readers. ere are also some unfortunate errors, such as the misdating of the Rye House Plot (p. ), or the false attribution of the humorous completion of Bellemante’s verse-lines in Emperor .  to Scaramouch instead of Harlequin (p. ). Notwithstanding, the edition offers numerous fresh insights and is sure to be a valuable resource and guide for all those interested in Behn’s intriguing rewriting of commedia elements, and her amusing satire of texts about lunar travel. U  V M R Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives. Ed. by R G. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. e essays in this ambitious volume combine depth and breadth, and include contributions from leading scholars in the fields of philosophy and literature. Its  Reviews consideration of nineteen important figures means that the volume will be of interest both to those researching individual philosophers’ work and its relationship to poetry, and also to readers wishing to gain an overview of ‘continental’ approaches. e thinkers discussed are the following: Heidegger, Benjamin, Bataille , Arendt, Gadamer, Lacan, Adorno, Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Derrida (the only one not to be named in the title of the chapter devoted to him by Leslie Hill), Badiou, Nancy, Rancière, Kristeva, and Agamben. Placed first in the volume, Heidegger is the anchor because his interpretation of Hölderlin was so influential, in the French context in particular. Subsequent thinkers engage with Heidegger as they reflect on poetry; for instance, Bruno Bosteels situates Badiou’s thought ‘with and Against Heidegger’ (p. ). Among the many clear essays are James Risser’s discussion of Gadamer, for whom poetry is ‘a quiet word’ that offers intimacy in a world of estrangement (p. ), Ian James’s concise presentation of Nancy’s imprecise view of poetry, perhaps hard to pin down because it involves the senses as well as affect, and the suggestion by Cecilia Sjöholm that philosophy, for Arendt, can engage with the world ‘as if’ when it ‘listens’ to poetry...

Encounters in the Dark: Identity Formation in the Jacob Story by Noel Forlini Burt

Reviewed by: Encounters in the Dark: Identity Formation in the Jacob Story by Noel Forlini Burt Brian Peterson noel forlini burt, Encounters in the Dark: Identity Formation in the Jacob Story (SBLSS 96; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020). Pp. viii + 186. Paper $33. Noel Forlini Burt’s central purpose in this work is to examine the meaning of the Jacob narrative, specifically Jacob’s encounter with God at the Jabbok, for the biblical author’s proposed postexilic audience. In the introduction, B. sets forth her methodology and gives a summary of each chapter. Using a self-described “eclectic” (p. 2) methodology, B. draws on collective memory studies, while employing an “array of lenses, including deconstruction, psychoanalytic theory, feminist analysis, Levinasian ethics, narratology, and socionarratology” (p. 3). B. divides her study into six chapters: The Name, The Face, The Wound, The Dark, The Crossing, and Facing the Dark. In chap. 1, B. covers the implications Jacob’s name had for the immediate narrative in Genesis 32, and for Jacob’s life. She also examines the role that the names Israel and Jacob had for the nation. B. ends the chapter with a detailed treatment of the implications and ambiguity associated with “The Name’s” (i.e., God’s) refusal to disclose the divine name to Jacob at the Jabbok. This examination gives way to chap. 2, where B. studies the deep theological and narratival meaning that the motif of the “face” has in the Jacob narrative and the larger ancestral narratives. She examines the significance of the author’s use of the word “face” specifically zeroing in on Jacob’s nocturnal face-to-face encounter with the “man” at the Jabbok/Peniel and Jacob’s face-to-face reunion with Esau the following day. Focusing in chap. 3 on the literal “wound” inflicted on Jacob by the “Wound” (i.e., Elohim/Ish—B.’s terminology), B. examines the implications of this wounding event for the life of Jacob (and Israel) and how his earlier experiences of wounding led him to this integral moment in his life. Building on this, the motif of darkness found in the Jacob cycle and the Jabbok event serves as the backdrop for chap. 4. B. examines the numerous ways in which literal and metaphorical darkness informs the reader about the greater purposes of the author. From the “darkness” of Rebekah’s womb and Isaac’s eyes when Jacob deceived him, to the “darkness” of the Bethel encounter and the Jabbok wrestling event, the motif offers B. another point of contact for making application of the text. In chap. 5, B. undertakes a diachronic analysis of the Jacob narrative especially as it relates to the postexilic community. Drawing on collective memory theory, B. offers an overview of the pertinent literature related to one’s understanding of the connections [End Page 484] between Israel/Jacob and Edom/Esau and the possible Sitz im Leben that may have fostered the development of the Jacob-Esau accounts as well as the connections between Israel/Jacob and Aram/Laban. This chapter leads naturally to B.’s concluding chapter, where she summarizes her findings by focusing on the theological and ethical implications as well as the “political strategies” for her proposed audience. In her concluding comments, B. notes, “[T]he images [of] . . . name, face, and dark—each attest to the complexity of the postexilic community’s relationship to God and the dark time space of the exile” (p. 164). She follows this with the comment, “The chapters ‘The Wound’ and ‘The Crossing’ articulate the proposition of specific political strategies for the postexilic community” (p. 165). True to her proposed methodology, B. is to be commended for her grasp and utilization of a broad range of literature on this topic. She even engages with the archaeological data related to Edom and Israel’s development (pp. 143–47). That said, B. makes a few questionable comments that some may find problematic. For example, her assertion that Abraham placed Ishmael on Hagar’s shoulder when he sent them away (p. 46) seems to be reading too much into the grammar. And on p. 77 she states that Rebekah comforted Isaac after his father’s death, but...

Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther by Mark Chinca

Reviewed by: Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther by Mark Chinca Barbara Newman Mark Chinca. Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv, 299. 9 illus. $80.00. Philosophy, as Plato famously said, is meditation on death. The biblical author Jesus ben Sirach similarly wrote, “In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Sir 7:40). Mark Chinca’s careful study [End Page 294] traces select Christian attempts to obey that precept from the thirteenth century through the sixteenth, with a coda on Descartes. His method is partly rhetorical, partly psychological, as he parses the fine distinctions among various techniques for meditating. Beyond his specific focus on the four last things (death, judgment, hell, and heaven), Chinca examines modes of meditation per se as a devotional exercise. According to the jacket copy, meditating on death was an important premodern technique “for developing a sense of individual selfhood.” But Chinca’s work hardly bears out that claim if we take “individual selfhood” in its usual sense, for the goal of these devout meditations was in no way to cultivate or express one’s unique personality. It was rather to internalize universal truths so as to take personal responsibility for them. At one point Chinca devotes ten pages to the maxim “all humans are mortal,” showing how reiterated exempla impressed it on the believer’s soul. Modes of death vary, as in Leonard Cohen’s haunting Jewish meditation: “And who by fire, who by water,/Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,/Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,/Who in your merry merry month of May,/Who by very slow decay,/And who shall I say is calling?” But medieval treatises did not encourage speculation on how death might come. They insisted instead that it would come, making that certainty the touchstone of the believer’s approach to life. Chinca’s first chapter treats three influential texts by Bonaventure: De regimine animae, Soliloquium, and De triplici via. Although all three are in Latin, they adapt traditional monastic exercises for secular users. De triplici via introduces the familiar scheme of three spiritual “ways”: purgative, illuminative, and unitive. Concentrating on such terms as gradus and scala, Chinca argues that in the Benedictine Rule, the ladder of the soul’s progress with its rungs is a metaphor drawn from artisanal labor, since the monastery was conceived as a spiritual workshop. But in Bonaventure these terms become equivocal—sometimes metaphors, but sometimes technical terms for stages in a systematic scheme of meditation. Always methodical, Bonaventure directs the soul to turn its “ray of contemplation” in four directions—toward its interior, to see how it has been “formed by nature, deformed by sin, and reformed by grace” (60); toward external things to learn contemptus mundi; toward what is below it to attain fear of death, judgment, and hell; and finally toward what is above it to cultivate longing for celestial joy. Within each of these contemplations, the Soliloquium provides detailed points and images for the exercitant to ponder, in a program meant to be repeated frequently to enhance its transformative power. [End Page 295] Chapter 2 deals with the Somme le Roi, a handbook compiled by the Dominican Friar Laurent for King Philip III of France in 1279. Though not original with this author, the Somme le Roi outpaced many comparable works. Its ars moriendi chapters were continually copied for two centuries, making their way into print and multiple translations. The work sends its reader on an imaginative journey: “go out of yourself, go out of this world, learn to die, separate your soul from your body in thought. Send your heart into the other world—that is, into heaven, hell, and purgatory” (66). Dante took that journey, as did many visionaries. But the purpose of the exercise is less to create vivid pictures of the afterlife than to keep death before the mind’s eye at all times. The believer should “learn to die” not like the worldly wise...

