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“It is so rare and refreshing to read a Roman history book which recognizes and celebrates the sheer difficulty of writing history” (The Times Literary Supplement). The ruling elite in ancient Rome sought to eradicate even the memory of their deceased opponents through a process now known as damnatio memoriae. These formal and traditional practices included removing the person’s name and image from public monuments and inscriptions, making it illegal to speak of him, and forbidding funeral observances and mourning. Paradoxically, however, while these practices dishonored the person's memory, they did not destroy it. Indeed, a later turn of events could restore the offender not only to ...
Contending that Jesus narrative parables are more poetic than metaphoric, Hedrick argues that parables should be heard solely on their own terms. Hedrick s dissatisfaction with figurative and metaphorical approaches or those that argue for a particular meaning or a single interpretation diverges sharply from the modern consensus and breaks new ground in parable studies.
This book is the result of a long and fruitful conversation among practitioners of two very different fields: ancient history and political theory. The topic of the conversation is classical Greek democracy and its contemporary relevance. The nineteen contributors remain diverse in their political commitments and in their analytic approaches, but all have engaged deeply with Greek texts, with normative and historical concerns, and with each others' arguments. The issues and tensions examined here are basic to both history and political theory: revolution versus stability, freedom and equality, law and popular sovereignty, cultural ideals and social practice. While the authors are sharply cri...
Unmasking Biblical Faiths aims to address many of the challenges to traditional Christian faith in the modern world. Since the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, human reason, formerly tethered by the constraints of organized religion, has been set free to explore the universe relatively unchallenged. The influence of the Bible, on the other hand, weakened due to the successes of modern historical criticism, is found to be inadequate for the task of enabling the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), in that it cannot adequately respond to the many questions about religious faith that human reasoning raises for modern human beings. In a series of short but tightly reasoned essays, Charles Hedrick explores the confrontation between traditional Christian faith and aggressive human reason, a conflict that is facilitated by Western secular education.
In 1958, Bible scholar Morton Smith announced the discovery of a sensational manuscript-a second-century letter written by St. Clement of Alexandria, who quotes an unknown, longer version of the Gospel of Mark. When Smith published the letter in 1973, he set off a firestorm of controversy that has raged ever since. Is the text authentic, or a hoax? Is Smith’s interpretation correct? Did Jesus really practice magic, or homosexuality? And if the letter is a forgery . . . why? Through close examination of the "discovered” manuscript’s text, Peter Jeffery unravels the answers to the mystery and tells the tragic tale of an estranged Episcopalian priest who forged an ancient gospel and fooled many of the best biblical scholars of his time. Jeffery shows convincingly that Smith’s Secret Gospel is steeped in anachronisms and that its construction was influenced by Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, twentieth-century misunderstandings of early Christian liturgy, and Smith’s personal struggles with Christian sexual morality.
A hundred years after A. Schweitzer's Von Reimarus zu Wrede, the study of the historical Jesus is again experiencing a renaissance. Ongoing since the beginning of the 1980's, this renaissance has produced an abundance of Jesus studies that also display a welcome diversity of methods, approaches and hypotheses. The Handbook of the Study of the Historical Jesus is designed to handle this diversity and abundance. Drawing from first-class scholarship throughout the world, the four large volumes of the Handbook offer a unique assembly of leading experts presenting their approaches to the historical Jesus, as well as a thought-out compilation of original studies on a large variety of topics pertaining to Jesus research and adjacent areas.
In this splendid introduction to the elusive rhetorical device central to the New Testament picture of Jesus, Charles Hedrick explores the nature of the parable and its history of use. He asks basic questions such as, what is a parable? is Jesus really the author of the parables? and what does a parable mean? and then reviews a range of sources--from Aesop's fables to modern New Testament scholarship--to answer them. He also surveys the various ways the parables have been approached in literary criticism throughout history, giving specific examples of each method and delineating their strengths and weaknesses.
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[This] book acquaints the beginner with the topic of gnosticism and early Christianity and presents to the specialist some of the new frontiers their colleagues are exploring. For the beginner there is a concise introduction to gnosticism. It covers the issues of origin, literature, leading ideas, and possible links with early Christianity. Each contributor has prepared a preface to his or her paper that points to its salient features and explains how the essay fits into the overall subject of the book. --from the Preface
Becoming Christian examines various facets of the first letter of Peter, in its social and historical setting, in some cases using new social-scientific and postcolonial methods to shed light on the ways in which the letter contributes to the making of Christian identity. At the heart of the book chapters 5-7, examine the contribution of 1 Peter to the construction of Christian identity, the persecution and suffering of Christians in Asia Minor, the significance of the name 'Christian', and the response of the letter to the hostility encountered by Christians in society. There are no recent books which bring together such a wealth of information and analysis of this crucial early Christian text. Becoming Christian has developed out of Horrell's ongoing research for the International Critical Commentary on 1 Peter. Together these chapters offer a series of significant and original engagements with this letter, and a resource for studies of 1 Peter for some time to come.