Search results for ""Author Alvin P. Cohen""

Warring States Papers seeks to apply standard philological methods to major unsolved textual problems: (a) to establish the nature and interrelations of the texts, including the recognition of interpolations and of text growth generally; (b) to date the texts or their constituent layers; and finally (c) to read the history of the period from that newly available source material. In both fields, with their core of culturally protected texts, these fundamental preliminaries have tended to be overlooked. The Project's revolution, in both its fields of concern, has consisted in large part of not overlooking them. Once the basic questions have been asked and at least in part answered, the history of each period is more readily available for further study as such, and for comparison with similar developments both ancient and modern. New contributions developing this methodologically fresh beginning are welcome. To encourage them, and to ensure variety in each annual volume, the journal emphasizes short articles rather than long disquisitions.

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Alpha is an annual repository for leading-edge research in the New Testament and related texts, and the historical development which the texts imply. Like its older sister journal Warring States Papers, it has a central focus on the methodology of text-based historical research, and includes examples of the application of basic historical and philological methods to texts in other traditions, including Chinese and Homeric Greek. In the past, the early Christian texts have been approached theologically, rather than as historical sources. Christian history has been seen as fully realized in Paul, and all other viewpoints are dismissed as later heresies. But many of the NT texts give hints of a pre-Pauline Christianity, the thing Paul began by persecuting. The work of the Project leads to an unexpectedly full picture of that pattern of early belief and practice. It is this to which we have given the name Alpha Christianity. It turns out to be remarkably close to what many contemporary Christians actually live. This first volume takes up the principal Gospels and other early sources for the teachings of Jesus. It notes evidence for stratification in Mark, leading to the earliest and thus most authoritative stratum of that text. It finds no need to posit a common source for Matthew and Luke, and instead argues for mutual contact between them. Mandaean and Gospel echoes of John the Baptist are compared, the work of William O Walker Jr on interpolations in Paul is continued, and a foundation is laid for the introduction of a new stylistic difference test in v2.

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