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Jewish and Christian Communal Identities in the Roman World
Jews and Christians under the Roman Empire shared a unique sense of community. Set apart from their civic and cultic surroundings, both groups resisted complete assimilation into the dominant political and social structures. However, Jewish communities differed from their Christian counterparts in their overall patterns of response to the surrounding challenges. They exhibit diverse levels of integration into the civic fabric of the cities of the Empire and display contrary attitudes towards the creation of trans-local communal networks. The variety of local case studies examined in this volume offers an integrated image of the multiple factors, both internal and external, which determined the role of communal identity in creating a sense of belonging among Jews and Christians under Imperial constraints.
Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism
The concern for purity was the cornerstone of the religious culture of ancient Judaism. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism explores how this concern shaped the worldview of Jews during the Second Temple period as well as their daily practices and social relations. It examines how different groups offered competing visions and methods for living a life of purity, which embodied a promise for personal and cosmic salvation and at the same time determined the degree of sectarian separation. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism offers a comprehensive description of the world of purity among the Jews of the Second Temple period in general and within the tradition of the Pharisees in particul...
Interaction Between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art, and Literature
This volume contains essays dealing with complex relationships between Judaism and Christianity, taking a bold step, assuming that no historical period can be excluded from the interactive process between Judaism and Christianity, conscious or unconscious, as either rejection or appropriation
Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism
In this volume Joshua Paul Smith challenges the long-held assumption that Luke and Acts were written by a gentile, arguing instead that the author of these texts was educated and enculturated within a Second-Temple Jewish context. Advancing from a consciously interdisciplinary perspective, Smith considers the question of Lukan authorship from multiple fronts, including reception history and social memory theory, literary criticism, and the emerging discipline of cognitive sociolinguistics. The result is an alternative portrait of Luke the Evangelist, one who sees the mission to the gentiles not as a supersession of Jewish law and tradition, but rather as a fulfillment and expansion of Israel’s own salvation history.
In the Seat of Moses
In the Seat of Moses offers readers a unique, frank, and penetrating analysis of the rise of rabbinic Judaism in the late Roman period. Over time and through masterly rhetorical strategy, rabbinic writings in post-temple Judaism come to occupy an authoritarian place within a pluralistic tradition. Slowly, the rabbis occupy the seat of Moses, and Lightstone introduces readers to this process, to the most significant texts, to the rhetorical styles and appeals to authority, and even to how authority came to be authority. As a seasoned and honest scholar, Lightstone achieves his goal of introducing novice readers to the often obscure world of rabbinic literary conventions with astounding success. This book is an excellent contribution to the Westar Studies series focused on religious literacy.
The Pharisees
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 ...
Jewish Law
New Perspectives on Jewish Law combines the detailed work characteristic of scholarship on Jewish law with an orientation towards its broader academic and cultural significance. It shifts the study of Jewish law from its focus on legal doctrine and history to legal theory, achieving in the process a more sophisticated understanding of law that will benefit both the legal academy and Jewish studies. By employing the framework of legal theory, it similarly corrects an over-emphasis on the metaphysical presuppositions and philosophical implications of Jewish law, which has tended to cast it as exceptional relative to other legal systems. Moreover, it answers to old-new anxieties about law, ofte...
Scripture, Interpretation, or Authority?
In this study of motives and arguments in Jesus' halakic conflicts, Thomas Kazen suggests a way beyond the use of traditional criteria of authenticity. Employing results from recent research on the development of halakah during the Second Temple period, which outlines trajectories and areas of tension within and between various Jewish movements, the author revisits the Synoptic conflict narratives about Sabbath observance, purity rules and divorce practices. Kazen disentangles theological motives from reasonable historical explanations and suggests relative dates and contexts for motives and arguments often ascribed to Jesus. He questions interpretations which focus on unique authority and suggests that Jesus' stance is better explained within the framework of prophetic criticism and a traditional Israelite understanding of Torah. With this study, he contributes as much to our understanding of halakic development during the Second Temple period as he does to our understanding of the historical Jesus and his relationship to contemporary movements.
What Is the Mishnah?
The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic Judaism—all of rabbinic law, from ancient to modern times, is based on the Talmud, and the Talmud, in turn, is based on the Mishnah. But the Mishnah is also an elusive document; its sources and setting are obscure, as are its genre and purpose. In January 2021 the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law of the Harvard Law School co-sponsored a conference devoted to the simple yet complicated question: “What is the Mishnah?” Leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Israel assessed the state of the art in Mishnah studies; and the papers delivered at that conference form the basis of this collection. Learned yet accessible, What Is the Mishnah? gives readers a clear sense of current and future direction of Mishnah studies.
Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature
This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust.
