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A multidisciplinary appraisal of the Pharisees: who they were, what they taught, and how they’ve been understood and depicted throughout history For centuries, Pharisees have been well known but little understood—due at least in part to their outsized role in the Christian imagination arising from select negative stereotypes based in part on the Gospels. Yet historians see Pharisees as respected teachers and forward-thinking innovators who helped make the Jewish tradition more adaptable to changing circumstances and more egalitarian in practice. Seeking to bridge this gap, the contributors to this volume provide a multidisciplinary appraisal of who the Pharisees actually were, what they ...
The essays presented by Professors Marie A. Conn and Thérèse McGuire examine stone and water as vehicles of ritual memory through the lenses of various disciplines. In seven concise yet revealing chapters, the authors examine instances throughout history and unbound by geography of stone and water as real or abstract objects that shape our lives, possibly without our notice. Chapters topics include: -Water as a vehicle for ritual memory from the earliest days of human history to the present-day. -An investigation of the aesthetic principles of the Middle Ages up to the Gothic styles of cathedrals in North America. -Julian of Norwich, the famous cloistress, walled in by stone in comparison to Etty Hillesum, a WWII-era mystic, whose small desk used to write her revealing diaries became her stone cloister cell. -The Irish, water, and stone in Finnegan's Wake. -Warming the "stone heart" of a child pummeled by the foster care system. -The lack of clean water that contributes to wide-spread disease. -Group behavior and the eventualities of war through stone-like, (uncooperative and hardened) psychological states.
The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history. Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conqu...
Updated ed. of: Targum and Testament. 1972.
In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history? The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound chur...
The ‛Euthalian apparatus’ is a corpus of auxiliary texts that summarize Acts and the New Testament Letters. The material is found in a great number of Greek biblical manuscripts. Some sources identify the author as ‛Euthalius, bishop of Sulci’, but almost nothing is known about this figure. Vemund Blomkvist’s study is based on the idea that the biblical text and the apparatus form a ‛system’, and that this system may be studied as a unity. The commentary shows that the different genres of the apparatus offer quite different paraphrases of the apostolic writings: The argumenta present a radicalized interpretation of Paul’s theology, while the chapter titles seem to be closer to the biblical text. Together with Prof. David Hellholm, Blomkvist has published a study on the meta-terminology of the apparatus (‛Paraenesis as an ancient genre-designation’, 2002), also included in the present volume.
Josephus's thirty volumes (more consulted than read) are considered the ultimate reference work for Judaism in the Graeco-Roman period. Even the more sceptical, who would wish to read between the lines, must often resort to arbitrary techniques because it is not apparent where the 'lines' are. This volume of essays by seven prominent scholars-John Barclay, Per Bilde, Steve Mason, Tessa Rajak, Joseph Sievers, Paul Spilsbury and Gregory E. Sterling-is another step in the effort to change the way we look at this most famous/notorious ancient Jewish historian. It introduces him as a rational being, a first-century author, and a thinker, with his own literary and social contexts-on the premise that he is worth trying to understand. Three essays deal with his Jewish Antiquities, two with Against Apion, and two with the larger themes of afterlife and apocalyptic in his writings. An up-to-date assessment of Josephus and his modern scholarly interpreters, for expert and non-expert alike.
An ongoing issue for clergy as well as Christians in general is how to approach New Testament narratives about the crucifixion of Jesus in relation to Jews, Judaism, and the horrific events of the Holocaust. The events of Holy Week pose particular challenges for clergy and congregations. In this book Henry Knight helps us deal with Holy Week texts in light of our post-Holocaust world and provides practical examples of prayers, liturgies, and resource material to help pastors prepare for and lead worship and teach during this important time in the life of a congregation.
The purpose of this book is to help postmodern Westerners understand what the Bible has to say about wealth and possessions, basing itself on the presumption that (a) nobody can understand themselves apart from some recognition of their spiritual roots, and (b) that these roots sink deeper into the pages of the Bible than most Westerners realize. Focusing upon that part of the Bible most widely recognized to be its ideological core--that which is called Torah by some, Pentateuch by others--it interprets this "great text" against other "great texts" in its literary-historical environment, including (a) some epic poems from Mesopotamia, (b) some Jewish texts from Syria-Palestine, and (c) some Nazarene parables from the Greek New Testament.