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This book examines texts and materials, ranging from the eastern Mediterranean to northwestern Europe, related to the Maccabean martyrs. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski demonstrates that Christian thinkers constructed memories of the Maccabean martyrs that simultaneously appropriated Jewish traditions and obscured the Jewish origins of Christianity.
The history of influence of the old testamentary Maccabees is the focus of the essays collected in this book, which extend thematically and chronologically from the cult of martyrs in late antiquity to the time of the modern wars of liberation.
This book traces the historical phenomenon of “the Jew as Legitimation.” Contributors discuss how Jews have been used, through time, to validate non-Jewish beliefs. The volume dissects the dilemmas and challenges this pattern has presented to Jews. Throughout history, Jews and Judaism have served to legitimize the beliefs of Gentiles. Jews functioned as Augustine’s witnesses to the truth of Christianity, as Christian Kabbalist’s source for Protestant truths, as an argument for the enlightened claim for tolerance, as the focus of modern Christian Zionist reverence, and as a weapon of contemporary right wing populism against fears of Islamization. This volume challenges understandings of Jewish-Gentile relations, offering a counter-perspective to discourses of antisemitism and philosemitism.
Mishnah Avot is a collection of wisdom sayings from the sages who comprised the earliest generations of rabbinic leadership. Over the centuries, Jews have studied and reflected on Mishnah Avot, seeing in it a guide to the development of wisdom revealed in Torah. The More Torah, The More Life offers a commentary on Mishnah Avot and the teachings of later Jewish scholars who commented upon it. Using the musical metaphor of resonance, this book shows how a Christian theological engagement with rabbinic literature yields new questions concerning the nature of Jesus Christ, the relationship between Israel and the Church, and the significance of Torah for Christians. The More Torah, The More Life offers new direction in the development of non-supersessionist Christian theology while also advancing engagement with Judaism as an area of concern in Christian thought and practice.
Fighting over the Bible explores the bitter conflicts between main stream Jews and their internal and external opponents, especially between particular Jewish groups such as Pharisees, Sadducees, Qumranites, Samaritans, Rabbanites and Karaites, as well as with Christians and Muslims regarding their interpretations of Jewish Scripture. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is an important sacred text for all branches of the Abrahamic faiths, but it has more often divided than unified them. This volume explores and exemplifies the roots of these interpretive conflicts and controversies and traces the rich exegetical and theological approaches that grew out of them. Focusing on the Jewish sources from...
Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East engages with two levels of scholarly discussion that are all too often dealt with separately in modern scholarship: the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies. It outlines how these two lines of inquiry can and should be read in an integrative manner. Major historical themes such as conversion to Islam, Islamization, religious violence, and the regulation of Muslim/non-Muslim ties are addressed and reframed by attending to the relatively hidden, yet highly meaningful, role that women played throughout this period. This book is about the history of Islam from the perspective of femal...
What do we mean when we talk about 'being Christian' in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together sixteen world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity and Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honour of the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume's dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, the papers in Section I, `Being Christian through Reading, Writing and Hearing', analyse the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to be Christian. The essays in Section II move on to explore how late antique Christians sought to create...
Religion was integral to the conduct of war in the ancient world and the Romans were certainly no exception. No campaign was undertaken, no battle risked, without first making sacrifice to propitiate the appropriate gods (such as Mars, god of War) or consulting oracles and omens to divine their plans. Yet the link between war and religion is an area that has been regularly overlooked by modern scholars examining the conflicts of these times. This volume addresses that omission by drawing together the work of experts from across the globe. The chapters have been carefully structured by the editors so that this wide array of scholarship combines to give a coherent, comprehensive study of the role of religion in the wars of the Roman Empire. Aspects considered in depth include: the Imperial cults and legionary loyalty; the army and religious/regional disputes; Trajan and religion; Constantine and Christianity; omens and portents; funerary cults and practices; the cult of Mithras; the Imperial sacramentum; religion & Imperial military medicine.
This comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the Old Testament apocryphal books summarizes their context, message, and significance. The first edition has been very well reviewed and widely adopted. It is the most substantial introduction to the Apocrypha available and has become a standard authority on the topic. The second edition has been substantially revised and updated throughout to reflect the latest scholarship. The book includes a foreword by James H. Charlesworth.