Jewish Scriptures Research Articles

Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings Lawrence Warner Delany, Sheila , ed., Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings ( The Multicultural Middle Ages), New York/London, Routledge, 2002; hardback; pp. xi, 258; 6 b/w illustrations; RRP £65; ISBN 0415938821. This collection of five previously-published essays and nine new contributions attempts to bring the category of 'the Jews' into the centre of medieval English cultural studies. The expulsion of 1290 has too easily put scholars of medieval culture into a position of silent complicity with the forces behind that event, yet 'the Jews' remained prominent in English historical consciousness and the construction of English identity. The major accomplishment of Chaucer and the Jews is to drive that point home, from a variety of viewpoints. The volume's title is extraordinarily misleading: Chaucer, whose name appears in the biggest font on the cover, is the primary focus of just five essays, with two others, by Gillian Steinberg and Judith Neaman, concerning the teaching of Chaucer to Jewish students. 'That is because I have sought to challenge the idea of "author per se"', its editor explains (p. x). If in the name of a progressive politics one can re-name the richness and variety of medieval English literature and history 'Chaucer', should we likewise subordinate all the varieties of medieval religious belief to the category 'Christianity'? Fortunately, such cynicism and audience-baiting is rare after the introduction. [End Page 153] The Chaucer materials are a motley collection. Christine Rose, in an essay from 1998, argues that the Man of Law's Tale, ostensibly about Muslims, 'represents a veiled evocation of that other threat to Christian hegemony, the Jew' (p. 19), while Delany's 1999 piece proposes 'that Islam is conspicuous by its absence from [the Prioress's Tale] …, and that the Asia setting is precisely the tell-tale sign of that effacement' (p. 48). Such arguments hearken back to the era of Robertsonianism, according to which Chaucer hid ('veiled', 'effaced') his meaning for others to uncover. The prominence of this Chaucerian poetics of the occult is particularly surprising given Delany's insistence that we read empirically and historically rather than allegorically (pp. 44-5). Two other Chaucer essays are rather slight notes. Jerome Mandel suggests that the status of Sir Thopas's hauberk as 'Jewes werk' adds to the tale's comedy. William Chester Jordan's chapter 'The Pardoner's "Holy Jew"', which seeks 'to explicate the Pardoner's character and the dramatic thrust of his performance' (p. 25), should have considered the tale's figure of the old man, so strongly affiliated with Jewish stereotypes such as St Paul's 'old man' and the Wandering Jew. By contrast, Sylvia Tomasch's 'Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew', first published in 2000, is a much more sophisticated, if problematic, engagement with the topic at hand. She draws upon post-colonial theory to propose that 'the virtual Jew is an invented "reality" that does not depend on actual medieval Jews for its connotations, let alone its denotation' (p. 79). Yet I wondered whether her argument was pre-determined rather than being based on particular evidence, as suggested, for instance, by her odd description of the Canterbury Tales as constituting 'compulsive retellings' of the stereotype of 'the Jew' (p. 79). Such overstatements recur elsewhere in the collection as well. Colin Richmond's important 1992 essay 'Englishness and Medieval Anglo-Jewry' is quite effective in showing that historians have adopted the anti-Semitic mindset of their objects of study, but it goes too far by calling Thomas of Monmouth, who claimed William of Norwich to be victim of Jewish ritual murder, 'the sole begettor [sic] of a lie that … led to terrible and untold suffering' (p. 223; cf. Anthony Bale's similar remark on p. 185). John McCulloh has shown that 'Thomas did not invent the myth, and his literary representation of it remained without influence' (Speculum 72 [1997]: 740). Mary Dove's 'Chaucer and the Translation of the Jewish Scriptures' has little to do with Chaucer; instead, it helpfully explicates the theory and practice of the translators of the Wycliffite Bible. Timothy Jones surveys the 'rise of David' story in the...

