Search results for ""JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck)""

This edited volume offers expert insights into core questions of ethics, education, and religion during what is often termed the "Golden Age" of Islamic culture and intellectual history. It focuses on the scholarly oeuvre of the Muslim philosopher and historian Miskawayh (d. 1030), who is known in the contemporary Muslim world as the "founder of Islamic ethics". Written by internationally renowned scholars in Islamic studies, the chapters trace the significance of ancient Greek, Iranian, and Arabic intellectual traditions, among others, in the Islamic educational discourse. They also show how historical research on concepts of education and ethics specific to religion and culture can help find answers to key issues in contemporary societies.

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Christopher G. Foster identifies Jewish mystical elements in the Dead Sea Scrolls and compares them with analogous features in the Corinthian correspondence to illuminate through differences and similarities how Paul advocates a mystical and communal participation in the Spirit. After defining early Jewish mysticism and introducing the method of heuristic comparison, Part I identifies and investigates mystical elements in Dead Sea Scrolls. Part II compares these findings with corresponding aspects in 1 and 2 Corinthians to demonstrate the largely corporate tenor of participation and transformation in and by the spirit for Paul.

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Während die Herausforderungen digitaler Informationsintermediäre anschaulich beschrieben worden sind, fällt das Angebot an probaten Instrumenten zum Umgang mit Social Bots, Fake News oder Hate Speech bislang vergleichsweise ernüchternd aus. Die in diesem Band vereinten Beiträge spüren der Frage nach, mit welchen Regelungsinstrumenten den neuartigen Gefahren für die Meinungsbildung und den demokratischen Diskurs begegnet werden kann. Dabei werden auch die diesen Gefahren zugrundliegenden tatsächlichen Annahmen und ihre Wirkungszusammenhänge ausgeleuchtet. Im Wege einer medien- und sozialwissenschaftlich fundierten Analyse von Regelungsinstrumenten ergründen die Beiträge das Potential für eine Neukonzeptionierung des medien- und kommunikationsrechtlichen Instrumentenkastens und illustrieren, dass das Regelungsinstrumentarium konsequenter auf den strukturellen Wandel der digitalisierten Öffentlichkeit auszurichten ist.

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Untangling the growth of the Jacob Cycle and the historical realities behind it is of enduring interest, as the studies on the Jacob Cycle in recent years indicate. It seems to be one of the oldest origin traditions preserved in the Hebrew Bible. In spite of the previous consensus in the field, new studies and current archaeological findings have scrutinized several of the previous "certainties", leading to a debate on whether some of the basic assumptions should be modified or even rejected.This volume comprises seven articles from renowned international specialists in the field that offer comprehensive insights into new approaches and current research questions. The unique perspective lays in its combining of literary, archaeological, and historical approaches in order to understand and to evaluate the historical realities behind the Jacob Cycle and its traditions.

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It is often presumed that biblical redaction was invariably done using conventional scribal methods, meaning that when editors sought to modify or compile existing texts, they would do so in the process of rewriting them upon new scrolls. There is, however, substantial evidence pointing to an alternative scenario: Various sections of the Hebrew Bible appear to have been created through a process of material redaction. In some cases, ancient editors simply appended new sheets to existing scrolls. Other times, they literally cut and pasted their sources, carving out patches of text from multiple manuscripts and then gluing them together like a collage. Idan Dershowitz shows how this surprising technique left behind telltale traces in the biblical text - especially when the editors made mistakes - allowing us to reconstruct their modus operandi. Material evidence from the ancient Near East and elsewhere further supports his hypothesis. "This is an extremely stimulating study that will have a lasting impact on the scholarly discourse. [...] The Dismembered Bible is an outstanding example of what biblical studies can learn from neighboring disciplines and hopefully marks only the beginning of a more intense dialogue between exegesis and research on material aspects of textual production." Translation of Anja Klein in Theologische Revue, 117. Jahrgang, September 2021, https://doi.org/10.17879/thrv-2021–3568

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In this study, Blake Wassell applies new Roman and Jewish contexts to a Johannine ambiguity, which is Pilate declaring Jesus both innocent and guilty of making himself King of the Ἰουδαῖοι. Pilate repeats that he finds in Jesus no basis for the accusation, and yet he also writes the content of the accusation in the inscription on the cross. The paradox leads readers into another paradox: the Ἰουδαῖοι make themselves the accused as they make the accusation, and Jesus conquers as he is conquered. The author analyses how they destroy the temple of his body, so that he can raise it and how they exalt him, so that he can reveal himself.

