Christian Gospels Research Articles

Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure by David Wenham

Reviewed by: Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure by David Wenham Glenn B. Siniscalchi david wenham, Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure (Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Pp. xii + 249. Paper $29.99. David Wenham’s evenhanded, concise, and accessible book is dedicated to the basic themes of contemporary research on the historical Jesus. It is strongly recommended for introductory-level college courses that are related to historical approaches to the NT writings. One of the best aspects of Jesus in Context is the comprehensive coverage of most of the pertinent subjects in the current state of historical Jesus research. Whether it is the broad contours of the Roman Empire or the Jewish matrix from which Jesus and his first followers emerged in ancient Israel, there is plenty of informative and digestible material in this book. Wenham’s impartial coverage of the current findings of Jesus research is both ecumenically sensitive and consistent with the presuppositions of Christian theology. In this way, W.’s text subtly reports that christological orthodoxy and many well-established conclusions about the historical figure of Jesus can now be seen as comrades-in-arms. W. is keen on informing the reader where the consensus of NT scholars stand with respect to Jesus and his self-understanding; his teachings, actions, and miracles; and the immediate impact that he made on his followers. One might profit from understanding the political and socioreligious contexts in which Jesus lived (part 1) and some of the major themes that characterized his sayings and ministry (part 2). Toward the beginning of Jesus in Context, W. discusses the literary sources that ancient historians commonly use to study Jesus, the geographical and archaeological discoveries that seem pertinent for the relevant contemporary studies, and the history of ancient Israel and the Roman Empire up to and including the first century of the Common Era. [End Page 168] Wenham’s text is also excellent with regard to the fundamental reliability of the canonical Gospels. He rightly reports that form criticism, redaction criticism, the fascination with the second-century apocryphal Gospels, and the notion of oral traditions in ancient Palestine are not relevant enough concerns to lead one to conclude that the Christian Gospels are unreliable. Moreover, the current state of NT scholarship is not on the side of the revision-ist views of Rudolf Bultmann (who was known for separating the theology of the canonical Gospels from whatever history might lie behind them) or the older nineteenth-century scholars who saw the Gospels as fabricated myths. In the words of W., “The skepticism that ends up with scholars concluding or implying that much gospel tradition is the creation of the early Christian church rather than Jesus is curious, to say the least. It is much more likely that the main creative genius reflected in the gospel stories and teaching was the person who inspired the Christian movement, rather than . . . his followers” (p. 76). Rather, most of the newest questers in the guild endorse the historicity of Jesus and his various teachings about the reign of God, his baptism by John the Baptist, his wondrous miracles, and his resurrection from the dead. Recognizing that Paul’s letters were not understood as inspired texts by the original recipients, W. pointedly brings home the relevance of the apostle Paul for Jesus studies: “Both these early letters and others that followed, . . . give a lot of evidence about what the first Christians said and believed about Jesus. The letters are not telling the stories of Jesus, but are dealing with issues that had arisen in the churches; their references to Jesus are all the more revealing for being incidental” (p. 47). One of W.’s areas of special interest is that the apostle Paul and the four Gospel writers were not literarily dependent on one another. Despite that barrage of technical publications on early christology and historical criticism, W.’s book should be warmly welcomed as one of the best introductory texts on the current state of the basic questions on the historical Jesus and the reliability of the NT. In terms of accessibility and depth of...

Rethinking the Origins and Purpose of Religion: Jesus, Constantine, and the Containment of Global Revolution

For sociologists, Jesus Christ and the associated Catholic Church are generally seen are regressive, conservative, and authoritarian. For this reason, Sociologists avoid reading the Bible as a textual research source. Overcoming sociological resistance, however and examining the Christian New Testament reveals a story much different than expected. While the Church may certainly be conservative, regressive, authoritarian, even predatorial, Jesus Christ and his apostles were not. Exegesis of Christian gospels reveals not a gentle shepherd of sheeple, but a revolutionary Christ that is neither conservative, gentle, nor passive—an impassioned and committed revolutionary set on progressive social change and fundamental revision of elite power structures. Keywords: Religion, Christianity, Jesus Christ, Critical theory, Narrative analysis.

