Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future

Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future
Author: Hindy Najman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2014-04-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1139915843

This book explores the Jewish community's response to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The focus is 4 Ezra, a text that reboots the past by imaginatively recasting textual and interpretive traditions. Instead of rebuilding the Temple, as Ezra does in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Ezra portrayed in 4 Ezra argues with an angel about the mystery of God's plan and re-gives Israel the Torah. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, 4 Ezra is analyzed in terms of a constellation composed of elements from pre-destruction traditions. Ezra's struggle and his eventual recommitment to Torah are also understood as providing a model for emulation by ancient Jewish readers. 4 Ezra is thus what Stanley Cavell calls a perfectionist work. Its specific mission is to guide the formation of Jewish subjects capable of resuming covenantal life in the wake of a destruction that inflects but never erases revelation.

Temple and Empire

Temple and Empire
Author: Mina Monier
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-11-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1978707452

Temple and Empire explores the theme of temple piety in Luke-Acts and 1 Clement in historical context. Mina Monier argues that situating both works in Trajanic Rome, and reading them through the lens of Roman imperial ideology explains their peculiarly positive presentation of the Temple as a form of reverence toward ancient worship and ancestral customs that would not offend, but would appeal to traditional Roman sensibilities.

“The Time Is Fulfilled”

“The Time Is Fulfilled”
Author: Lynne Moss Bahr
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2018-12-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567684377

In this study, Lynne Moss Bahr explores the concept of temporality as central to Jesus's proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Using insights from continental philosophy on the messianic, which expose the false claim that time progresses in a linear continuum, Bahr presents these philosophical positions in critical dialogue with the sayings of Jesus regarding time and time's fulfillment. She shows how the Kingdom represents the possibilities of a disruption in time, one that reveals the intrinsic relation between God and humanity. In illustrating how Jesus's sayings regarding time are thus expressions of his messianic identity-as of the world and not of the world--Bahr argues that the meaning of Jesus's identity as Messiah is embedded in the disjuncture of time, in the impossibility of "now," from which the Kingdom comes . Bahr's use of critical theory in this study expands the concept of God's Kingdom beyond the traditional confines of the discipline.

The Apocalypse of Abraham in Its Ancient and Medieval Contexts

The Apocalypse of Abraham in Its Ancient and Medieval Contexts
Author: Amy Paulsen-Reed
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-11-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004430628

This book examines the multiple contexts for the pseudepigraphal Apocalypse of Abraham, including the ancient Jewish milieu in which it was originally written and its medieval Christian Slavic setting.

The Crucified Book

The Crucified Book
Author: Anne Starr Kreps
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812298489

In The Crucified Book, Anne Kreps shows how the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, and its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity.

The Dead Sea Scrolls at Seventy: “Clear a Path in the Wilderness!”

The Dead Sea Scrolls at Seventy: “Clear a Path in the Wilderness!”
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2024-10-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004698078

The Sixteenth Orion Symposium celebrated seventy years of Dead Sea Scrolls research under the theme, “Clear a path in the wilderness!” (Isaiah 40:3). Papers use the wilderness rubric to address the self-identification of the Qumran group; dimensions of religious experience reflected in the Dead Sea writings; biblical interpretation as shaper and conveyor of that experience; the significance of the Qumran texts for critical biblical scholarship; points of contact with the early Jesus movement; and new developments in understanding the archaeology of the Qumran caves. The volume both honors past insights and charts new paths for the future of Qumran studies.

Matthew and the Mishnah

Matthew and the Mishnah
Author: Akiva Cohen
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 664
Release: 2016-06-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9783161499609

Akiva Cohen investigates the general research question: how do the authors of religious texts reconstruct their community identity and ethos in the absence of their central cult? His particular socio-historical focus of this more general question is: how do the respective authors of the Gospel according to Matthew, and the editor(s) of the Mishnah redefine their group identities following the destruction of the Second Temple? Cohen further examines how, after the Destruction, both the Matthean and the Mishnaic communities found and articulated their renewed community bearings and a new sense of vision through each of their respective author/redactor's foundational texts. The context of this study is thus that of an inner-Jewish phenomenon; two Jewish groups seeking to (re-)establish their community identity and ethos without the physical temple that had been the cultic center of their cosmos.

Prophetic Rivalry, Gender, and Economics

Prophetic Rivalry, Gender, and Economics
Author: Olivia Stewart Lester
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2018-07-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3161556518

Olivia Stewart Lester examines true and false prophecy at the intersections of interpretation, gender, and economics in Revelation, Sibylline Oracles 4-5, and contemporary ancient Mediterranean texts. With respect to gender, these texts construct a discourse of divine violence against prophets, in which masculine divine domination of both male and female prophets reinforces the authenticity of the prophetic message. Regarding economics, John and the Jewish sibyllists resist the economic actions of political groups around them, especially Rome, by imagining an alternate universe with a new prophetic economy. In this economy, God requires restitution from human beings, whose evil behavior incurs debt. The ongoing appeal of prophecy as a rhetorical strategy in Revelation and Sibylline Oracles 4-5, and the ongoing rivalries in which these texts engage, argue for prophecy's continuing significance in a larger ancient Mediterranean religious context.

On Prophets, Warriors, and Kings

On Prophets, Warriors, and Kings
Author: George J. Brooke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-05-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110377381

While recent decades have seen a plethora of studies exploring the complex processes that shaped biblical books traditionally designated as Prophets, much remains to be done in order to uncover the rich history of their interpretation throughout the ages. This collection of essays aims at filling this gap by exploring different aspects of the exegesis of the Former and Latter Prophets in contexts both ancient and modern, Jewish and Christian. From the inner-biblical interpretation of the Prophets to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, Patristic writings, and contemporary rhetoric, this volume sheds light on how key figures in those books were read and understood by both ancient and not so-ancient readers.