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It is generally accepted that Revelation’s heavenly scenes were intended to demonstrate that God continued to exercise his control even when the audience’s experience might suggest otherwise. In The Abyss in Revelation, Edward Gudeman argues that even though the scenes of the underworld and its inhabitants are describing reality from the opposite perspective, they declare God’s sovereignty and power in an equally powerful way. Examining the motif and imagery of the abyss and the sea in Old Testament, New Testament, Greco-Roman, and Second Temple Jewish writings, Gudeman identifies traditions that John appropriates in Revelation in order to create his unique vision of the abyss. Gudeman...
In The Church as Paradise and the Way Therein: Early Christian Appropriation of Genesis 3:22–24, Christopher A. Graham demonstrates that early Christian authors employed the words “paradise” and “way” as allusions to the expulsion narrative (Genesis 3:22–24) to signify that the benefits available in protological Paradise were once again accessible in and through Jesus and the Church. The centrality of the expulsion narrative in their literary milieus gave these authors confidence that readers would discern these allusions. After considering the reception of the expulsion in texts circulating within the early Christian milieu, Graham turns to the texts of Luke and Irenaeus of Lyons. Both authors drew from an interpretive tradition in which a return to Paradise was desirable. Both celebrated Jesus's reversal of Adam's expulsion and the constitution of Jesus's followers as the location and means by which humanity could continue to access divine truth and life. For both authors, the Church is Paradise and the way therein.
The early Enoch literature does not refer to the Mosaic Torah or emphasize the distinctively Mosaic laws designed for Israel. But the book of Jubilees gives room to both Mosaic and Enochic traditions within the Sinaitic revelatory framework. What, then, should we make of such differences? / This question and related speculations were on the minds of scholars gathered from around the world at the fourth Enoch Seminar at Camaldoli, Italy, in July 2007. Four tendencies emerged from the discussion at the seminar. Some scholars claimed that Jubilees was a direct product of Enochic Judaism with subordinated Mosaic features. Some suggested that Jubilees was a conscious synthesis of Enochic and Mosa...
The essays in Sacred Texts and Disparate Interpretations shed new light on core themes in Qumran studies, such as the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, history of the Qumran community, Hebrew philology and paleography, Wisdom and religious poetry.
The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea moves beyond previous Judaist readings to argue that the evil creator is a distinctly Christian idea in biblical interpretations. Through Gnostic and Marcionite readings, Litwa connects ancient analyses of God's wicked actions with analysis in modern theology.
This book presents the authoritative print bibliography of current scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran, and related fields (including New Testament studies); source, subject, and language indices facilitate its use by scholars and students within and outside the field.
This book examines ideas of spiritual nourishment as maintained chiefly by Patristic theologians –those who lived in Byzantium. It shows how a particular type of Byzantine frescoes and icons illustrated the views of Patristic thinkers on the connections between the heavenly and the earthly worlds. The author explores the occurrence, and geographical distribution, of this new type of iconography that manifested itself in representations concerned with the human body, and argues that these were a reaction to docetist ideas. The volume also investigates the diffusion of saints’ cults and demonstrates that this took place on a North-South axis as their veneration began in Byzantium and gradually reached the northern part of Europe, and eventually the entirety of Christendom.
The volume focuses on variants between the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch prompted by graphic similarities between letters. As a phenomenon that occurs during the transmission of ancient texts, an in-depth study of the linguistic and paleographic background of these variants provides fruitful ground for the exploration of the Pentateuch transmission. This volume gathers all the relevant variants from the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch, comparing them to further witnesses, primarily the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. Each case is examined independently through a linguistic analysis of the variants, their process of development and an evaluation of which version...
With the full publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fresh analysis of the evidence presented can be and indeed, should be made. Beyond the Qumran Community does just that, reaching a surprising conclusion: the sect described in the Dead Sea Scrolls developed later than has usually been supposed and was never confi ned to the site of Qumran. / John J. Collins here deconstructs the Qumran community and shows that the sectarian documents actually come from a text spread throughout the land. He examines the Community Rule, or Yahad, and considers the Teacher of Righteousness, a pivotal fi gure in the Essene movement. After examining the available evidence, Collins concludes that it is, in fact, overwhelmingly likely that the site of Qumran housed merely a single settlement of a very widespread movement.
Through close examination of ancient, medieval, and modern Lives of the saints, Ann W. Astell demonstrates how the historical transformation of hagiography as a genre correlates with similar changes in biblical studies. Christian hagiography flourished from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, illuminating the gospel through the overlapping forms of exempla and vita. Originally, the Lives of the saints were understood as hermeneutical extensions of the Bible—God authors the saint, just as God authors the divinely inspired scriptures. During the medieval period, a sense of dual authorship between God and the cooperating saint developed, paralleling the Scholastic impulse to assign greater agency to the human writers of scripture. Then, in the sixteenth century, powerful new anxieties about historical truth pushed hagiography aside for biography, its successor. Drawing on her expertise in the history of Christianity and biblical exegesis, Astell convincingly shows how this radical shift in hagiography’s status—the loss of the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical senses of the Lives—serves as a bellwether for modern biblical reception.