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Josiah Royce was undoubtedly one of the most interesting thinkers of classical American philosophy in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. His works cover a wide range of subjects from psychology and issues of social philosophy to metaphysics. Surrounded by philosophers such as William James or Charles Sanders Peirce, Royce developed a concept of pragmatism which he himself called "absolute pragmatism" and which was centred around a theory of community. The essays in this edited volume deal with this pragmatistic approach in his work and discuss it from various points of view. Among other things, they explore Royce's relationship to German idealism, the foundation of his ethics as well as his philosophical doctrine of God and his philosophy of religion. This results in rather divergent assessments of his philosophy, each of which is evidence of the enduring relevance of his thinking for the world of today.

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Angelic beings have occupied an important place in many traditions within Judaism and Christianity from Second Temple times up until the present. In this volume, essays by scholars from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America draw attention to a wide variety of ways in which traditions about angels were addressed and developed over time, including examples from the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls and related literature, early Christian writings, "magical" texts, and the rich heritage of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The contributions as a whole demonstrate the interwovenness of Jewish and Christian tradition and, in turn, reveal how much the consideration of angelology reflects broader hermeneutical, textual, and tradition-historical approaches to the study of religion.

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The Sermon on the Mount never ceases to challenge readers in every generation. New methods and new insights into new surroundings have to be applied to the most influential speech ever given. In this study, Ernst Baasland takes a fresh look at the history of research done on it, both on its broad influence and on the variety of interpretations. The historical questions are seen from new perspectives. Is orality the key to a better understanding? To what extent can we reconstruct a pre-text and the question of authenticity be answered? These questions are seen through historiographical lenses. The author argues in favour of a universal addressee and maintains that the speech contains radical philosophical thinking. The first audience consisted of Jews, and the religiously based understanding of life is conceived within Judaism. However, its ethics of wisdom is developed in a Hellenistic setting and provides a radical philosophy of life.

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This volume of essays by Christopher Rowland, written during the last forty years, concerns the nature of apocalypticism and its reception history. His reading of apocalyptic texts is thereby colored not by immersion into the study of "apocalyptic" in biblical scholarship, but by acquaintance with early Jewish mysticism. One of the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of "mystic" is one which helps to understand not only the mystical but also apocalyptic: a mystic is "one who believes in the possibility of the spiritual apprehension of truths that are inaccessible to the understanding." This definition and the importance of the opening word of Revelation as an apocalypse - in other words, a writing whose form is revelatory -, are explored in these essays. As this understanding of apocalypticism contrasts with the eschatological character predominant in modern biblical scholarship, a theme of this collection therefore is that the eschatological elements in apocalyptic texts are not the determining feature of what constitutes "apocalyptic," which must especially attend to the revelatory form of apocalyptic texts such as Revelation. The pervasiveness of apocalyptic and mystical elements in the New Testament is a consistent thread throughout the volume, which also includes consideration of the apocalyptic and eschatological thought of Joachim of Fiore and his disciples, the early modern appeal to visions and revelation, and culminates in the texts and images of William Blake (1757-1827). The collection's concern with the history of the reception of such ideas contributes to the vindication of Ernst Käsemann's view of apocalyptic being the "mother of Christian theology".

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The sacrificial instructions and purity laws in Leviticus have often been seen as later or secondary additions to an originally sparse Priestly narrative. In this volume, Liane M. Feldman argues that the ritual and narrative elements of the Pentateuchal Priestly source are mutually dependent, and that the internal logic and structure of the Priestly narrative makes sense only when they are read together. Bringing together insights from the fields of ritual theory and narratology, the author argues that the ritual materials in Leviticus should be understood and analyzed as literature. At the core of her study is the assertion that these sacrificial instructions and purity laws form the backbone of the Priestly story world, and that when these materials are read within their broader narrative context, the Priestly narrative is first and foremost a story about the origins and purpose of sacrifice.