Daniel 1–6 in Classical Islamic Culture and the Gospel According to Ibn Hishām


 
 
 This article assesses the importance of the biblical book of Daniel in the first four Islamic centuries, focusing in particular on the legendary materials contained in Daniel 1–6. The article is divided into three sections. In the first section the treatments of Daniel 1–6 in Isrāʾīliyyāt works are examined, and it is shown that summaries of Daniel 1–6 in these works display evidence of oral transmission. Additionally, it is shown that some authors’ familiarity with Daniel legends led them to insert this character into “biblical” narratives that do not otherwise relate to him. In the second section it is argued that Daniel’s exploits were so widely known that they served as a sort of yardstick for judging the relative importance of some other “heroic” figures who are described in classical Islamic sources. In the third section it is postulated that the introductory sections of Ibn Hishām’s Sīra consciously relate stories with Danielic associations in order to bring the Sīra into line with the Christian Gospels.
 
 

Mimesis and Social Interactions: Conversations with René Girard

In this 1996 interview, published here in English translation for the first time, René Girard retraces some of the main aspects of his mimetic theory, such as the mimetic nature of desire and sacrificial scapegoating. In particular, Girard focuses on the similarities and differences between the role of sacrifice in primitive societies and in our contemporary Western society. Girard argues that fashion is essentially mimetic and that nowadays fashions incline towards forms of negative escalation, and finds evidence of such “minimalism” both in art and literature. In Girard’s view, all forms of scapegoating are founded on the crisis of differences, and the victimage mechanism is a fundamental structure of society. Girard concludes by advocating for a renunciation of rivalry, which he argues is one of the fundamental messages of the Christian Gospels.

The Ancient Christian Gospels as Historiae: A Secular-Critical Evaluation of M. David Litwa's How the Gospels Became History

The Ancient Christian Gospels as Historiae: A Secular-Critical Evaluation of M. David Litwa's How the Gospels Became History

Why Would the Pope Have A Private Audience with Anesthesiologists? The Origin of the “Doctrine of Double Effect” and Its Application to Pain Control

Sunday February 24, 1957 was a pivotal day in the history of anesthesiology and pain medicine. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII met with anesthesiologists attending an international symposium sponsored by the Italian Society of Anesthesiologists entitled, “Anesthesia and the Human Personality”. The purpose of this audience was to seek clarification about the use of opioids at the end of life to reduce suffering. Three questions had been formulated from the previous year’s Italian Congress of Anesthesiologists and sent to the Holy See on this specific issue. The Pope responded during this audience remarking that there was no moral obligation to withhold pain medication that could elevate suffering. He further remarked that the suppression of consciousness that can occur with opioids was consistent with the spirit of the Christian gospels. Finally, he also stated that it was not morally objectionable to administer opioids even if it might shorten life. The moral philosophy behind these answers is the doctrine of double effect. In essence, administering medications to relieve pain, the primary effect, may also hasten death, the unintended secondary effect. In seeking answers to these questions, the Italian anesthesiologists were at the forefront of a larger and ongoing debate. As new therapies are developed that may have unintended consequences, when it is morally permissible to use them?

Advent of Auto-Affection: Possibility, Givenness and Reception in Jean-Luc Marion

Jean-Luc Marion obliquely suggests that we return to religion when we think through and struggle with those topics that philosophy excludes or subjugates. This paper investigates a selection of such subjugated motifs. Marion’s recent claim (perhaps even ‘principle’): “auto-affection alone makes possible hetero-affection,” will be examined through piecemeal influences made upon its development through Marion’s return to religious thinking beyond the delimited jurisdiction of philosophy. Although still proper to the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, Marion finds new insights by tracing their legacy back further to the Christian gospels, Augustine, Aquinas, and, importantly, Nicholas of Cusa. Philosophy, proper, (if there is such a thing) may well adumbrate human understanding of data, phenomena, and possibility by discouraging any further thinking of them in terms of love, givenness, or revelation. It is by preferentially opting for these themes that philosophy excludes or subjugates that makes possible the entanglement of truth with love, suggested by Marion: “truths that one knows only if one loves them first.”

Christian Environmental Ethics and Economic Stasis

AbstractThe growth paradigm assumes that economic growth is objectively good because it leads to increased prosperity and utility maximization. Christian ethics oppose this worldview because it rejects the idea that economic prosperity is objectively good. Instead, Christian ethics are theocentric, assuming that God and the relationship with the divine is objectively good. Material prosperity is seen to interfere with this relationship. Still, there are at least two views of the human-divine relationship that have implications for environmental ethics. The first and most popular view argues that the human-divine relationship is mediated by the human-in-community relationship. Alternatively, individualistic theism posits that the human-divine relationship is individually available without community-centeredness. This individualistic view has been criticized as leading to an insufficient ethic of environmental care, however, here we argue that a radical dualism consistent with the Christian Gospels can lead to an ethos of environmental benevolence.