Montesquieu: mémoire de la critique ed. by Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (review)

MLR, 101.1, 2006 247 views of the philosophes. In this assessment, Montesquieu is accorded importance as a political thinker but only very marginally as a historian. Senarclens contests this assessment in the chapter entitled Au-dela de l'erudition et de la philosophie: l'historiographie de Montesquieu' (pp. 227-63). She considers that, while he is not deficient in erudition or careless about the need to verify facts, the crucial difference between him and the other philosopher-historians lies in his use of his imagination to transport himself into the times about which he writes, in order to understand the reasons men had for acting in ways which seemed absurd to the rationalists of the Enlightenment. She makes a good case forassessing Montesquieu as a serious historian who still has something to offer.Students should not be too much discouraged by the over-profusion of examples she gives. Some of these, at least, offerpointers to furtherinteresting explorations of the subject. Kingston-upon-Thames Iris Cox Montesquieu: memoire de la critique. Ed. by Catherine Volpilhac-Auger. Paris: Presses de l'Universitede Paris-Sorbonne. 2003. 600 pp. ?44. ISBN 2-84050230 -5. This collection gives the reader a fair taste of the reception given (almost exclusively in France) from 1721 to 1787 to Montesquieu's published works. There are extracts from private letters to the author (from e.g. Desmolets, Henault), letters between other correspondents (e.g. Voltaire, Rousseau, Delphin de Lamothe, Lord Chesterfield , Horace Walpole) as well as from contemporary reviews such as the Memoir es de Trevoux, Le Mercure, and Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques (among others). There is noth? ing post-Revolution except for some correspondence in 1795-96 concerning a new edition of his known works and the whereabouts of unpublished manuscripts. It is interesting to see that Montesquieu's daughter, Denise de Secondat, took part in this correspondence, and to read the letter in which she claimed to have been for a time her father'spetit secretaire. Though the Lettres persanes, Le Temple de Gnide, and the Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence had been published anonymously , it became an open secret that Montesquieu was the author. These works became very popular, though they did not escape adverse criticism. The criticism was mainly on religious grounds forthe Lettres persanes, and on historical grounds forthe Romains, while Le Temple de Gnide incurred disapproving comment from seriousminded friends and critics who feltthat this tale of love and pleasure was not worthy of its author. When L'Esprit des lois was published in 1748, a differentapproach to the author and his work became necessary. Throughout history new and revolutionary interpretations of man's existence as an individual and in society have emerged, sometimes put forward by exceptional indi? viduals. These may bring about a new, even ifpartial, consensus ofopinion, but before that consensus there is likely to be fierceopposition. We can see this process at work in religion, when Jesus of Nazareth and his followers reinterpreted the Jewish scriptures to apply to all humankind, and in science when Galileo (and others) demonstrated that the earth revolved round the sun rather than the sun round the earth. Something similar began to happen in the understanding of human societies with the publication of L'Esprit des lois. A critic recently described this work as 'still one of the eighteenth century's most difficultbooks' (Michael Sonenschon, review of David W. Carrithers and Patrick Coleman, Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), in French Studies, 58 ( 2004), 260). The difficultyis in the detail in a work of immense scope, but the governing theory,that there are differentforms of 248 Reviews human society produced by and producing differentlaws, seems like a factual assess? ment today. However, itwas controversial when set beside the universalist doctrines of the Churches, both Catholic and Reformed, and ofprevious political philosophies. We need not be surprised, therefore,to findthat L'Esprit des lois, though itquickly gained a very wide readership in France, Europe, and America, provoked fierce criticism. Montesquieu: memoirede la critique, with its preface by Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, presents a valuable survey and selection of examples of this criticism (as well as...