Reconstructing the Temple: The Royal Rhetoric of Temple Renovation in the Ancient Near East and Israel

Reconstructing the Temple: The Royal Rhetoric of Temple Renovation in the Ancient Near East and Israel

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

Defending National Loyalty: Yoram Hazony on Nationalism

Nationalism according to Hazony is the view that the world ought to consist of independent nation states, each constituted at bottom by the loyalty granted to it by its individual constituents in return for its nurturing and protecting the prior loyalties granted by them to their families, clans, and tribes. This view contains three unresolved difficulties. (1) It claims to provide a wholesale alternative to Lockean and post-Lockean constitutionalism, though unlike Locke et al. it fails to differentiate political from apolitical loyalties. (2) It cites biblical Israel as the model for loyalty-based nationalism but disregards the biblical prophets' insistence that national loyalty must be grounded in obedience to the (divinely revealed) law, not vice versa. (3) It limits what it calls the Bible's “political philosophy” to putative “natural laws” or moral principles, while overlooking the biblical authors' unobtrusive self-distancing from prophetic moralizing when, facing the prospect of their nation's long-term exile, they quietly encourage what amounts to a political–philosophical examination of the merit of biblical law as such, e.g., by calling it “your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the nations.”

Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America. By Daniel Vaca (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2019) 329 pp. $39.95

Historians long took fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals at face value when they claimed to be champions of “the old-time religion.” In fact, the dramatic tension in leading scholarly accounts of modern American Protestantism often emanated from the epic clash between these putative conservatives, intent on preserving biblical authority and essential doctrines, and their modernizing liberal counterparts.But in recent years, this consensus has come under fire, as a rising chorus of scholars has insisted that evangelicals were, from the very beginning, modernizers in their own right. Books by Gloege, Dochuk, and others have sought to redefine evangelicalism, not as a stable tradition marked by an unwavering commitment to an unchanging deposit of faith, but as a profoundly anti-institutional orientation that prized disruptive innovation and despised all would-be regulators, federal and denominational alike. In these scholars’ telling “the old-time religion” was always, first and foremost, a brand.1Vaca’s Evangelicals Incorporated represents a brilliant addition to this emerging literature. Drawing from previously untapped archival sources and interviews with a number of leading figures in the publishing industry, Vaca explores how “books have served as engines of transdenominational evangelical consciousness” (12). In the modern United States, that consciousness expanded as publishers sought more expansive markets for their books. Although companies such as Eerdmans and Zondervan arose in the early twentieth century to serve relatively small Dutch Reformed communities, they always had broader ambitions. Hence, as Vaca shows, “[Eerdmans’] branding strategies…prioritized capacious concepts, which allowed consumers and supporters to associate the firm with whatever strain of Protestantism they valued most” (104). In the early going, the company styled its carefully curated list as “distinctive,” thus making inroads into a wider world of fundamentalist readers. Its leadership, however, always longed to connect with a mass market. By the 1940s, it increasingly seemed that one way was to refashion itself as an “evangelical” publisher. In latching onto the term—which evoked an aspirationally broad-based, though decidedly white, coalition of conservative Protestants—companies like Eerdmans and Zondervan were not so much promoting an evangelicalism that already existed out in the world. Rather, Vaca contends, they were teaming up with fledgling organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals in efforts to bring just such an evangelical public into being.This project gained momentum with the emergence of the Christian Booksellers Association, founded in 1950, and with the subsequent proliferation of evangelical bookstores across suburban landscapes. Vaca persuasively argues that the establishment of such bookstores as subcultural spaces situated within mass-market shopping venues expedited the diffusion of evangelical tropes and forms into the American mainstream. The rise of this “ambient evangelicalism” did not go unnoticed in the nation’s executive suites. By the 1980s, major New York publishing houses were seeking to acquire smaller evangelical publishers, many of which saw God’s hand at work in the deal. As Vaca relates, “the evangelical publishing industry put faith in corporate finance as the best way to reap ever more abundant metaphysical and financial harvests” (163). Insisting that evangelical publishers’ motivations are not reducible to either the material or the spiritual, Vaca casts these firms instead as purveyors of “financial faith” (182). Their extraordinary success can be measured in a variety of ways, but most of all in the fact that, by the early-twenty-first century, evangelicalism was not merely “an identity category and a media market” (227). It had become, as Vaca declares in closing, “the commercial religion of our time” (234).Evangelicals Incorporated is an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship. Vaca’s approach reflects not only his dexterity with historical and ethnographic methodologies but also his ability to weave together theoretical insights drawn from a variety of different fields, including religious studies, American history, whiteness studies, the history of the book, the history of capitalism, and more. What emerges as a result is a provocative and compelling reinterpretation of evangelicalism in the modern United States with which scholars and general readers alike will be wrestling for a long time to come.

