Sayings Of Jesus Research Articles

Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood

Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood

L’altra lettura. Tra nuovi libri e nuovi testi

Between the age of the Antonines and that of the Severi literacy reaches its greatest diffusion in the Graeco-Roman world; as a consequence a “consumption literature” develops for new classes of readers with an average education. This literature, which also draws materials from local traditions and folklore, includes narrative texts, epic poetry in paraphrase, treatises on culinary art and on hunting, biographies, magic formulae; it also reaches the Christian world, as shown by the collections of the sayings of Jesus, apocryphal Gospels, Acts of the martyrs, amulets. At the same time it becomes common to read these texts silently or in a whisper, in contrast to the reading aloud and with modulations which in antiquity was customary with the texts of the “high” culture, permeated with rhetoric. Therefore the new texts and the new way of reading, as they set themselves against the “intrinsic aristocratic nature of classical culture” may be considered as a sign of a “democratisation of culture” in the Later Empire.

The Authenticity of John 4.35

The author examines a Johannine saying, using the criteria of authenticity for sayings of Jesus developed particularly in connection with material in the Synoptic Gospels and demonstrates by cumulative argument that John 4.35 is most probably a genuine saying of Jesus. If this conclusion is correct, the way is open for further discoveries of the same kind in the Fourth Gospel.

The Irresponsibility of New Testament Scholarship in the Twentieth Century

A brilliant young German New Testament scholar said to me recently in an e-mail message, “What is more, scarcely anything new can ever be said; mostly it is the arrangement of well-known thoughts from a new point of view that is helpful and releases new impulses. Really new thoughts are accordingly received with great scepticism. So I often ask myself what we are actually doing.” That on the one hand, and the spurious excitement of the “Honest to Jesus!” movement, publicising the work of the Jesus Seminar, on the other hand. The Jesus Seminar meets several times a year in the United States and sets itself to decide by vote the likely authenticity of the sayings of Jesus and of events in the Acts of the Apostles. It was founded by Robert Funk. His book, Honest to Jesus, aims “to set Jesus free”, to “demote Jesus”, and to “declare the New Testament a highly uneven and biased record of various early attempts to invent Christianity.” The show will be on the road in the United Kingdom when Funk visits the country from the end of March AD 2000 to the beginning of May to hold seminars and rallies. It seems that close detailed scholarship by individuals dealing with the New Testament is regarded as boring and that the only excitement is to be gained by joining with others and getting Bishop Spong to puff your book, trying to shock the public in echo of Bishop John Robinson.

The Ongoing Creation of Loving Community: Christian Ritual and Ethics

At the center of Christian practice is an ethical imperative: "This is my commandment," Jesus says; "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12). This principle of active love lies at the heart of Christian living.

An Authentic Saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas?

The Gospel of Thomas provides an important component in many recent portraits of Jesus as a non-eschatological sage. Various material is cited from Thomas, yet careful analysis of individual sayings and redactional layers is rare. This is particularly true of sayings without Synoptic attestation. Is it possible that Thomas contains authentic sayings not found in the NT? What methodological steps would be necessary to isolate such material? How would such sayings affect portraits of the historical Jesus? These issues are explored though analysis of Saying 82 of the Gospel of Thomas.

The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, and: Hidden Sayings of Jesus: Words Attributed to Jesus Outside the Four Gospels, and: Sayings of Jesus: Canonical and Non-Canonical: Essays in Honour of Tjitze Baarda (review)

