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Revised thesis (Ph.D.) - Southern Methodist University, 2007.
Sound matters. The New Testament’s first audiences were listeners, not readers. They heard its compositions read aloud and understood their messages as linear streams of sound. To understand the New Testament’s meaning in the way its earliest audiences did, we must hear its audible features and understand its words as spoken sounds. Sound Matters presents essays by ten scholars from five countries and three continents, who explore the New Testament through sound mapping, a technique invented by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott for analyzing Greek texts as speech. Sound Matters demonstrates the value and uses of this technique as a prelude and aid to interpretation. The essays that make up this volume illustrate the wide range of interpretive possibilities that emerge when sound mapping restores the spoken sounds of the New Testament and revives its living voice. Contributors Thomas E. Boomershine Pieter J. J. Botha Jeffrey E. Brickle Nina E. Livesey Dan Nasselqvist Bernhard Oestreich Frank Scheppers Bernard Brandon Adam G. White
Speculation around the health of Paul the Apostle has been present since soon after his death. Recently scholars have understood Paul to be disabled but have been wary of isolating precisely what his disabilities may have been or whether they are important for understanding his writings. This book is the first full-length study of Paul the Apostle and disability. Using insights from contemporary disability studies, Isaac Soon analyses features of Paul's body in his ancient Mediterranean context to understand the ways in which his body was disabled. Focusing on three such ancient disabilities--demonization, circumcision, and short stature--this book draws on a rich variety of ancient evidence...
Explores the relationship between the Mosaic law and early Christian ethics In this volume thirteen respected scholars explore the relationship between the Mosaic law and early Christian ethics, examining early Christian appropriation of the Torah and looking at ways in which the law continued to serve as an ethical reference point for Christ-believers — whether or not they thought Torah observance was essential. These noteworthy essays compare differences in interpretation and application of the law between Christians and non-Christian Jews; investigate ways in which Torah-inspired ethical practices helped Christ-believing communities articulate their distinct identities and social responsibilities; and look at how presentations of the law in early Christian literature might inform Christian social and ethical practices today. Posing a unified set of questions to a diverse range of texts, Torah Ethics and Early Christian Identity will stimulate new thinking about a complex phenomenon commonly overlooked by scholars and church leaders alike.
This volume offers a comprehensive examination of circumcision and foreskin in the undisputed Pauline epistles. Historically, Paul's discourse on circumcision has been read through the lens of Paul's supposed abandonment of Judaism and conversion to 'Christianity.' Recent scholarship on Paul, however, has challenged the idea that Paul ever abandoned Judaism. In the context of this revisionist reading of Paul, Ryan Collman argues that Paul never repudiates, redefines, or replaces circumcision. Rather, Paul's discourse on circumcision (and foreskin) is shaped by his understanding of ethnicity and his bifurcation of humanity into the categories of Jews and the nations—the circumcision and the foreskin. Collman argues that Paul does not deny the continuing validity (and importance) of circumcision for Jewish followers of Jesus, but categorically refuses that gentile believers can undergo circumcision. By reading this language in its historical, rhetorical, epistolary, and ethnic contexts, Collman offers a number of new readings of difficult Pauline texts (e.g., Rom 4:9–12; Gal 5:1–4; Phil 3:2–3).
Why did Saint Augustine ask God to “circumcise [his] lips”? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight’s head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath actually—as an early glossator figures her—a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land inside of his uncut member? In this little book, A. W. Strouse excavates a poetics of the foreskin, uncovering how Patristic theologies of circumcision came to structure medieval European literary aesthetics. Following the writings of Saint Paul, “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” become key terms for theorizing language—especially the dichotomies between the mere text and its extended exegesis, between brevity and longwindedness, between wisdom and folly. Form and Foreskin looks to three works: a peculiar story by Saint Augustine about a boy with the long foreskin; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. By examining literary scenes of cutting and stretching, Strouse exposes how Patristic treatments of circumcision queerly govern medieval poetics.
An epicenter in present-day Pauline scholarship is the issue of the Law. The interpretation of this contentious issue started before Paul's letters and found its way into them by his citing how others perceived of his theology, and in Paul rendering rumors and criticism, and also interacting with them. To this reception-oriented perspective belong also punitive actions taken against Paul by synagogues. As a reception of Paul, Acts is included, leaving a more complex picture than argued by advocates of Paul within Judaism. Thus Karl Olav Sandnes uncovers the first interpretation or reception of Paul's view on Torah. It is limited in its scope, but provides a critical and necessary view on common trends in Pauline scholarship. Paul's decentering of the Torah was considered endangering for morality, for Jews and Gentiles alike. Perceptions of Paul's theology must be accounted for in Pauline studies.
Why did Saint Augustine ask God to “circumcise [his] lips”? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight’s head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath actually—as an early glossator figures her—a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land inside of his uncut member? In this little book, A. W. Strouse excavates a poetics of the foreskin, uncovering how Patristic theologies of circumcision came to structure medieval European literary aesthetics. Following the writings of Saint Paul, “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” become key terms for theorizing language—especially the dichotomies between the mere text and its extended exegesis, between brevity and longwindedness, between wisdom and folly. Form and Foreskin looks to three works: a peculiar story by Saint Augustine about a boy with the long foreskin; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. By examining literary scenes of cutting and stretching, Strouse exposes how Patristic treatments of circumcision queerly govern medieval poetics.
Covering the period from 200 BCE to 600 CE, this book describes important aspects of identity formation processes within early Judaism and Christianity, and shows how negotiations involving issues of ethnicity, stereotyping, purity, commensality, and institution building contributed to the forming of group identities. Over time, some of these Jewish group identities evolved into non-Jewish Christian identities, others into a rabbinic Jewish identity, while yet others remained somewhere in between. The contributors to this volume trace these developments in archaeological remains as well as in texts from the Qumran movement, the New Testament and the reception of Paul’s writings, rabbinic literature, and apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings, such as the Book of Dreams and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies. The long timespan covered in the volume together with the combined expertise of scholars from various fields make this book a unique contribution to research on group identity, Jewish and Christian identity formation, the Partings-of-the-ways between Judaism and Christianity, and interactions between Jews and Christians.