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This volume contains the first critical edition and translation of Barlaam of Seminara's fourteenth century treatise Ethics According to the Stoics , along with a series of interpretative essays explaining its content and context. Barlaam's text is the earliest interpretative work written on Stoic ethics, a product of the burgeoning Italian Renaissance but also drawing on Barlaam's experience in the Byzantine intellectual world of Constantinople. Intriguingly, it offers a radically different account of the Stoic theory of emotions to the one known from other sources, possibly taken from sources accessible to Barlaam but now lost. The volume includes interpretative essays on each of the two books of Barlaam's treatise, along with a biographical introduction and an essay setting out the wider context of the reception of Stoicism in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

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In this study, Paul J. Sander examines the phenomenon of alternate psalm delimitation in the Hebrew and Greek psalters (Psalms 9, 10, 114, 115, 116, and 147 in the Hebrew and Psalms 9, 113, 114, 115, 146, and 147 in the Greek). The main goal of his analysis is to determine the literary, theological, and canonical significance of these alternate psalm delimitations. The author shows that combined delimitation of the received Hebrew text of Psalms 9-10 and 114-115 creates interpretative possibilities that are not present without the combined interplay of the respective psalms. Similarly, the separate delimitation of the received Hebrew text of Psalms 116 and 147 creates other interpretative possibilities based upon linkages with adjacent psalms and an increased focus on the specific themes in the separately delimited psalms. The Greek lexical differences have literary and theological effects that correlate to varying degrees with the alternate Greek delimitations and open up new interpretative possibilities for the respective texts.

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This volume presents contributions from "The Larger Context of the Biblical Food Prohibitions: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches" conference held in Lausanne in June, 2017. The biblical food prohibitions constitute an excellent object for comparative and interdisciplinary approaches given their materiality, their nature as comparative objects between cultures, and their nature as an anthropological object. This volume articulates these three aspects within an integrated and dynamic perspective, bringing together contributions from Levantine archaeology, ancient Near Eastern studies, and anthropological and textual perspectives to form a new, multi-disciplinary foundation for interpretation.

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The fifty-two essays collected here span half a century of biblical scholarship. Together they provide a view into the history of Old Testament studies from the vantage of a scholar who worked to integrate his command of it with several cognate disciplines, including New Testament, Biblical Theology, and the history of interpretation. Canon is a rule and guide: this is a ubiquitous concern in the work of Brevard Childs. As he argues, scripture has been shaped with frameworks for interpretation, guidelines built into it through a complex editorial process that resulted in a multifaceted canon with two Testaments. Scripture is a canon and rule of faith that in turn shapes the church's confession and life of faith. This approach to scripture entails a holistic view that touches the Bible's composition and reception histories as well as its enduring claim on living communities of faith.

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Several early Christians identify Isaiah's Servant of the Lord as Jesus; yet Paul appears to connect the Servant with himself. In this study, Daniel Cole examines the hermeneutical warrants and ethical implications of Paul's use of texts within Isa. 49-54, arguing that this section constitutes a coherent prophetic narrative in which God saves a new people from sin by the Servant's death and subsequent work in his followers, the servants. While several Second Temple works interpret elements of this prophecy with differing conceptions of history, Paul sees Isaiah's Servant fulfilled in Jesus' death and subsequent spiritual union with the apostle. The author thus demonstrates that the coherent salvation history of the Servant prophecy provides both the interpretive framework for Paul's reading of Isaiah and the relational definitions for the imperatives that Paul places on himself and others.

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Cian J. Power explores how the biblical authors viewed and presented a fundamental human reality: the existence of the world's many languages. By examining explicit references to this diversity - such as the ambivalent account of its origins in the Tower of Babel episode - and implicit acknowledgements that included the use of strange-sounding speech to portray alien peoples, he illuminates ideas about Aramaic, Egyptian, Akkadian, and other ancient languages. Drawing on sociolinguistics, Power detects a consistent link between language and - ethnic, political, religious, and divine/human boundaries, and argues that changing historical circumstances are key to the Bible's varying attitudes. Furthermore, the study's findings regarding the biblical authors' ideas about their own language and its importance challenge our very notion of Hebrew.

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Mateusz Kusio traces and investigates the references to the Antichrist across ancient Jewish and Christian literature. Beginning with a reception-historical study of a number of eschatological and oracular texts in the Hebrew Bible, he goes on to discuss texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, biblical pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha, and Patristic writings. The study reveals an anti-messianic tradition involving a variety of eschatological antagonists in conflict with diverse messianic actors that stretches across both Jewish and Christian corpora and revolves around a set of similar motifs, ideas, and core Biblical texts.