John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Relationship between the Jews and the Church

The views of two modern Catholic figures, John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, on the Jewish religion and the State of Israel are informed by their theological reflections that go back to the Christian Scriptures. There they identify the radical newness of Christianity and at the same time its profound roots and continuing debt to the Jewish Scriptures and to the continuing existence of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. The tortured past history of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people and their religion apparently turned on the political exigencies of ‘protecting’ the daily exercise of Catholicism. In the modern historical period where on the one hand, the independent State of Israel exists and where on the other hand, Catholicism has no intrinsic need of a specific land, the theological principles of the need of and debt to Israel as the ‘elder brother’ and as the ‘stock’ onto which Christianity is inescapably grafted, has come to the fore and has led to a number of agreements, under John Paul II, between the Vatican and the State of Israel.

Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (review)

Reviewed by: Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity Paula Fredriksen Larry W. Hurtado Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003 Pp. xxii + 746. Larry Hurtado's big new book, Lord Jesus Christ, takes as it prototype and anti-type Wilhelm Bousset's 1913 classic, Kyrios Christos (1-26). Hurtado promises to concentrate not on texts or on doctrines so much as on early Christian practices, specifically on those that attest to "devotion to Jesus." In so doing, he hopes to demonstrate the falseness of Bousset's view that elevated Christological claims measure the penetration of non-Jewish, specifically pagan Hellenistic ideas, into early Christian proclamation. On the contrary, urges Hurtado, devotion to Jesus as a very elevated figure traces back to the very earliest post-resurrection community in Jerusalem. Thus, it represents a spectacular mutation of Jewish monotheism ("Christian binitarianism"), but not a deviation from it; on this issue Paul and the earliest community were joined. And this tradition was most valued and best preserved by those streams of the Christian movement that we can now identify as proto-Orthodox. To understand how Hurtado gets where he goes with his presentation of second-century Christianity (ch. 9, "Radical Diversity," and ch. 10, "Proto-Orthodox Devotion"), we need to grasp what he establishes in his preceding 518 pages. Hurtado begins with Jewish monotheism. Since ancient Jews, as "scrupulous" monotheists (his term), avoided worshiping any divine figures other than God, the earliest Christians (scrupulous Jewish monotheists themselves) by praying to and calling upon Jesus together with God embarked upon worship practices that were strikingly innovative. Hence Hurtado's "binitarian" coinage for this liturgical "novum": "The incorporation of Christ into the devotional pattern of early Christian groups has no real analogy in the Jewish tradition of the period" (31). Conclusion: these groups thereby claimed a unique and uniquely elevated status for Jesus extremely early on, well before anyone even thought of taking the good news to the Diaspora. Hurtado's definition of Jewish monotheism thus enables him to knock away one of the pillars of Bousset's argument. What chance of Gentile Hellenistic influences, if these practices (and, implicitly, Christological claims) originated in Judea in the very first months and years of the movement? From this the rest falls into place. The early elevation of Jesus did not mean [End Page 537] that these earliest Christians denied his full humanity. On the contrary, Pauline vocabulary and the fact that the earliest narratives of Jesus present him as an historical character point in the opposite direction: though Jesus was extremely, uniquely divine, he was also fully human. These texts' insistence on Jesus' Davidic lineage makes the same point. And while the question of Gentile members' status was initially snarled on the issue of Torah-observance, no one in the earliest movement questioned that their proclamation was in a straightforward way congruent with the essential message of the Jewish scriptures. By the time we reach chapter 9 and Hurtado's discussion of "Radical Diversity," his categories are well established. Earliest Christianity was monotheist, incarnational, and congruent with rather than contrasting to Jewish scriptures. (His reference to these scriptures throughout as the "Old Testament" is confused and confusing because neither the category nor the concept "New Testament" was conceived until the mid-second century and then, as we shall see, by a "deviant.") Valentinus and Marcion, we are thus unsurprised to learn, represent "major innovations and rival interpretations . . . over against the comparatively more traditional preferences that marked proto-orthodox circles" (519). Valentinians with their graduated pleromas and superfluity of divine figures were not as "serious" as their proto-orthodox counterparts about maintaining or protecting monotheism (529 and elsewhere). They "downplayed" the Old Testament and its narratives (530), they emphasized redemption from bodily existence as the index of salvation (47), and their Christology was docetic. This Docetism in turn accounts for their disinclination to be martyred (unlike the proto-orthodox 619-625). Marcion, like Valentinus, also deviated from proto-orthodoxy and was on that account expelled from the Roman church (549), setting up his own churches instead. He composed his New Testament canon from a larger body of...

