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The Prophetic Body
Modern study of biblical prophecy frequently defines prophecy as a message from God and has focused almost exclusively on prophets' words. But prophecy was always also embodied. Anathea E. Portier-Young insists on the synergy of word and body in biblical prophecy. Prophets did more than reveal knowledge: the prophetic body connected God and people, making them present to one another, channeling divine power, traveling between realms. Drawing insights from disciplines ranging from neurobiology to cultural studies, the author examines stories of prophetic commissioning, bodily transformation, asceticism and ecstasy, mobility and immobility, affect and emotion, revealing the body's centrality to prophetic mediation.
Snatched Into Paradise (2 Cor 12:1-10)
In 2 Corinthians 12:1-10, Paul claims to have been snatched into paradise but then tells how he received a "thorn in the flesh". Many recent scholars contend that Paul belittles ecstatic experiences such as the ascent to paradise. This monograph places 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 in the contexts of ancient ascent traditions as well as other accounts of extraordinary religious experience in Paul's letters, and it engages premodern interpretation of the ascent. This study argues that for Paul, extraordinary experiences such as the ascent enable self-transcending love for God and neighbors.
Waters of the Exodus
In Waters of the Exodus, Nathalie LaCoste examines the Diasporic Jewish community in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and their relationship to the hydric environment. By focusing on four retellings of the exodus narrative composed by Egyptian Jews—Artapanus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo of Alexandria—she lays out how the hydric environment of Egypt, and specifically the Nile river, shaped the transmission of the exodus story. Mapping these observations onto the physical landscape of Egypt provides a new perspective on the formation of Jewish communities in Egypt.
Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas
The Shepherd of Hermas is one of the oldest and most well-attested Christian works. Its popularity arguably exceeded that of the canonical Gospels. Many early Christian thinkers regarded the Shepherd as authoritative and cited it in their own writings, even though its status as Scripture was controversial. The far-reaching influence of the Shepherd during the first few centuries is attested in part by the many languages in which it was copied: Latin, Ethiopic, Coptic, Middle Persian, and Georgian. The early dating and wide dissemination of the Shepherd of Hermas offers us access to a period when canonical boundaries were elastic. This volume treats religious experience in the Shepherd, a top...
Religious Experience Revisited
Religious Experience Revisited explores a dilemma which has haunted the study of religion since William James. Is religion rooted in experiences? Is religion rooted in expressions? How are experiences and expressions related? The contributors to this international and interdisciplinary compilation explore the possibilities and the impossibilities of a hermeneutics of religion. Combining theology and philosophy with biblical, cultural, historical and literary studies, they examine how religious experiences and religious expressions have been entangled in the past and in the present. These entanglements call for interdisciplinary conversations in which those who study experiences and those who study expressions can learn from each other in order to carve out important and instructive spaces for the study of religion.
Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions
Given the recent interest in the emotions presupposed in early religious literature, it has been thought useful to examine in this volume how the Jews and early Christians expressed their feelings within the prayers recorded in some of their literature. Specialists in their fields from academic institutions around the world have analysed important texts relating to this overall theme and to what is revealed with regard to such diverse topics as relations with God, exegesis, education, prophecy, linguistic expression, feminism, happiness, grief, cult, suicide, non-Jews, Hellenism, Qumran and Jerusalem. The texts discussed are in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic and are important for a scientific understanding of how Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity developed their approaches to worship, to the construction of their theology and to the feelings that lay behind their religious ideas and practices. The articles contribute significantly to an historical understanding of how Jews maintained their earlier traditions but also came to terms with the ideology of the dominant Hellenistic culture that surrounded them.
Paul's Thorn in the Flesh
Solving the mystery of Satan's messenger Paul's enigmatic "thorn in the flesh" in 2 Corinthians has baffled interpreters for centuries. Many offer suggestions as to the identity of Satan's messenger; others despair that the puzzle is unsolvable. In Paul's Thorn in the Flesh: New Clues for an Old Problem, Kenneth Berding reopens the case. He follows a trail of clues that includes ancient beliefs about curses, details from Paul's letters, Jesus's own suffering, and the testimony of the earliest Christian interpreters. Berding offers twenty criteria—some familiar, others neglected—that any proposal must explain. While the usual suspects fall short, Berding suggests a new solution—one that satisfies all the evidence and gives us a fuller view of Paul. Far from an abstract puzzle, Paul's own suffering is relevant to Christians today. Paul's Thorn in the Flesh is an accessible study that casts new light on Pauline studies, first--century background, and theological and pastoral concerns.
Mind, Morality and Magic
The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts? "Mind, Morality and Magic" draws on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind - including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship - such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics - as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.
Philippians
Pauls letter to the Philippians offers treasures to the reader--and historical and theological puzzles as well. Paul A. Holloway treats the letter as a literary unity and a letter of consolation, according to Greek and Roman understandings of that genre, written probably in Rome and thus the latest of Pauls letters to come down to us. Adapting the methodology of what he calls a new history of religions perspective, Holloway attends carefully to the religious topoi of Philippians, especially the metamorphic myth in chapter 2, and draws significant conclusions about Pauls personalism and "mysticism." With succinct and judicious treatments of pertinent exegetical and theological issues throughout, Holloway draws richly on Jewish, Greek, and Roman comparative material to present a complex understanding of the apostle as a Hellenized and Romanized Jew.
The Departure of an Apostle
What was Paul's attitude toward his own death? How did he act and what did he say and write in view of it? What hopes did he hold for himself beyond death? Alexander N. Kirk explores these questions through a close reading of four Pauline letters that look ahead to Paul's death and other relevant texts in the first two generations after Paul's death (AD 70-160). The author studies portraits of the departed Paul in Acts, 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp's letter To the Philippians, and the Martyrdom of Paul. He also examines portraits of the departing Paul in 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, and 2 Timothy, arguing that Paul's death did not primarily present an existential challenge, but a pastoral one. Although touching upon several areas of recent scholarly interest, Alexander N. Kirk sets forth a new research question and fresh interpretations of early Christian and Pauline texts.