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New Testament scholars generally agree that the historical Jesus was itinerant. Mark claims that Jesus travelled among the towns and villages of Galilee, preached in their synagogues, attracted large crowds, and journeyed through the surrounding regions. Yet few settlements are named, there is no clear itinerary of Jesus' travels, and the summary travel statements belong to Mark's editorial material. Consequently, there is a high degree of uncertainty concerning Jesus' itinerant ministry. However, archaeological surveys have discovered approximately 200 Early Roman period towns and villages in Galilee, with a material culture that is distinctively Jewish. Jewish identity markers have also been found at sites in surrounding regions. In this study, J. A. Lloyd draws on archaeological data and literary sources to explore the extent and plausibility of Jesus' itinerant ministry as depicted in Mark 1.14-8.30.

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Tomáš Cvrček offers a re-evaluation of the Theresian school reform of 1774 and its consequences using statistical data on schooling produced by the public administration. As the most comprehensive examination of this vast body of statistical material to date, the book assesses the reliability of these sources, their proper interpretation, and their limitations in order to shed light on questions such as the extent of the school network, the degree of enforcement of compulsory schooling, the rate of enrolment and attendance, the level of financing, the social and economic position of teachers, and the political economy of schooling provision. Covering a period from the reform's inception to the liberal overhaul in 1869, the statistical analysis reveals that, by most measures, the introduction of universal elementary schooling was much less successful than has been thought. Even the most advanced crown lands did not see ninety percent of their school-age children in classrooms until fifty years after the reform and there were many areas where schooling made no inroads until shortly before the First World War. In contrast to much of the previous literature that blamed incompetence and half-hearted implementation of the policy for these shortcomings, the author argues that the fundamental flaw lay in the policy's design and, specifically, in the imperial government's insistence on control and enforced uniformity of schooling throughout the realm. The slow development of Austrian schooling thus resulted from the inflexibility of the very policy that was supposed to speed it up."[...] Cvrcek's current volume is a superb contribution not only to the history of Austrian education but to the cliometric study of the rise of popular schooling more generally."David F. Mitch in The Journal of Economic History, Volume 80, Issue 4, December 2020, pp. 1234-1236"Not only economic historians but readers interested in the broader social and political development of modern Habsburg Central Europe will find much of value in the findings here."Gary B. Cohen on https://eh.net/book_reviews/schooling-under-control-the-origins-of-public-education-in-imperial-austria-1769-1869

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Paul's anthropological assumptions influence the rest of his thought, and in this study, Samuel D. Ferguson follows a growing interest in the corporate, non-autonomous nature of his doctrine of humanity. In a further departure from strictly individualistic interpretations, the author explores the bounded and relational aspects of Paul's anthropology. An array of "relations" ranging from those with the Creator, world, cosmic forces, other persons, and Christ, are shown as impacting human agency, identity, and volition, evidencing what this study terms "Relational Anthropology." The work of the Spirit further demonstrates this phenomenon, as texts from Romans 8 and First Corinthians 12 witness to Spirit-wrought relationships that actualize the new life of a believer, including the Spirit-generated relation of sonship and Spirit-sustained relations of interdependence experienced through shared charismata.

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In this work, Jan N. Bremmer brings together articles on Greek and Roman myths and rituals of male initiation, which have all been updated and, where necessary, revised and translated into English. The preface sketches the rise of the initiatory paradigm within a wider anthropological and Indo-European perspective and discusses the problem of noting ritual elements in mythical reflections. The first of two following sections concentrates on initiatory motifs in a series of famous myths, such as education by shepherds and 'wild men' (Heracles, Centaurs), travesty (Dionysos and Kaineus), the defeat of a monster (Odysseus vs. the Cyclops, Oedipus and the Sphinx) and warring and wandering groups of young men (the Trojan War, Meleager, Orpheus, Theseus and Peirithoos). The second section focuses on historical rituals, beginning with pederasty and the symposium. The author then moves on to the importance of the maternal family and fosterage in the initiatory process before ending with an archaic Latin inscription that reveals the contours of a group of young men in action in the full light of history.