Aesthetic Behaviour in the Jewish Scriptures: A Preliminary Sketch

Although some biblical commentators nowadays do refuse an aesthetic disjunction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’, so allowing that ancient Israel’s ‘crafts’ might have aesthetic value, there seems to be little attention accorded the aesthetics—the aesthetic behaviour—presupposed in the canonical literature. In part this is due to the obsessions of our now questionable, socially restrictive ‘Enlightenment’ inheritance. But there is discernible in the canonical writings an aesthetics of abundance, intensification, plenitude, especially in much of the Psalter, and in concentration in Song of Songs. And this aesthetic celebration which we may discern here tallies well with much of the everyday aesthetic behaviour in which we ourselves engage.

The dignity of servanthood in pastoral care.

Servanthood is a dominant image of ministry in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, and poses a rich source of material from which to address the theme of human dignity from the perspective of pastoral care. The biblical concept of servanthood, which defines the nature of the pastoral relationship and dignifies the personhood of the care recipient, suggests an approach to the issues of vulnerability of both giver and receiver of care, and proposes that the caring relationship is best conceived as a partnership to which each participant brings gifts. The servant theme implies addressing the notion of the kingship of Christ, how control issues affect the ministry of pastoral care, and the realization that being a servant of the Lord entails a concern for the well being of each individual and of the social order; that is, servant ministry mandates both visiting the sick (Matthew 25) and seek justice and righteousness as social norms (Isaiah 16:5).

Interpreting Islam in American Schools

How is Islam taught in American schools? Teaching Islam to young Americans is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Israeli-Arab conflict shaped the contours of the study of Islam with images and stereotypes inherited from the Crusades and Colonialism. Islam has been taught not as an essential ingredient of the World History but through the political conflicts of Israelis and Arabs as well as the American global agenda within which Qaddafi, Hafez al-Asad, and Ayatullah Khomeini emerged as the representatives of Islam. The Muslim population in America grew dramatically in the twentieth century, and curriculum was devised to include Islam without disturbing the unitary narrative of Western Civilization: The textbooks disconnect Islam from the Judeo-Christian tradition even as they emphasize how Islam borrowed from Jewish and Christian scriptures. Textbook writers portrayed Islam in light of the Arab nomadic society and the life of the Prophet of Islam while deliberately downplaying the Abrahamic legacy in Islam.

The Turbulent Marriage of Ethnicity and Spirituality: Rabbi Theodore Falcon, Makom Ohr Shalom 1 and Jewish Mysticism in the Western United States, 1969-1993

American Jewish culture entered a prolonged crisis in the 1970s and 1980s as intermarriage and spiritual rigidity appeared to threaten the viability of the Jewish community. Many American Jews turned to alternative forms of spirituality. A small coterie of these Jewish spiritual explorers returned to their ethnic heritage to rediscover the long-neglected interior dimensions of Judaism. This paper examines the distinctive Kabbalistic community that coalesced around Rabbi Ted Falcon in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s and grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. Trained as a Reform rabbi and a psycho-therapist, Falcon became a pioneering advocate of meditative and self-reflective techniques that were firmly rooted in Jewish scripture and Kabbalistic texts. The synagogues that Falcon led in Los Angeles and Seattle became magnets for disaffected Jews who had abandoned their tradition in favor of Eastern religions and New Age spirituality.

