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Book SynopsisThe concept of natural lawuniversal moral knowledgeis often associated with Stoic philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, or the medieval Jewish rabbis. But Jews in the Second Temple period had their own model of natural, interpreting the story of Adam and Eve so as to associate the primordial pair with "wisdom," "law," or "commandment." In this tradition, when God created humans he endowed them with moral knowledge. "Adam's wisdom" was a common motif in Jewish literature of the Greco-Roman period. Some textsnamely, Sirach, 4 Ezra, and Paul's Letter to the Romanscombined Adam's law with the tradition of Israel's reception of the law at Sinai. Rony Kozman offers a careful reading of these three early Jewish writings to show that Jews coordinated Adam's wisdom and the torah of Moses to emphasize that natural law was divinely revealed. This interpretive tactic heightened the moral knowledge God gave to all people by dressing Adam's commandment in the cloak of Sinai's thunderous revelation; it further underscored humanity's culpability alongside God's justice. But Jewish writers thought differently about the possibility of fulfilling natural law's obligations, and deployments of the motif toward particular rhetorical-theological ends resulted in divergent perspectives: Sirach secures humanity's moral agency; 4 Ezra diminishes it; Romans incapacitates it altogether. Kozman reads key passages from Romans to show Paul's universal problem with law and his solution. The arrival of law's global dominion in Adam and Moses subjected everyone to the reigns of Sin and Death. Paul's gospel announces that in Christ, Jews and gentiles have been liberated from Law's reign so that they fulfill its just commands. Adam's Wisdom and Israel's Law remedies the scholarly neglect of natural law in the New Testament, recontextualizes the Apostle Paul within his Jewish milieu, and emphasizes the importance of attending to both the common and diverse interpretations of the figure of Adam in the Second Temple period. As Kozman demonstrates, Adam was an important site for contesting theological and philosophical issues, including epistemology, ethical obligation, divine justice, human freedom, and how Jews and gentiles relate to God's law.

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Book SynopsisAramaic, one of the great international languages of antiquity, left an indelible mark on the New Testament. Jesus and his first followers knew it because for centuries Aramaic had been a primary means of communication in the Middle East, and it remained current long after their time. Usage of Aramaic within Jesus' movement, initially with or without recourse to other languages, helped provide the fledgling community with a cultural as well as linguistic identity. Precise examples of the words of Jesus' teaching in Aramaic, reinforced by portrayals of him among Aramaic speakers, are explicit in the Gospels. Whatever other language choices he may have made, the Greek Gospels portray him as employing Aramaic as his medium of teaching. Bruce Chilton's Aramaic Jesus is a groundbreaking study in pursuit of this "Aramaic Jesus," a pursuit that requires awareness of the kind of Aramaic in play. In the past, sorting out dialects and types of Aramaic relied on sources composed well after the time of the New Testament; this work factors in analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls and related materials to access forms of Aramaic current during the first century CE. Since the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels involves various intersections with Aramaic, tracing the impact of Aramaic in the depiction of Jesus within the New Testament entails several investigative categories: specific cases in which Aramaic is identifiably transliterated within the Greek Gospels; analysis that accounts for the cultural settings of Aramaic through the technique of retroversion (involving translation back into Aramaic); and assessment of noticeable overlaps between the New Testament and contemporaneous Aramaic literature, where thematic emphases emerge that relate Jesus' movement to Second Temple Judaism. The writings we call the Gospels involved transitions from the au/orality of Jesus and his movement to reliance upon writing, and from their language(s) to written Koine Greek. Those shifts involved an increasing resort to narrative and literary conventions. The extent to which Aramaic is a factor within this process is uncharted, and this volume clarifies the issues that are in play. Chilton's analysis illuminates the Aramaic Jesus and the people and processes that conveyed his memory.

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