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Research on the Book of Jeremiah has gained momentum in the past forty years and led to new results. The differences between the MT and the LXX have received more attention than ever. The extent of Deuteronomistic thinking and of redactions marks the debate on the composition of the book. It has become evident that the Book of Jeremiah intensively picks up earlier sources and offers a synthesis of them, comparable to a mosaic. It concentrates on the downfall of Jerusalem, conceives anew the prophet's role in the figure of Jeremiah and portrays the biblical God in a unique way. This collection of studies by Georg Fischer from the past ten years imparts insights into the recent discussions about the Book of Jeremiah.

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"This is a book from which everyone will learn, and which will prompt even seasoned scholars to think again."Mark J. Edwards, Professor, Faculty of Theology & Religion and Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford

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Together with Jerusalem and Rome, Athens stands today as a symbol of European culture. This image goes back a long way, having received a lasting imprint from the developments of Late Antiquity. The present volume focuses on this period, exploring the cultural and religious transformations of the city and the creation of symbolic images of Athens from the fourth to the sixth centuries AD from a variety of perspectives, including archaeology, ancient history, classical philology, Byzantine studies, and the history of religions. The contributions retrace reconfigurations of urban space and their impact on the sacred topography of Athens, as well as the changes in the Athenian panorama of learning and religion, uncovering various strategies employed to appropriate or counteract the Athenian past and its symbolic capital, whether by means of genealogy, by architectonic measures or by constructing literary images of the city suited to supporting particular claims. From the various competing discourses over the city, Late Antique Athens emerges as an emblem of higher learning and pagan religion, an image bequeathed to later European intellectual history.

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The study of the Septuagint's language can only bring about true recognition of its particular theological significance when the idea of exchange between Hebrew and Greek language and thought in the classical and Hellenistic period is so defined that it becomes the guideline and core of all Septuagint research. To bring about the most profound change possible in how the world of faith in the Septuagint is studied, this volume focuses on the terminology and concepts of divine and human realms by comparing pertinent Septuagint texts with Masoretic text and placing them in their religious-historical, philological and philosophical settings.

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In this work, Arie W. Zwiep examines the gospel stories of the raising of Jairus's daughter and the healing of the haemorrhaging woman (Mark 5:21-43; Matt 9:18-26; Luke 8:40-56) from a plurality of (sometimes conflicting) interpretive strategies to demonstrate the need and fruitfulness of a multi-perspectival exegetical approach. Among the various (diachronic and synchronic) methods that are being applied in this study are philological criticism, form criticism and structural analysis, tradition- and redaction criticism, orality studies and performance criticism, narrative analysis, textual criticism and the study of intertextuality. Such a comprehensive approach, it is argued, leads to an increased knowledge and a deepened understanding of the ancient texts in question and to a sharpened awareness of the applicability of current scholarly research instruments to unlock documents from the past.

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This volume discusses the topics of sin, suffering, and evil in the Hebrew Bible. It gathers fresh and innovative perspectives provided by internationally renowned biblical scholars that not only demonstrate ways in which these topics are dealt with in the Hebrew Bible itself, but also map out their lasting impact on human experience of suffering throughout history. Put into dialogue with the thought-provoking work of Fredrik Lindström, the volume provides a diversity of methodological approaches to the question of human suffering and God's role in it, ranging from discussions of monism in the Hebrew Bible, through deconstructive readings of evil in the Exodus narrative, to the processing of suffering at the Dachau concentration camp, and ways that the dynamics of good and evil might play out in a technological future dominated by artificial intelligence.

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The teachers of early Christianity were one of its most intriguing groups and appear to have been the equivalent of the Jewish rabbis or pagan philosophers. By examining all the earliest sources mentioning the 'didaskaloi', Alessandro Falcetta sheds light on the first hundred years of their history, tackling questions such as why their fate was so different from that of the rabbis, and whether they were tradents of the Jesus material and therefore guarantors of the Gospels' historic reliability. By relating teachers to apostles, prophets and bishops, the author enriches our knowledge of the structure of early Christian communities and how they developed into hierarchical churches.

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Frederik Poulsen investigates exile as a literary and theological theme in the book of Isaiah. While other biblical writings explicitly depict the destruction of Jerusalem and the inhabitants' deportation to Babylon in the early sixth century BCE, Isaiah is apparently silent. At the center of the book where readers would expect to find an account of these traumatic and defining events, there is just a strange gap. The author argues that the curious break between chapters 39 and 40 indicates an anti-climax - a destroyed and forsaken Jerusalem - and that several passages stress its importance by either pointing forward to it or looking back at it. Frederik Poulsen demonstrates that the exile in Isaiah hides itself as a "black hole" at the center of the book and thereby has a decisive influence on the literary structure, poetic imagery, and theological message of this prophetic scroll.