Tatian and the Jewish Scriptures: A Textual and Philological Analysis of the Old Testament Citations in Tatian's Diatessaron (review)

Tatian and the Jewish Scriptures: A Textual and Philological Analysis of the Old Testament Citations in Tatian's Diatessaron (review)

Tatian and the Jewish Scriptures: A Textual and Philological Analysis of the Old Testament Citations in Tatian's Diatessaron

It has long been argued that Tatian, in the production of the Diatessaron, made regular reference to the Old Testament Peshitta when he came across Old Testament citations in the Gospels. This book argues on the contrary that Tatian made little or no use of the Old Testament Peshitta, but regularly took over the text of the Old Testament citations as he found them in the Gospel sources out of which he created his harmony. Where they differ from the form of these citations in the standard Greek text tradition of the Gospels, it is because, in the second century, Tatian had access to Gospel sources which may have varied significantly from the text of the later manuscripts on which our modern critical editions are based. Thus, Tatian's Diatessaron becomes a window into an early state of the Gospel texts and supports the idea that a significant amount of textual fluidity characterized the Gospel texts in the first two centuries of their transmission. This study will be of interest to those working in the fields of Diatessaronic studies, New Testament Textual Criticism, and the history of the Syriac Church.

Abrahamic religious and Roman legal roots of environmental protection: utility of ancient doctrines in modern society

Many members of modern American society, including some outspoken members of the national leadership, subscribe to the idea that natural resource conservation and environmental protection are recent developments. Even if they have a firm grasp of modern history, they may look to the 1920s and 1930s as the genesis point for natural resource conservation as a concern of the law. Environmental protection is looked at as having arisen out of the social foment of the late 1960s–early 1970s. Although there is some truth in these interpretations, it would be wrong to discount much more ancient antecedent authorities in law and social norms for these societal choices. These interpretations overlook the importance of two key millennia–old legal and religious authorities that underlie modern legal, political, and religious thinking about the environment: res communes (the concept in Roman Law which leads directly to the modern Anglo–American concept of the Public Trust Doctrine), and the concept of the Sabbatical and Jubilee Years found in the Pentateuch (first section of the Jewish and Hebrew Scriptures). This chapter will reexamine each of these concepts in light of modern criticism regarding natural resource protection and property rights. The chapter will explore the concepts of res communes and Sabbatical/Jubilee Years; their similarities and differences; their influence on modern legal, religious, and societal practice; and how each of these concepts can be used to help provide further support for proper stewardship of the natural environment. Special consideration will be paid to the similar concepts of natural resource stewardship and intergenerational equity that arose from the very different societal roots: the Roman Law found in the Institutes of Justinian and the foundational Abrahamic writings underlying the beliefs of three major world religions.

Is There Halaka (The Noun) at Qumran?

