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Christian Origins and the Ancient Economy
What does economics have to do with Christian origins? Why study such a connection? First of all, the New Testament makes many direct references to economic issues. But, second, the economy affects every other aspect of life (family, religion, community, work, health, and politics). To understand what it was like to live in a society, one must understand what the economy was doing. The study of the economy includes not only the goods and services of a society but also human labor and its control. For one, it entails the size of the pie of goods. (How prosperous was first-century Galilee?) But the study of economy also takes account of the slice of the pie that each family obtained. (How fair was the economy to each family?) Those involved in the quest for the historical Jesus have discovered that the ancient economy is a major point of dispute among various interpreters. Was the early Jesus movement a socioeconomic protest? Or was it primarily a religious reform? These two approaches understand Jesus in remarkably different ways. This volume seeks to guide readers through some of the most controversial issues raised in the last twenty years on this important topic.
Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews
In the collection entitled Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews Gabriella Gelardini gathers fifteen essays written in the last fifteen years, twelve of which are in English and three in German. Arranged in three parts (the world of, behind, and in front of Hebrews’s text), her articles deal with such topics as structure and intertext, sin and faith, atonement and cult, as well as space and resistance. She reads Hebrews no longer as the enigmatic and homeless outsider within the New Testament corpus, as the “Melchizedekian being without genealogy”; rather, she reads Hebrews as one whose origin has finally been rediscovered, namely in Second Temple Judaism.
Hebrews in Contexts
Scholars of Hebrews have repeatedly echoed the almost proverbial saying that the book appears to its reader as a "Melchizedekian being without genealogy". For such scholars the aphorism identified prominent traits of Hebrews, its enigma, its otherness, its marginality. Although Franz Overbeck might unintentionally have stimulated such correlations, they do not represent what his dictum originally meant. Writing during the high noon of historicism in 1880, Overbeck lamented a lack of historical context, one that he had deduced on the basis of flawed presuppositions of the ideological frameworks prevalent of his time. His assertion made an impact, and consequently Hebrews was not only "othered...
The Three Pillars
The Three Pillars: How Family Politics Shaped the Earliest Church and the Gospel of Mark, examines how family relationships played a key role in the earliest Christian church. By disentangling the two disparate genealogies of Jesus, the author reconstructs the families of Joseph and Mary. Presented here for the first time is the full ancestry of Jesus' mother, Mary, who was descended from the anti-Hasmonean high priest Alcimus. The author suggests that Mary and her daughter Mary played a hitherto unrecognized role in the church's earliest leadership struggle and that a composite of these two women, not Mary Magdalene, was the basis for the Gnostic Mary of later Christian works. The author ne...
Understanding the Social World of the New Testament
The New Testament is a book of great significance in Western culture yet is often inaccessible to students because the modern world differs so significantly from the ancient Mediterranean one in which it was written. It is imperative to develop a cross-cultural understanding of the values of the ancient Mediterranean society from which the New Testament arose in order to fully appreciate the documents and the communities that they represent. Dietmar Neufeld and Richard E. DeMaris bring together biblical scholars with expertise in the social sciences to develop interpretative models for understanding such values as collectivism, kinship, memory, ethnicity, and honour, and to demonstrate how to apply these models to the New Testament texts. Kinship is illuminated by analysis of the Holy Family as well as to early Christian organisations; gender through a study of Paul’s view of women; and landscape and spatiality through a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth. This book is the ideal companion to study of the New Testament.
The Body of Creation
In the modern period, space has predominately been conceived of as a mere setting for human action, ontologically separate from the body. In Markan studies, the result has been the multiplication of textual geographies that hide the spatiality of Jesus’s narrativized and, thus, living body. Rather than representing Jesus’s body as replicating the spatial configurations of dominant scribal cartographic practice (including imperial practice), James B. Pendleton shows that Mark portrays Jesus’s body as a living production of space that troubles dominant maps. Against readings of Mark that argue that Jesus is either an imperial or an anti-imperial figure, Pendleton argues that Mark presents Jesus’s body, and thus his spatiality, as both inside (as an insider) and outside (as an outsider) simultaneously, in what has more commonly been theorized recently as third spatiality, or thirdspace. Rather than an imperial or anti-imperial economy of spatial production, Pendleton argues, Mark presents Jesus’s body within a both-and and more economy that is kenotic, revealing God’s own royal yet “emptying” body.
The Godman and the Sea
If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains the case that the study of early Christianity is dominated by an assumption of the force of Jesus's personality on divergent communities. In The Godman and the Sea, Michael J. Thate shifts the terms of this study by focusing on the Gospel of Mark, which ends when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discover a few days after the crucifixion that Jesus's tomb has been opened but the corpse is not there. Unlike the other gospels, Mark does not include the resurrection, portraying ins...
Interpreting 2 Peter through African American Women’s Moral Writings
Shively T. J. Smith reconsiders what is most distinct, troubling, and potentially thrilling about the often overlooked and dismissed book of 2 Peter. Using the rhetorical strategies of nineteenth-century African American women, including Ida B. Wells, Jarena Lee, Anna Julia Cooper, and others, Smith redefines the use of biblical citations, the language of justice and righteousness, and even the matter of pseudonymity in 2 Peter. She approaches 2 Peter as an instance of Christian cultural rhetoric that forges a particular kind of community identity and behavior. This pioneering study considers how 2 Peter cultivates the kind of human relations and attitudes that speak to the values of moral people seeking justice in the past as well as today.
Loneliness
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Like Mount Zion
Critical spatial approaches — particularly those informed by the scholarship of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Soja — have significantly impacted biblical scholarship over the last twenty years. However, these spatial approaches have been limited due to the methodological challenges inherent in transposing the social-scientific approaches of the aforementioned scholars to the task of biblical interpretation. This volume adapts conceptual metaphor theory as a methodological bridge to address such constraints. The first half of the volume begins by surveying the field of critical spatiality in biblical studies, arguing for the need for fresh methodological development. Thereafter, the volume deli...