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By means of an in-depth study of Luke 16:16 and its context, Giuseppe G. Scollo intends to draw its readers into new scholarly appreciation of one of the most ambiguous and discussed NT sayings, an authentic crux interpretum in modern scholarship, that of the so-called "violence passage," as recorded in the Gospel of Luke: "The law and the prophets lasted until John; but from then on the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and everyone who enters does so with violence" (NAB 2011). While issues that still demand an explanation by modern-day exegetes are addressed (see the meaning of "violence" contained in the verb biazomai, the identity of the alleged "violent" agents, and the nature of their action with regard to the basileia of God), evidence warrants a new look at the teachings surrounding the Lucan verse and its narrative setting in the light of the love commandment and its Targumic interpretation.

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This volume fundamentally re-examines textual approaches to the New Testament and its manuscripts in the age of digital editing and media. Using the eccentric work of Herman Charles Hoskier as a shared foundation for analysis, contributors examine the intellectual history of New Testament textual scholarship and the production of critical editions, identify many avenues for further research, and discuss the methods and protocols for producing the most recent set of editions of the New Testament: the Editio Critica Maior. Instead of comprising the minute refinement of a basically acceptable text, textual scholarship on the New Testament is a vibrant field that impinges upon New Testament Studies in unexpected and unacknowledged ways. Contributors:Garrick V. Allen, J. K. Elliott, Gregory Peter Fewster, Peter J. Gurry, Juan Hernández Jr., H. A. G. Houghton, Annette Hüffmeier, Dirk Jongkind, Martin Karrer, Jennifer Wright Knust, Jan Krans, Thomas J. Kraus, Christina M. Kreinecker, Curt Niccum, D. C. Parker, Jacob Peterson, Stanley E. Porter, Catherine Smith, Jill Unkel, Klaus Wachtel, Tommy Wasserman, An-Ting Yi

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This edited volume brings together important scholars of religion in the ancient world to honor the impact of Karen L. King's scholarship in this field. Her work shows that Christianity was diverse from its first moments - even before the word "Christian" was coined - and insists that scholars must engage both in deep historical work and in ethical reflection. These essays honor King's intellectual impact by further investigating the categories that scholars have used in their reconstructions of religion, by reflecting on the place of women and gender in the analysis of ancient texts, and by providing historiographical interventions that illuminate both the ancient world and the modern scholarship that has shaped our field.

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The Epistle to the Hebrews is usually associated with its theology of Christ the High Priest. However, the term "high priest" is not so common in the first four chapters of Hebrews, occurring only four times with a further reference to sacrifice in 1:3. Rather than emphasising the priestly or sacrificial activity of Christ, these opening sections contain a number of references to creation: 1:2-3,10-12, 2:5-9, 10; 3:1-6; 4:3-4 and 4:9-10. In this volume, Angela Costley uses discourse analysis to explore the importance of the topic of creation to the discourse of the Epistle to the Hebrews, uncovering a close link between creation and salvation. She highlights the interaction of the topic of creation with the topic of salvation in the discourse to uncover a depiction of Christ as the creator who descends to take on human flesh, God who becomes human, in order to lead humanity heavenward.

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The importance of material generosity in early Christianity has been firmly established in New Testament research. Given this consensus, Timothy J. Murray examines the New Testament texts for evidence of when, how and why the early Christians restricted their generosity. Having also examined the restricted generosity of comparable social structures (Jewish groups, Greco-Roman associations and the Hellenistic oikos), the author argues that the self-conception of the early Christians as members of a fictive-family was the most significant influence on their practices of material generosity and its restrictions, in which they drew heavily from existing cultural ideals regarding family reciprocity and support. Additionally, the author argues (against the majority view) that evidence for organised poor-care in Jewish groups is meagre and non-existent with regard to Greco-Roman associations.