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes Symbols omitted.) Scholars concerned with Judaism its various forms at the turn of the era readily speak of ha la ka when referring to a legal opinion or ruling of an individual or a group that seeks to prescribe the proper conduct of observant Jews particular situations. Scholarly monographs that discuss the proper interpretation of the ha la ka of Qumran or Jesus or Philo or Josephus are well known.1 This essay does not question the existence at the turn of the era of the phenomenon that we moderns label ha la ka. One need only read the Rule of the Community (IQS) or the so-called Halakic Letter (4QMMT), to say nothing of the extensive treatment of legal issues the corpus of Philo or Josephus's Jewish Antiquities, to settle the question of the existence the first century B.C.E. and C.E. of the reality that we call ha la ka. The question this essay raises is rather a linguistic one with two implicit parts: (1) Was the Hebrew noun ha la ka current use the first century B.C.E. and C.E.; and, if so, (2) did it carry the sense that is clear from the Mishnah onwards, namely, a legal opinion or ruling about proper Jewish conduct a particular situation?2 In itself, the question is a narrow one. But biblical scholars should be aware of when they are defining a particular reality with a label whose existence or at least whose technical meaning arose only at a later date. At times our vocabulary may be anachronistic; our concepts and affirmations should not be.3 Hence the question: Can we find any occurrence of the word ha la ka prior to the Mishnah?4 For all practical purposes, this means: Can we find this Hebrew noun the Dead Sea Scrolls and related texts? Some scholars reply with a flat no.5 However, the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (ed. David J. A. Clines; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-) lists sub voce (2:559) two occurrences of the noun ha la ka, both from the Rule of the Community (1QS); the noun never occurs the canon of Jewish Scriptures or the deuterocanonical/apocryphal book of Ben Sira. As the Dictionary properly indicates, there are problems with both supposed occurrences at Qumran. In 1QS 1:25, the Dictionary entry first presents the form hlktnw as the noun ha la ka plus the first person plural suffix -nu (our). Hence it translates the phrase hrs ...nw hlktnw as: We have made our conduct wicked. . However, the entry goes on to note that the Hebrew letter he at the beginning of hlktnw is not clear (this is apparently due to a scribe's attempt to erase the he); hence the Dictionary lists the alternate reading blktnw, in our going (the preposition be with the qal infinitive construct of the verb ha lak [leket] plus the first person plural suffix). The sense of the whole statement would then have to be: We have acted wickedly our conduct. . What is curious the Dictionary's first reading is that the letter bet, which is clearly visible the photographs of the manuscript, is not represented, while the he, which is obscured the text a scribal erasure (more about this below), is represented.6 Quite rightly, therefore, their editions of the Qumran texts, both James H. Charlesworth and Elisha Qimron, on the one hand, and Florentino Garcia Martinez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, on the other, print the Hebrew text with the letter bet without parentheses or brackets and then the letter he parentheses or brackets.7 Charlesworth and Qimron translate the disputed word as by our walking; Garcia Martinez and Tigchelaar translate it as inasmuch as we walk. At least the latter translation seems to take the disputed form to be the qal infinitive construct of the verb. Indeed, his vocalized text, Eduard Lohse simply reads 1QS 1:25 as be lekte nu (the preposition be plus the qal infinitive construct of the verb plus the first personal plural suffix);8 he does not even consider the possibility of reading a form of ha la ka this passage. …

The Charge of Distortion of Jewish and Christian Scriptures

The Charge of Distortion of Jewish and Christian Scriptures

Why Bother With Hebrews?

Few, if any, present‐day undergraduate degree courses in Theology include in their syllabus a study of the Epistle to the Hebrews or other New Testament writings other than the Gospels and the Pauline epistles. The result is in effect that we create a canon within a canon.This paper, originally read at a postgraduate seminar, gives reasons why Hebrews in particular should not be neglected.Hebrews provides evidence of the diversity of early Christian tradition, for example, with its teaching that it is impossible to be re‐admitted to the community of faith, having once abandoned it, and with its unique use of Israel’s day of Atonement rites in its presentation of Christ. Moreover, the very genre of Hebrews merits particular interest.Hebrews also evidences a Christian community which has yet to break with Judaism. Its thoroughly Jewish background illustrates for students of the New Testament the necessity of knowing the Jewish Scriptures as well as the writings of the New Testament. Moreover, a study of the Epistle could make a constructive contribution to present‐day Jewish–Christian dialogue, even if in the past it has been enlisted on the side of a thinly‐disguised anti‐Semitism.Finally, Hebrews (e.g., with its depiction of Jesus as sacrificial victim and as High Priest) brings the student face to face with the metaphorical character of much of the language of the New Testament – a form of language which is not to be taken less seriously than other kinds of language; and in this case, Hebrews’ Day of Atonement metaphors issue in new insights – in an innovative theology of access to God.For this and other reasons, the study of Hebrews has an important contribution to make to theology degree syllabuses.

