Historical-Jesus

Daily Gleanings about Craig Keener’s “Christobiography” and Antti Laato’s “Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem in Three Abrahamic Religions.”

Available from Eerdmans is the second edition of Richard Bauckham’s “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.”

During 2016, the “Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism” published several noteworthy articles.

The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include:

• Markus Bockmuehl and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Paradise in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Views, reviewed by Pieter G. R. de Villiers
• Tony Burke, ed., Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery?: The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium, reviewed by James F. McGrath
• Andrew R. Davis, Tel Dan in Its Northern Cultic Context, reviewed by Bob Becking and by Aren M. Maeir
• Stephen Finlan, The Family Metaphor in Jesus’ Teaching: Gospel Imagery and Application, reviewed by Joanna Dewey
• Kai Kaniuth, Anne Löhnert, Jared L. Miller, Adelheid Otto, Michael Roaf, and Walther Sallaberger, eds., Tempel im Alten Orient, reviewed by Jeffrey L. Morrow
• Emma Loosley, The Architecture and Liturgy of the Bema in Fourth- to-Sixth-Century Syrian Churches, reviewed by Robert Morehouse
• Elvira Martín Contreras and Guadalupe Seijas de los Ríos-Zarzosa, Masora: La transmisión de la tradición de la Biblia Hebrea, reviewed by Amparo Alba Cecilia
• Halvor Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth Century Historical Jesus, reviewed by Craig A. Evans
• Pheme Perkins, First Corinthians, reviewed by H. H. Drake Williams III

Thanks to Anthony Le Donne for noting the availability of LibriVox recordings for D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus. LibriVox also has apps available for Android, iOS, and Kindle users, and the iOS version (at least) allows downloading and storage for offline listening.

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Now garnering interest in Logos Bible Software’s prepublication program are 6 volumes of select works from Simon Kistemaker. The collection mostly contains items related to the Gospels but also includes an edited volume of hermeneutics essays and a survey of Calvinist history and thought.

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[caption id=“attachment_2129” align=“alignright” width=“87”] Richard Bauckham[/caption]

In his 2006 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham suggests:

that we need to recover the sense in which the Gospels are testimony. This does not mean that they are testimony rather than history. It means that the kind of historiography they are is testimony. An irreducible feature of testimony as a form of human utterance is that it asks to be trusted. This does not mean that it asks to be trusted uncritically, but it does mean that testimony should not be treated as credible only to the extent that it can be independently verified. There can be good reasons for trusting or distrusting a witness, but these are precisely reasons for trusting or distrusting. Trusting testimony is not an irrational act of faith that leaves critical rationality aside; it is, on the contrary, the rationally appropriate way of responding to authentic testimony. . . . It is true that a powerful trend in the modern development of critical historical philosophy and method finds trusting testimony a stumbling-block in the way of the historian’s autonomous access to truth that she or he can verify independently. But it is also a rather neglected fact that all history, like all knowledge, relies on testimony. ( 5; italics original)

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The latest issue of New Testament Studies includes:

• Helen K. Bond, “Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination”
• John K. Goodrich, “Sold under Sin: Echoes of Exile in Romans 7.14–25”
• Timothy A. Brookins, “The (In)frequency of the Name ‘Erastus’ in Antiquity: A Literary, Papyrological, and Epigraphical Catalog”
• Daniel Frayer-Griggs, “Neither Proof Text nor Proverb: The Instrumental Sense of διά and the Soteriological Function of Fire in 1 Corinthians 3.15”
• Jonathan A. Linebaugh, “The Christo-Centrism of Faith in Christ: Martin Luther’s Reading of Galatians 2.16, 19–20”
• Thomas J. Kraus, " Hapax legomena: Definition eines terminus technicus und Signifikanz für eine pragmatisch orientierte Sprachanalyse"
• Karen L. King, “The Place of the Gospel of Philip in the Context of Early Christian Claims about Jesus’ Marital Status”
• Emily Gathergood, “Papyrus 32 (Titus) as a Multi-text Codex: A New Reconstruction”

The next issue of the Biblical Theology Bulletin includes:

• David M. Bossman, “The Ebb and Flow of Biblical Interpretation”
• Joel Edmund Anderson, “Jonah in Mark and Matthew: Creation, Covenant, Christ, and the Kingdom of God”
• Peter Admirand, “Millstones, Stumbling Blocks, and Dog Scraps: Children in the Gospels”
• Zeba A. Crook, “Memory and the Historical Jesus”
• John W. Daniels, Jr., “Gossip in the New Testament”

The following poem, “Epi-strauss-ium,” by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) playfully draws attention to D. F. Strauss’s then recently published Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet ( Life of Jesus Critically Examined; NAEL 2:1452 n. 1).

Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John Evanished all and gone! Yea, he that erst, his dusky curtains quitting, Through Eastern pictured panes his level beams transmitting, With gorgeous portraits blent, On them his glories intercepted spent, Southwestering now, through windows plainly glassed, On the inside face his radiance keen hath cast, And in the luster lost, invisible, and gone, Are, say you, Matthew, Mark, and Luke and holy John? Lost, is it? lost, to be recovered never? However, The place of worship the meantime with light Is, if less richly, more sincerely bright, And in blue skies the Orb is manifest to sight.

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