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Abraham, whom the apostle Paul calls the "father of us all" (Rom 4:16), was a central figure in Judaism from the outset and came to be important in Christianity and Islam. The Abraham tradition is an issue of narrative and counter-narrative, memory and counter-memory. Moreover, Abraham's family is brought in as a network of meaning to express opposition, antithesis or common ground within and between different religious movements. The contributions to this volume discuss the presentation and reception of Abraham's family in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The topics cover Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Second Temple writings, New Testament, Rabbinic literature, Greek, Latin and Syriac church fathers, as well as Jewish medieval interpretation and a twelfth-century Arabic travel report of a pilgrimage to Mecca.

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In recent decades, the debate on monotheism and religious pluralism has been strongly influenced by the idea that monotheism originating in the Old Testament is the root of intolerance and violence. In this study, Daniela Scialabba investigates inclusive tendencies in Old Testament monotheism, in particular theological principles motivating and supporting the possibility of a positive relationship between non-Israelites and the God of Israel. Thus, she examines three texts thoroughly: the Book of Jonah, Psalm 33 (MT and LXX), and the novel "Joseph and Aseneth". Despite their difference concerning genre, date of origin and provenance, these texts have important ideas in common: the relationship between the God of Israel and non-Israelites as well as the concept of God as a universal creator who has pity with all his creatures.

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In this volume, Benjamin D. Giffone shows that the coexistence of at least three cultic centralization models within the Pentateuch, including Northern, Benjaminite, and Southern traditions, helps to calibrate the level of theological consistency that may reasonably be expected of biblical texts. The scholarly tendency to view biblical narratives as late, tendentious fictions is not sufficient to explain the texts' final forms. The author explains how the use of earlier narrative and legal material within Chronicles and other Second Temple texts illumines instances of unevenness that later interpreters smoothed to a degree but retained in the text. Community memory existing outside the written texts provided limits on the changes that could be introduced by scribes but was sufficiently malleable to allow for changes. Narrativity as a key feature of the texts allowed certain memories to be retained, framed by various techniques to suit the storymakers' aims.

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In this study, Max Whitaker investigates the intriguing accounts of Jesus' resurrection appearances through the lens of Greco-Roman narratives. In both canonical and apocryphal accounts of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, Jesus appears in an unrecognisable form to other characters, including people who knew him well just before his death. The motif of a character appearing in an unrecognisable form to people he or she knows well is one which exists in folk literature, and in Greco-Roman and Jewish literature from a range of genres. The author investigates a range of stories in which characters appear in an unrecognisable or metamorphic form, and summarises patterns and themes. This throws new light on how Jesus' post-resurrection stories would have been understood by their original audiences.

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Eric Covington examines the way in which Ephesians coherently holds together cosmological, Christological, ecclesiological, and ethical elements within its vision of the early Christian way of life. He begins by investigating the extent to which the categories of functional teleology featured within ethical reflection in both Greco-Roman and early Jewish traditions. Next, he analyzes the letter's Auslegungsgeschichte, focusing on Thomas Aquinas' medieval commentary, to demonstrate how Ephesians has previously been interpreted through the lens of teleology. Finally, he turns to an historical-exegetical examination of Ephesians to demonstrate the way in which the letter uses the categories and concepts of functional teleology. He concludes that Ephesians identifies the appropriate way of life in light of an individual and ecclesial telos within God's ultimus finis for all of creation.

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This volume lists, in alphabetical order, all the Latin words that appear in the Vulgate translation of the New Testament and the various ancient Latin translations of the "Apostolic Fathers". Following each Latin word are listed all the Greek words that are attested as translational antecedents, or "Vorlagen", for that Latin word in the Greek New Testament and the Greek Apostolic Fathers. Each Greek word is followed by a numerical marker indicating its page location in a particular Greek concordance of the New Testament or the Apostolic Fathers.Containing approximately 9,000 Latin words and phrases, and approximately 13,800 Greek translational equivalents, the index is sure to be of interest to anyone, including classicists and medievalists, studying Latin texts that were translated or may have been translated from Greek originals.

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Jonathon Lookadoo explores Ignatius's pairing of high priestly and temple metaphors in order to understand more clearly how Ignatius viewed Jesus and the church. The metaphors of high priest and temple are closely related in three of Ignatius's letters. This study allows readers to appreciate better how Ignatius portrayed Jesus's identity and work. The author also sheds light on how some of Ignatius's audiences were to demonstrate unity. By exploring each metaphor with a view to its rhetorical function in a particular letter as well as to similar imagery in early Jewish and early Christian literature, Jonathon Lookadoo freshly illuminates Ignatius's letters in a way that is of interest not only to Ignatian scholars, but to all who study early Christian letters, rhetoric, and theology in the first two centuries CE.