Reviewed by: The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, and: Hidden Sayings of Jesus: Words Attributed to Jesus Outside the Four Gospels, and: Sayings of Jesus: Canonical and Non-Canonical: Essays in Honour of Tjitze Baarda Sheila E. McGinn Marvin Meyer, The Unknown Sayings of Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998. Pp. xxvi + 182. $18.00. William G. Morrice, Hidden Sayings of Jesus: Words Attributed to Jesus Outside the Four Gospels. London: SPCK; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997. Pp. viii + 247. $18.95, paper. William L. Petersen, Johan S. Vos and Henk J. de Jonge, editors, Sayings of Jesus: Canonical and Non-Canonical: Essays in Honour of Tjitze Baarda. Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 1997. Pp. xxvi + 344. Nlg 176; US $103.50. These three volumes provide but a sample of the plethora of recent studies and collections of Jesus materials, canonical and non-canonical. Both Meyer and Morrice create collections of sayings from various sources, whereas Petersen et al. provide a collection of essays concerning the sayings material. Morrice includes sayings from the NT gospels, Acts, and the Pauline corpus, as well as sayings from the NT Apocrypha, and even a few Arabic texts. He does not spell out his selection criteria. Of the book’s eighteen chapters, five are devoted to sayings from the Gospel of Thomas. A total of 253 fragments are presented, each of which Morrice “grades” as to its authenticity. To only thirty-six of those not known from the NT does he give an “A” or “B” grade. This fact somewhat undercuts the value of Morrice’s work, since the vast majority of these A-B grade sayings are available in prior collections. The primary value Morrice himself seems to see in his collection is a case for viewing the GThos as not “gnostic”—and therefore as valuable for interpretation of the NT parables. Since the texts are available elsewhere and Morrice provides very little in the way of interpretation of individual sayings, this collection does not seem particularly useful—neither for “historical Jesus” scholarship nor for analysis of wider movements in the early Christian period. Meyer bemoans the “unfortunate canonical shadow” which falls over Morrice’s collection (xiii), and attempts to avoid this limitation in his own collection by excluding those sayings found in the NT, Q, or the Coptic GThos. Instead, Meyer turns to the NT Apocrypha—including the Gospels of Mary, Peter, Phillip, Hebrews, Ebionites, Eve, Egyptians, Nazoreans, and Thomas (Gk); the Acts of Peter, Thomas, and John; the Dialogue of the Savior; Book of Thomas and the First Book of Jeu; Secret James; the Martyrdom of Peter; the Epistles of the Apostles; Papyrus Oxyrhynchus, Papyrus Egerton, the Bruce Codex and Berlin 20915; Pistis Sophia—as well as the Didache, four additions to the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and a variety of other Christian sources from the Clementine Epistles to Ephrem the Syrian and Augustine of [End Page 615] Hippo. Among his 200 selections, Meyer also includes two sayings from the Babylonian Talmud (no. 181–182), one inscription from a mosque in India, and seventeen sayings from the Arabic writers áAbd al-Jabba\r, al-Ghazzali, and al-Ibshihi. The collection is certainly much more eclectic than that of Morrice, but it does not advance the historical discussion much. One would have liked to have Meyer’s criteria for selection of these diverse sayings. Instead of delineating his own criteria for determining the historicity of a given saying, he outlines three different sets garnered from Duling/Perrin, Crossan, and Funk, but he never evaluates them. Essentially Meyer seems to follow Funk’s method, which is the least sophisticated of the three choices. Subjective and formal criteria are intermixed with each other with no apparent hierarchy for their application. No ground-breaking work this, perhaps the most noticeable feature of the sayings culled from patristic sources is their paucity. The Festschrift for Tjitze Baarda, edited by Petersen, Vos and de Jonge is a collection of essays of which Prof. Baarda can be rightfully proud. The Baarda bibliography alone would have made this volume a solid contribution to the field; the essays make it even more valuable. This is a substantial work, with...

Leibniz on God's Knowledge of Counterfactuals

In the eleventh chapter of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus says to the inhabitants of Bethsaida and Corozain: If the miracles worked in you had taken place in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes (v. 21). Passages like this support a scriptural argument for God's knowledge of counterfactuals about created individuals. In the sixteenth century, Jesuits and Dominicans vigorously debated about how to explain this knowledge. The Jesuits, notably Luis de Molina and Francisco Suarez, argued that the basis for this knowledge lies primarily in the divine intellect: counterfactuals about free creatures are primitive truths known to God by virtue of the immensity of his intellectual power. Their Dominican opponents, notably Domingo Bafiez and Diego Alvarez, held that this knowledge is simply God's knowledge of his own decrees, by which he determines the truth value of all contingent propositions, including counterfactuals.1

Book Review: Preaching the Hard Sayings of Jesus

Book Review: Preaching the Hard Sayings of Jesus

Book Review: Preaching the Hard Sayings of Jesus

Book Review: Preaching the Hard Sayings of Jesus

The Criterion of Coherence and the Randomness of Charisma: Poring Through Some Aporias in The Jesus Tradition

Many scholars employ a different kind of criterion of coherence from the standard, i.e., the criterion that Jesus’ authentic sayings hold together in a coherent whole; yet Jesus scholars differ regarding the nature of this coherence. When we then understand that Jesus was a charismatic leader of a new religious movement, and when we examine how such persons in general behave, we see the importance of randomness for charismatic leadership, and we understand that we cannot expect systematic coherence among the sayings of Jesus. Jesus may have said things that appear contradictory, but they will have enhanced his charismatic authority.