Early Christian Gospels: Their Production and Transmission, written by Scott D. Charlesworth

Early Christian Gospels: Their Production and Transmission, written by Scott D. Charlesworth

The Contribution of Non-Canonical Gospels to the Memory of Jesus: The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter as Test Cases

This article argues that the social memory approach makes a significant contribution to the interpretation of the early gospel tradition. This approach helps to overcome an anachronistic distinction between ‘canonical’ and ‘non-canonical’ (or ‘apocryphal’) Gospels by highlighting the way Jesus was portrayed in various Gospels of the first and second century. Early Christian Gospels in general presuppose the post-Easter perspective on Jesus as a divine figure, but depict his activity and teaching in different ways. A closer look at the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter demonstrates how these Gospels take up and continue perspectives which can be observed already in the earlier Gospels in their own ways. Thereby they provide glimpses of different social and theological contexts of second-century Christianity.

Jesus Christ as the Final Scapegoat: Mobilizing Nonviolent Movements for Change

Abstract We live in an age of endemic violence. Violence is fed by the binary categories through which human beings interpret the world, leading to the phenomenon of scapegoating violence. Jesus died to be the final scapegoat. Spirals of fear singled out Jesus to be the scapegoat for the anxieties and animosities of the people in his time. René Girard discovered in the Christian Gospels a truthful narrative that did not mask or disguise scapegoating for what it is: the elimination of the innocent victim(s). Christians dare to claim that Jesus died to end all scapegoating. This nonviolent interpretation of the cross of Jesus Christ serves as the theological foundation for active participation by Christians in movements for organized nonviolent resistance as a means of achieving social justice. This foundation is urgently needed in a world of spiraling violence and war making.

Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies

HAUN SAUSSY opens The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies with the story of how we discovered Pluto. Astronomers deduced the dwarf planet’s existence by the atmospheric ‘wobble’ it pressed onto neighbouring orbits, although no one could locate it through a telescope. For Saussy, this discovery represents ‘a rare kind of triumph’: to understand an entity exists even though you cannot find it. In this spirit of indirect investigation, Saussy explores the oral tradition by focusing on its ‘wobble’, or how orality perturbs the wider orbit of literary culture. Thus The Ethnography of Rhythm offers not a definition of orality, nor a survey of oral history, nor a bid to usurp written culture with orality as its antithesis. Instead, Saussy pitches oral literature as its own strand of writing—an inscription like any other, but with our bodies as receiving and transmitting technologies. The Ethnography of Rhythm sits apart in Saussy’s bibliography, which is otherwise dominated by studies of poetics in ancient China. Although this book visits the subject of Chinese folk poetry, in particular the Shijing or Book of Songs, Saussy broadens his study to include a diverse series of cases—from the Malagasy hain-teny to the Druid oral tradition, Christian Gospels, and Homer, whom Saussy names as this book’s ‘protagonist’. By selecting The Ethnography of Rhythm as his title, Saussy highlights the ‘constitutive distance between orality and its observers’ and insists ‘it is only through an overlay of different media (since ethnography is an overlay of different cultures) that oral poetry emerges into view at all. The book is a working out of the ethno- and the -graphic sides of the problem.’

Imagery in interfaith dialogue: Informed by the practices of art psychotherapy

The art based project engaged Christian, Jewish and Muslim women who met monthly over 7 months. The participants were chosen through an invitation sent to congregants of progressive synagogues, churches and mosques in the city of Los Angeles. Each month, collaboratively selected texts from the Jewish Torah, the Islamic Quran and the Christian Gospels that explored interconnected stories were printed and handed out for reading and study. After comparing and discussing the texts the participants were invited to incorporate the printouts of the biblical passages into simple collages, reflecting their responses. Colored, textured papers and glue were provided. The participants met in triads (Christian, Jewish and Muslim) to share their art, using their imagery to explore connections and disconnections between traditional understandings. The findings of the analysis indicate that members of the groups reported decreased defensiveness, the expansion of dialogue, and the discovery of new ways of knowing about their spirituality and faith.