MAKING ALL EXPERIENCE RELIGIOUS: THE HEGEMONY OF RITUAL AT QUMRAN

AbstractThis study provides a preliminary inventory of the evidence for ritual density and change at Qumran. Then insights from ritual studies and the study of oral-literate cultures are used to formulate a hypothesis regarding the meaning of Qumran ritual intensity and relate it to the group's religious experience. We learn that ritual exercised measurable hegemony over the people at Qumran, making large portions of their experience "religious" in a certain sense, and that some of their ritual practices set them apart from other Jews. The study also indicates the basis for the group's ritual practices, their interpretation of Jewish scriptures.

Borrowing and Lending: Is there anything Christian about either?

Fundamental to Christian development activity is the question of money, and how those who would follow Jesus Christ use it. In recent years, one of the more creative applications of money to needs in the developing world has been the establishment of various capital funds (alternative banks, if you will), from which those marginalized from established banking structures can borrow capital. While the activities of these micro-enterprise organizations have been widely applauded, even their existence raises questions of a biblical and theological nature. At the heart of such questions lie the ethics of lending and borrowing, a subject about which the Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say.

Paul, Judaism, and Judgment According to Deeds

Preface List of abbreviations Introduction Part I. Judgment According to Deeds in Jewish Literature: 1. The use of the motif in the Jewish scriptures 2. The use of the motif in the Old Testament pseudepigrapha 3. The use of the motif in the Qumran literature Part II. Judgment According to Deeds in Paul's Letters: 4. Judgment according to deeds in Paul's letter to the Romans 5. Judgment according to deeds in 1 Corinthians 6. Judgment according to deeds in 2 Corinthians and Colossians 7. Paul and a Jewish motif: conclusions Appendices Bibliography Subject index Index of passages.

The Jewish Heroes of Christian History: Hebrews 11 in Literary Context (review)

Book Reviews 151 The Jewish Heroes of Christian History: Hebrews 11 in Literary Context, by Pamela Michelle Eisenbaum. Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 156. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997. 250 pp. $39.95. Pamela Michelle Eisenbaurn proposes to demonstrate the originality ofthe list ofheroes in Hebrews 11 by contrasting it with its Greco-Jewish literary environment, which is not merely the biblical story but also the biblical story as mediated through competing (also complementary?) interpretations. She finds the selection of heroes in Hebrews 11 extraordinary and locates them outside Israel's national leadership. Her thesis is that Hebrews denationalizes Jewish scripture and revalues Jewish history to construe ethnic particularity as irrelevant for the authorial audience. Aside from an introduction, the book comprises four chapters: "Hagiography in Antiquity," "Hebrews and Hermeneutics," "Heroes and History," and "Hebrews and Historiography." Chapter 1 classifies Hebrews 11 as a list of heroes which entails a summary of biblical history and compares it with other such lists and summaries. Against other biblical summaries, Hebrews 11 allegedly neglects the Sinaitic covenant and the possession ofthe land. Eisenbaurn distinguishes between longer and briefer lists ofJewish heroes, but notes that longer lists also emphasize Sinai and the land. Briefer lists function to exemplify a point. Eisenbaum locates Hebrews in proximity to Jewish lists that have a unified story, but also detects kinship with Greco-Roman rhetoric in the variety ofheroes. In particular Hebrews includes women. Further, Eisenbaurn discovers dissimilarity between these heroes and the ultimate faith that Hebrews advocates, so that the heroes are not examples for imitation. Chapter 2 discusses three ways Hebrews appropriates scripture. It interprets precursor texts, uses them as factors in its own composition, and employs them in intertextual dialogue. Noting that citations usually represent direct speech whereas narrative material appears as retelling, Eisenbaum suggests that citations claim the impact of the immediacy of the original whereas reiterated narrative distinguishes the present from the past. Thus, these distinct modes ofappropriating citations and narrative enable Hebrews to quote God's words against historical precedents in the narrative. This revisionary appropriation of scripture continues in chapter 3 particularly in two distinct uses of "promise." Heroes from the past in Hebrews 11 may experience fulfillment of particular "promises," but not Christian eschatological fulfillment. Eisenbaurn attempts to identify a principle of selection that determines why characters as disparate as Rahab and Abraham belong in the same list. She settles on their standing apart from Israel as a nation. This chapter also contains Eisenbaum's discussion on "faith" in which she cautiously adopts my view that faith in Heb 11:1 has to do with the ultimate subjection of all things to Christ. The final chapter discusses the power of persuasion of Hebrews among early Christians. Eisenbaurn maintains that Hebrews advances new interpretations ofscripture 152 SHOFAR Summer 1999 Vol. 17, No.4 as paradigmatic truth. Thus, the list of heroes advances an interpretation of the one continuous story of scripture. On the basis of the transvaluation of the heroes and the thesis of denationalizing, Eisenbaum concludes that biblical heroes in Hebrews (Abraham and Moses explicitly) appear not as Israelites or Jews but essentially Christians, and this move dispossesses Jews from their national heritage and substitutes Christians as the heirs. This ambitious attempt to locate Hebrews 11 within its literary environment nearly succeeds. The study of the appropriation of scripture in Hebrews as well as of the mediation of the story of scripture through other interpretations is comprehensive, though, as Harold Bloom has shown, temporal relationships between precursor and successor texts are more complex than either the recovery of the original for the present in citations or the separation of present from past in narrative retelling. The scope of secondary literature is also impressive. But in my judgment, the thesis that the heroes and therefore the scriptures are denationalized fails. Against Eisenbaum's conclusion that Hebrews neglects the promise of the land, the world to come in 2:5 and the "rest" in 3:7-4: 11 are derivative of the Abrahamic promise of the land. The new covenant from Jer 31:31-34 is for the house oflsrae1 and the house of Judah (Heb 8:8), and it is derivative...