The “Molten Sea” Revisited

Abstract According to the biblical account (1 Kgs 7:23–26), in the middle of the courtyard of the temple stood a large water vessel of cast brass. Commentators and researchers have put forward various suggestions as to the form of the Molten Sea and its purpose in the temple. In this article, I argue that the description in 1 Kings offers definitive conclusions as to the biblical author’s intent regarding the form of the “Sea” and its volume (in בת units), and can resolve the outstanding question in the literature as to the equivalent of a בת in modern units of volume measurement. I shall also point to evidence in support of the view of other researchers that the Molten Sea held a purely symbolic role, while the practical functions of water for sacrificial purposes were provided by the bases (1 Kgs 7:27).

Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

The Metaphor of the Divine as Planter of the People: Stinking Grapes or Pleasant Planting? By Jennifer Metten Pantoja

In this revision of her PhD thesis from UCLA, Jennifer Metten Panjola sets out to trace the development of the root metaphor ‘God as planter of the people’ in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and in the literature of the Second Temple period. In chapter 1 she sets out her overarching aim: ‘to demonstrate that the biblical literature portrays the divine/human relationship as a reflection of the natural environment’ (p. 1). She takes issue with those biblical interpreters who emphasize the mystery and transcendence of God in the Hebrew Bible, maintaining that this picture of the deity is the product of Western theology rather than study of the text. But she also notes the tension within the text, which ‘depicts the divine as anthropomorphically present and unbounded at the same time’ (p. 4). It is this tension in the portrayal of YHWH as both physically present yet also transcendent that explains why the biblical authors so often use metaphors to depict the deity. Metten Panjola then notes the prevalence in the Hebrew Bible of imagery taken from the plant world and horticulture, which leads to her chosen focus of YHWH as gardener and the root (or conceptual, as she terms it) metaphor of YHWH as planter of the people.

The Hebrew Bible as Mythic “Vocabulary”: Towards a New Comparative Mythology

In this article, I argue that the history of the study of myth in the Hebrew Bible has been, and continues to be, shaped in negative ways by an essentially Romantic Nationalist understanding of the relationship between a people and their traditions. I then argue that more appropriate ways of modeling the construction of the Bible’s myths, combined with new investigations into the historical development of biblical traditions themselves, reveals a surprising continuity between the myth-making activity of biblical authors and editors and that of all those who retell and adapt biblical traditions in extrabiblical materials. I conclude that the existence of large-scale continuities between the adaptation of biblical traditions in different periods allows for a new kind of comparative investigation. By studying the use of biblical traditions in biblical literature, extrabiblical literature, and art, on approximately equal terms, we can gain new insights about the construction of biblical myths themselves, while connecting the study of the Hebrew Bible far more closely to the study of other bodies of tradition, elsewhere and later on.