The Word as Poet and Poem in the Christian Gospels

Celebrated by Sir Philip Sidney as the author of “divine” narrative art and “heavenly discourse” and deemed by William Blake the incarnation of “the Poetic Genius,” Jesus—not as familiar religious icon, but as a startling creative artist—fashions an expansive range of self-figurations that suggests a metaphysics and poetics of immanence and Becoming that both counters and coincides with the absolute Being of the Father as “I Am.” A liminal presence, in anthropologist Victor Turner’s sense, Jesus as Word provides responsive readers/listeners imaginative transit between ontological realms as they step into his vivid parables and pithy tropes. Both poet and text, Jesus invites us to read him as a kind of subject in process, a perpetually evolving poem that binds heaven and earth within powerful metaphors of identity and change. While the synoptic Gospels’ parables and similitudes highlight Jesus’ role as extraordinary poet, in his Johannine “I am” pronouncements and the theophany of the Son as visible voice that appears to John of Patmos, Jesus takes the form of a sacred poem, beckoning his audience(s), particularly (potential) disciples, toward their own creative, salvific rebirth.

Fiction and religion: how narratives about the supernatural inspire religious belief – introducing the thematic issue

This article introduces a thematic issue of Religion that interrogates the religious use of fantasy and science fiction in the contemporary religious field. The overall aim of the thematic issue is to identify those textual features that make it possible for a given fictional story to be used as a religious narrative, that is, to inspire belief in the supernatural beings of the story-world, and to facilitate ritual interaction with said beings. The contributions analyse the religious affordance and actual use of a wide range of texts, spanning from Harry Potter and Star Wars, over The Lord of the Rings and late 19th-century Scandinavian fantasy, to the Christian Gospels. Over the course of the thematic issue, the conclusion emerges that there exists a hierarchy of three levels of religious affordance that fictional narratives can possess: to afford belief in the supernatural beings of the story, a text must present those supernatural beings as real within the story-world; to afford ritual interaction with said beings, a text must include model rituals and inscribe the reader into the narrative; to afford belief in the historicity of the narrated events, a text must anchor the story-world in the actual world. Although we focus on the religious affordance of fictional texts, we also spell out implications for the study of religious narratives in general, and for the narrativist study of religion.

From divine word to human hand: negotiating sacred text in a medieval gospel book

Compiled by Eusebius of Caesaria in the fourth century, and thereafter a standard apparatus of medieval gospel books, canon tables index the concordances between the four books of the Christian gospels. Because they are functional and often sparsely decorated, these tables are easily overlooked as a practical device, and have long been assumed to carry little if any iconographical significance. In fact, however, they navigate a fundamental paradox of Christianity, for they reveal the tension between the multiple accounts of Christ as told by the gospels and the belief in a single truth told by scripture. A twelfth-century manuscript from the abbey of Helmarshausen in northern Germany, and now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (MS Ludwig II 3), contains canon tables whose decoration evokes precisely this issue. This article examines these tables within the visual program of the entire manuscript and in the context of twelfth-century thought. Rather than presenting gospel unity, these tables make visible the differences across the four accounts. Thus, they betray a concern for the limitations of imagery and its inability to express the profound gap between written word and sacred truth and between embodied man and infinite God.

Angelomorphism and Magical Transformation in the Christian and Jewish Traditions

This paper examines the concept of angelomorphism and magical transformation with reference to canonical and non-canonical Christian and Jewish beliefs. Magic, as loosely defined, is the attempt to engage with the world through the imagination or psyche in order to obtain some form of knowledge, benefit, or advantage, while celestial magic engages with the cosmos through stellar, planetary, or celestial symbolism, influences, or intelligences.1 Angelification of an individual is linked to the concept of resurrection, where, in the eschaton, the physical body of the righteous is transformed into a glorious new body fit for eternal life in heaven, regaining its divine likeness and becoming androgynous like an angel. The Hebrew Bible and Merkabah traditions support the possibility of the exceptional transformation of a human being into an angelic entity. Qumran liturgical texts also suggest the formation of an angelomorphic identity among the priesthood. The Christian gospels state that the redeemed will become like angels in heaven. Gnostics, however, consider that scriptural references to resurrection refer symbolically to receiving spiritual knowledge (gnosis). The paper examines concepts and practices within the respective traditions that point to a radical magical transformation of the human being that is needed to secure access to the heaven realm and the divine.