Book Reviews : Sayings of Jesus Outside the Canon

Book Reviews : Sayings of Jesus Outside the Canon

The Significance of φιλέω and φίλος in the Tradition of Jesus Sayings and in the Early Christian Communities

Due in part to the prominence of the word ⋯γαπάω in the New Testament, readers of that book have often believed that the early Christians as a group considered ⋯γαπάω to refer to a superior form of love than that represented by the Greek word φιλέω. One of the primary reasons for this conviction is the way in which the apostle Paul uses ⋯γάπη and ⋯γαπάω to such an extent in his epistles. In fact, Paul's usage of the ⋯γαπάω word family is so consistent that with one exception the word φιλέω is entirely absent from his vocabulary. Likewise, in the Septuagint the occurrences of ⋯γαπάω outnumber those of φιλέω by a ratio of 266 to a mere fifteen.1

Inviting and Hosting a Stranger in the Experiences of the Faith Communities: An Experiment in Constructing an Ethical-Poetical Christology

The numerous 'faces of Christ' in Africa, as well as those resulting from historical study in the West, call for a rereading of the event of Jesus. From the inquiry into the origin of the numerous faces, and the biblical evidence for the 'process and purpose of naming God' which are textually introduced by Exodus 3 and again taken up by the 'ego eimi' sayings of Jesus, it is suggested that the event of rereading is to be seen as an integral-incarnatory socio-historic dynamic. This dynamic is theologically understood and construed in an ethical-poetical Christology which will function within comtemporary contexts as an invitation of Christ into the experiences of the faith communities.

Rhetorical analysis and sociological analysis in historical Jesus research

AbstractIn this article I suggest ways in which rhetorical analysis can complement sociological analysis of early Christianity. On the basis of a universally acknowledged saying of Jesus ("blessed are you poor"), I suggest that those who use social scientific perspectives need to clarify more accurately the levels of data from which they are working (i.e., when they are working with probably early material, possibly the words of Jesus himself, and when they are working with the later elaboration of the traditional material) and to identify the rhetorical value of each level. I then show how, contrary to sociological analysis that depicts Jesus as merely proclaiming reversal, the historical Jesus proclaimed a reversal that had already happened but one that was away from God's intended order: what the historical Jesus was calling for was a future restoration to a state that existed before the reversal. Attention to the rhetorical nature of his follower's use of this proclamation, however, shows that when the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Lukan Acts of the Apostles uses the language of reversal and restoration, he now does so to describe what was happening not primarily vis-à-vis "the world" but in their own, now Christian communities. Jesus' message of reversal of the fate of the poor becomes in this way the Lukan message of the apostolic governance of that reversal, that is, the broker's (the apostolic leadership's, after the model of Jesus) dispensation of the patron's (God's) resources.

Jews and Christians Speak of Jesus (review)