“SOLA SCRIPTURA” AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE REFORMATION AND THE RECENT “GAY DEBATE” IN THE DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH

Although “ sola Scriptura ” was an important doctrine of the Reformation, it was not perceived to be a generic and exclusive principle that Scripture or the Bible had final authority with regards to any conceivable topic. The Reformation, with “ sola Scriptura ” as rallying cry, played a significant role in the development of critical biblical scholarship, and it was only after the emergence of evangelical fundamentalism in the late nineteenth century that the reinterpretation of “ sola Scriptura ” created a less accommodating attitude towards critical biblical scholarship. It is against this backdrop that the function of biblical authority in the recent “gay debate” in the Dutch Reformed Church will be discussed. In conclusion it will be asked whether “ sola Scriptura ” led to the Bible becoming a type of “paper pope” when the Counter-Reformation triggered the Protestant emphasis on the authority of Scripture to counter papal authority.

The Liturgy of Creation: Understanding Calendars in Old Testament Context

The Liturgy of Creation: Understanding Calendars in Old Testament Context

Archaeology and History of Eighth-Century Judah

Archaeology and History of Eighth-Century Judah

Understanding Scientific Theories of Origins: Cosmology, Geology, and Biology in Christian Perspective

Understanding Scientific Theories of Origins: Cosmology, Geology, and Biology in Christian Perspective

The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel

The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel

Conflicting Worldviews in Acts

This article examines the conceptual encounter of coexisting worldviews in the lands around the Mediterranean through the concept of the oikoumene, ‘the inhabited world’. Different cultures, such as the Roman and the Jewish, adopted the term, but distinctively adapted it around their own understanding. The result was a tension for early Christians between two parallel worldviews. The biblical authors considered it significant to elucidate the genuine Lord of the oikoumene, who was thus its centre. Luke employs the oikoumene in Luke-Acts and provides his own worldview, particularly, in Acts 17. Here he intends to suggest that the Roman oikoumene is to be gradually supplanted by the Christian oikoumene (17:6). At the same time, Luke claims that the Acts’ narrative portrays the inhabited world where the early Christians lived as restored into the authentic world created and ruled by God through Jesus (17:31). Similarly, the inhabited world represented in Acts is the world that God designed all nations (God’s offspring) to inhabit, and God has allotted the boundaries of the nations where the people are to dwell.

Edenic Equality and the Rejection of “Right Divine” in Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women (1810)

ABSTRACTLucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations (1810) traces the deplorable condition of women in western civilization from “ill-fated Eve” in the Garden of Eden to the daughters of “fair Albion” in the eighteenth century. In her first epistle, Aikin characterizes the “natural” subordination of women to men as the “Right Divine” of kings to censure those, like the “great [Republican] Milton,” who condemn the religious legitimacy of monarchical rule, yet hypocritically sanction man’s despotic power over women by citing biblical authority. This essay explores how Aikin’s epic poem challenges the biblical origins of female subordination by offering an alternative exegesis of Genesis. I argue that Aikin wields her considerable scriptural knowledge to contest Eve’s culpability in the Fall, thereby refuting the religious pretext for women’s subjugation. Informed by the Dissenting tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as prior feminist re-imaginings of Adam and Eve, Aikin positions herself as a theological and poetic authority fit to pen an epic revision of Genesis to rival John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674).

"This Piece of Parchment Will Shake the World": The Mystery of Mar Saba and the Evangelical Prototype of a Secular Fiction Genre

Abstract: The 1940 evangelical novel The Mystery of Mar Saba by James H. Hunter shares with a later, secular genre of novels I call gospel thrillers a common plot (the discovery of a new gospel from the first century and a race to prove or disprove its authenticity) but also common anxieties about biblical authority mapped onto geopolitical, theological, and personal registers. I triangulate these themes with the modern professional study of the Bible, which has also produced a vulnerable yet authoritative biblical text and which has, in surprising fashion, resurrected for its own purposes The Mystery of Mar Saba .