Faulkner’s Jewel: Logos and the Word Made Flesh

INTRODUCTION: SEEKING A LIVING WORD From early in William Faulkner's career as a novelist, he wrote as a man troubled by very medium of language itself. Even prior to discovery of his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County and masterful stories that would, in rapid-fire succession, quickly follow, he troubled by language's potential to remove human beings from necessary dynamism of lived experience. Nevertheless, he also discerned tremendous power of to manifest all that marks species as distinct. That is to say, humankind's dependence on left it precariously balanced between, on one side, disorder of sub-human existence and, on other side, mere lifeless abstraction, cut off from all vitality. (1) In his second novel, Mosquitoes, a work that predates imaginative return to what he called his postage stamp of native [Mississippi] soil, Faulkner explores nature of language that is both perilous and hopeful (Art). The peril is illustrated when narrator of Mosquitoes makes plain temptation toward despair in words: Talk, talk, talk: utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless, as though it might go on forever. Ideas, thoughts, became mere sounds to be bandied about until they were dead (153). The sentiment is one that Faulkner harbors and which would be crucial throughout his career as a writer--that is, as a man of words: in transferring experience into speech, are prone to rob deeds of their vitality. Within talky narrative of Mosquitoes, (2) however, Faulkner offers his own possible answer--one easily enough discerned, but hardly achieved--in loquacious figure of Dawson Fairchild, a character who maintains a hope that words brought into a happy conjunction produce something that lives (173). The early novel, then, looks toward a new kind of writing that would seek to collapse word and deed, bringing into existence through language a new being that is vital and substantial. (3) Coinciding with this discovery of language's potential a return to his native region, which he would later rename Yoknapatawpha County. In a brief and prolific period, from January 1929 to October 1930, Faulkner published his first three Yoknapatawpha stories, with latter two, The Sound and Fury and As I Lay Dying, proving to be his first true masterpieces. Arguably, it is in these two novels that Faulkner's new conception of language moved to fore, serving as a central theme in each work. That is to say, The Sound and Fury and As I Lay Dying are, in many respects, novels about language and Faulkner's own struggle to produce works of art in line with his new conception of language. And weaving its way through two stories is metaphor of Jesus of Nazareth, who is presented in Christian Bible--particularly Johannine texts (4)--as incarnate utterance of God, divine logos, the Word that was made flesh, and dwelt among humankind (John 1.14). In Faulkner's novels, two characters serving as thematic foils are Quentin Compson in former and Jewel Bundren in latter; taken together, pair exemplifies two novels' contrapuntal relationship, revealing opposite reactions to necessity of human verbality. Understanding, then, each young character's response to humanity's dependence upon language is crucial, for in their attitudes toward words, Faulkner reveals a wrestling with himself, seeking to come to terms with inescapable dependence upon speech that is distinguishing characteristic of humankind. FAULKNER'S CHRIST FIGURES When taking stock of Faulkner's imaginative reserve, one might find Flannery O'Connor's description of American South, with slight modification, to be a strikingly appropriate description of novelist's mind: if not centered on biblical mythology, his imagination inescapably haunted by it. (5) Scriptural allusions are rife within his stories, occasionally even edging their way into works' titles, and Christian Gospels seem to be especially venerated throughout his career. …

Recovering Jewish Christian Sects and Gospels. By Petri Luomanen. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language, vol. 110. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012. ix + 296 pp. $151.00 cloth.

Recovering Jewish Christian Sects and Gospels. By Petri Luomanen. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language, vol. 110. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012. ix + 296 pp. $151.00 cloth.

The Gospels as Imperialized Sites of Memory in Late Ancient Christianity

This article considers the intersection of Christian and imperial memory in the physical Gospel book. Besides describing the function of gospel books in the post-Constantine Roman Empire, it examines the connection between the Roman construction and production of sites of memory that established Roman imperium in the Mediterranean and the development of the Christian Gospel codex as a site of memory within Christianity. It also explores the related issues of imperial and divine power as manifest through material things, the rhetoric of seeing and iconicity, and the invented tradition of Christian orthodoxy. The article shows that the Christian Gospels and Roman sites of memory, despite a vast difference in their intended functions and original uses, both established imperium. It maintains that the creation of the Gospels' imperial iconicity was not based on their function as texts of spiritual enlightenment in late ancient Christianity, but on the fact that the production of Gospels as material cultural objects depended on Roman cultural exemplars and ideological rhetoric.