Book Reviews BOOK REVIEWS 147 Jews and Christians Speak of Jesus, edited by Arthur E. Zannoni. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. 191 pp. $12.00 (P). In recent years, topics in dialogue meetings between Jews and Christians have often focused on practical matters of current concern rather than the divisive issues offaith and teaching. This volume shows the measure of maturity that has been achieved in Jewish-Christian relations by tackling head-on one of the most central issues between these two groups, namely, Jesus of Nazareth. The essays in this volume, by recognized Jewish and Christian scholars, were originally presented as papers at a series of symposia sponsored by the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul and Minneapolis). This set of essays is an attempt to look afresh at the Jewish origins of Jesus, casting new light on the relations ofJesus to his contemporaryJews and on the process by which early Christians began to ascribe messiahship and divinity to Jesus. The book is set up admirably to facilitate discussion and rethinking of old issues. Each of the four parts of the book focuses on a crucial aspect ofunderstandingJesus. Part one, with essays by ShayeJ. D. Cohen and Anthony J. Saldarini, explores the diversity within Judaism at the time ofJesus. In part two, Lawrence H. Schiffman and E. P. Sanders examine the Jewishness ofJesus and how he related to the Judaisms of his time. In part three, Paula Fredriksen and John R. Donahue trace the background of the idea of messiah and the path by which early Christians came to consider Jesus as the messiah. And in part four, Alan F. Segal and Monika K. Hellwig reflect on how Christians began to make the move in their interpretation of Jesus from Christ to God-and how this radical move relates to the Jewish background of Christianity. These essays provide a helpful sampling of recent scholarship relating to understanding Jesus of Nazareth. There certainly is broad agreement among all these scholars that Jesus must first of all be seen within the context of the Jewish world in which he lived-that is perhaps the central theme of the whole volume. But within that general consensus these essays also present a fertile diversity in interpretation, bringing the reader into the lively and ongoing scholarly discussion. For example, Cohen argues that, for all the diversity of the Judaisms of this period, there was a clear assumption both amongJews and among 148 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 outsiders that Judaism was a unified system. Saldarini, on the other hand, sketches out the factions and distinct groups within Jewish society, importing modern ideas of sects and deviance to highlight the function of the diverse groups. Schiffman argues that almost all the sayings of Jesus reflect similar ideas expressed by otherJews, especially in the later rabbinic collections. Sanders makes a similar point about Jesus' relation to Jewish law, proposing that Jesus did not wish to oppose traditional religious law, even in the reported conflicts over sabbath observance and unclean foods. Scholars have sometimes emphasized that, while Jesus remained within the Jewish orbit, Paul and the other Christians who began to ascribe messiahship and divinity toJesus moved far beyond theirJewish roots. The essays in this volume suggest a much more nuanced view of Christian development within the Jewish context. Paul's construction ofthe message and the mission of Christianity, Fredriksen finds, fits entirely within the views and concerns ofJudaism. For example, the Gentiles Paul preached to were actually those who customarily attended synagogues without being Jewish converts, Gentiles who thus knew Jewish scripture and tradition. Donahue argues that the narratives of Jesus' suffering and death, which have been so divisive in Jewish-Christian relations, were motivated not by history but by theological concerns and contemporary issues. One important point in reexamining these narratives, according to Donahue, is to realize that Jesus was not tried by a Jewish "supreme court" (the Sanhedrin), as has traditionally been supposed, but actually by a type of informal group called in to arbitrate local cases. Concerning the ascription of divinity to Jesus by Christians, Segal suggests that this was not an alien non-Jewish...

The "Dialogue of the Savior" and the Mystical Sayings of Jesus

The "Dialogue of the Savior" and the Mystical Sayings of Jesus

“Think of the Lilies” and Prov 6:6–11

Among the best-known of Jesus sayings is the “worry” saying of Q (Luke 12:22–31):“Therefore,” [Jesus] said to his disciples, “I bid you put away anxious thoughts about food to keep you alive and clothes to cover your body. Life is more than food, the body more than clothes. Think of the ravens: they neither sow nor reap; they have no storehouse or barn; yet God feeds them. You are worth far more than the birds! Is there a man among you who by anxious thought can add a foot to his height? If, then, you cannot do even a very little thing, why are you anxious about the rest?

Gospel Traditions in the Second Century: Origins, Recensions, Text, and Transmission (review)

Presented at a conference held at the University of Notre Dame in 1988, these essays address such issues as the shape of the Synoptic gospel, the Western Text in the second century, the extra-canonical sayings of Jesus and the purpose of redactional changes.

Die etiek van Jesus in die lig van Q: Eskatologies of wysheidsteologies begrond?

The ethics of Jesus in the light Q: Rooted in eschatology or sapiental theology? Traditionally the sayings of Jesus with an ethical content were seen within the dialectics of ethics-eschatology. The imminent end, coupled with the unavoidable judgment, provides the grounds for the ethical call. The ethics of Jesus were regarded as a direct consequence of his eschatological message regarding the imminent kingdom of God This paper poses the question of whether this previous uncritical standpoint can be regarded as still valid today in the light of recent research on the hypothetical document Q. It has come to light that no sign of eschatological thinking can be found in the oldest and, therefore, most original layer of Q - indicating that Jesus probably did not think in an eschatological way. The question should be asked if another hypothesis is not to be sought - such as to regard Jesus radical ethical demands as a continuation of the Jewish sapiental tradition, but with the explicit intent to postulate an inclusive ethics. This paper’s aim is to hint in the direction of the latter, rather than to advocate it fully.