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How is God revealed through the life of a human community? Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological ethics begins from the claim to 'Christ existing as community', one of several variations on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy of religion. David Robinson argues that Bonhoeffer's eclectic use of Hegel's thought, from the socialising notion of 'objective Geist' to a trenchant depiction of the 'cleaving' mind, should not be obscured by his polemic against Idealism. He also offers close readings of Hegel's texts in order to appraise Bonhoeffer's criticism, particularly the charge of a 'docetic' distinction between idea and appearance in Christology. Meanwhile, historical context is provided for Hegel's 'deconfessionalisation' of the church vis-à-vis the state and Bonhoeffer's recovery of the ecclesio-political mark of suffering as non-recognition. The author provides a vital enquiry into the social compositions of faith and reason.

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Characters in the Gospel of John quote and re-quote each other frequently, almost excessively, yet their quotations are rarely literal. These characters (including Jesus and the narrator) make changes - some minor, some major - even when they re-quote important sayings of Jesus. Jeffrey M. Tripp examines this often overlooked feature of the Fourth Gospel in the contexts of first century pedagogy and literature, as well as early Christian tradition and practices. Attending to John's direct internal quotations reveals a text at play with its christological and eschatological language, teasing out the fullest extent of its meaning. The Gospel of John emerges as a theological narrative anchored in yet unbound by the ideas of the wider early Christian movement.

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The present volume consists of fifteen essays by colleagues and friends of the late Professor Hans Kvalbein focusing on various aspects of the theme of the church and mission in the New Testament and early Christianity. It also includes a survey of Hans Kvalbein's academic career and scholarship as well as a bibliography of his books and articles. Among the contributions are several related to the question of mission in Acts, while others focus on various texts and topics in the gospels, in Paul, in 1 Peter and Revelation. Some of the contributors interact with Kvalbein's views on aspects of the mission of the early church, for example the understanding of mission in Matthew and the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Others deal with questions such as mission and love of enemies, mass conversions and persecutions, infant baptism and the geographical horizon of early Christian mission.

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Der hier vorgelegte Band versammelt insgesamt acht Beiträge (von Vertretern der Klassischen Philologie, der Kirchengeschichte, der Philosophie und der Religionswissenschaft), die sich mit den möglichen Beziehungen zwischen dem christlichen Theologen Origenes und dem platonischen Philosophen Origenes beschäftigen. Dabei geht es nicht nur um die (immer noch nicht abschließend beantwortete) Frage, ob der Christ Origenes und der Platoniker Origenes vielleicht sogar dieselbe Person sind, sondern auch um den (in manchen Werken deutlich erkennbaren) Platonismus des christlichen Theologen Origenes und die Rezeption dieses oder dieser Origene(i)s in der Spätantike: bei den Platonikern Porphyrios und Proklos und bei dem christlichen Theologen Eusebius von Caesarea.

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Liturgical papyri are prime witnesses to the history of liturgy and the religious and theological currents in late antique Egypt. These items from the third to ninth century preserve hundreds of Greek and Coptic hymns, prayers, and acclamations, most otherwise unknown but some still recited by the Coptic Church. Ágnes T. Mihálykó offers the first extensive introduction to the liturgical papyri, facilitating the reader's access to them with a detailed inventory of edited manuscripts and an extensive discussion of their date and provenance. She also examines liturgical papyri as the first preserved liturgical manuscripts, describing their material features, the ways they were used, the early history of the liturgical books, and their languages. She reveals how liturgical texts were written down and transmitted and locates these important manuscripts in the book culture of late antique Egypt.

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This volume explores existential questions within the following three thematic fields: first, experiences of anxiety and despair as related to the question of what these phenomena show about freedom and its difficulties; second, hermeneutical theories as related to the question of how we can develop an existential hermeneutics that can account for the ambiguities of self-understanding between transparency and opacity, and, third, selfhood between self-understanding and self-alienation as a focal point of existential psycho(patho)logy. What can disturbances to or breakdowns in self-understanding teach us about personhood? Making visible one's own blindness by articulating the shadows of our knowledge and abilities is at the core of a negativistic approach to existential questions discussed in a dialogue between philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, theology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry.

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