The Transformation of Pauline Arguments in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho

In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin extensively quotes the Jewish scriptures and includes several citations of logia of Jesus. Furthermore, while explicit citations from Paul are peculiarly absent from the text, Justin, writing from Rome, certainly knows Paul's writings in detail and uses them. Indeed, it seems that the Dialogue provides a perfect occasion for him to employ Paul because in it he addresses the relationship between Judaism and the church, a central topic in both Romans and Galatians. Besides the appearance of Pauline quotations, several of Justin's arguments directly rely on Paul's thinking. For example, Justin probably has Galatians 3 before him as he composes Dialogue 95–96. Oskar Skarsaune's analysis of Justin's writing also indicates that Romans is one of Justin's preferred sources for quotations of the Jewish scriptures; that is, he sometimes quotes the Jewish scriptures as they appear in Paul rather the LXX. He draws especially from the Jewish scriptures quoted in Romans 2–4 and 9–11 because the chapters examine the problem of Torah and the Jews' rejection of the gospel, also two important issues in the Dialogue.

Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger's Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy

The development of German colonial fantasies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as described recently by Susanne Zantop, occurred simultaneously with the rise and professionalization of historical scholarship in Germany.1 One of its offshoots, the field of Protestant theology, which understood its task as the historical investigation of the origins of Christianity, provided fertile ground for the adoption of colonialist thinking. The theological relationship of Christianity toward Judaism had been, since the first century, one of annexation, subjugation, and control of Jewish scriptures and central religious ideas. Indeed, Judaism had long been essential to producing Christianity as a colonialist religion. Already accustomed to a theological position as colonizer, Christian theology, by the nineteenth century, quite easily reproduced many patterns of thought, if not the particular fantasies, that dominated the German colonialist imagination. In the modern period, the Christian theological experience easily legitimated European political efforts at colonialist conquest and control. Just as Frantz Fanon writes that it is the white man who creates the Negro, but the Negro who creates negritude, Christianity created Judaism, while the Jews created Judaism. Judaism as a religion is a modem