Judaism

Daily Gleanings about what’s available through the British Library’s “Discovering Sacred Texts” web portal.

Daily Gleanings from Brice Jones about P.Oxy. 83.5345 (a “first-c.” Mark fragment) and Larry Hurtado about Darina Staudt’s, “Der eine und einzige Gott.”

Gleanings about Jewish Studies and beating distractions to write productively.

In addition to the Boccacci and Segovia and Rodríguez and Thiessen volumes, Fortress Press has kindly, if accidentally, passed along a review copy of Mark Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm’s edited volume Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-century Context to the Apostle(2015). According to the book’s blurb:

In these chapters, a group of renowned international scholars seek to describe Paul and his work from “within Judaism,” rather than on the assumption, still current after thirty years of the “New Perspective,” that in practice Paul left behind aspects of Jewish living after his discovery of Jesus as Christ (Messiah). After an introduction that surveys recent study of Paul and highlights the centrality of questions about Paul’s Judaism, chapters explore the implications of reading Paul’s instructions as aimed at Christ-following non-Jews, teaching them how to live in ways consistent with Judaism while remaining non-Jews. The contributors take different methodological points of departure: historical, ideological-critical, gender-critical, and empire-critical, and examine issues of terminology and of interfaith relations. Surprising common ground among the contributors presents a coherent alternative to the “New Perspective.” The volume concludes with a critical evaluation of the Paul within Judaism perspective by Terence L. Donaldson, a well-known voice representative of the best insights of the New Perspective.

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In my email recently, I found Fortress Press had kindly provided a review copy of Gabriele Boccaccini and Carlos Segovia’s edited volume Paul the Jew: Rereading the Apostle as a Figure of Second Temple Judaism(2016). According to the book’s blurb:

The decades-long effort to understand the apostle Paul within his Jewish context is now firmly established in scholarship on early Judaism, as well as on Paul. The latest fruit of sustained analysis appears in the essays gathered here, from leading international scholars who take account of the latest investigations into the scope and variety present in Second Temple Judaism. Contributors address broad historical and theological questions—Paul’s thought and practice in relationship with early Jewish apocalypticism, messianism, attitudes toward life under the Roman Empire, appeal to Scripture, the Law, inclusion of Gentiles, the nature of salvation, and the rise of Gentile-Christian supersessionism—as well as questions about interpretation itself, including the extent and direction of a “paradigm shift” in Pauline studies and the evaluation of the Pauline legacy. Paul the Jew goes as far as any effort has gone to restore the apostle to his own historical, cultural, and theological context, and with persuasive results.

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The new Judaism and Rome project “aims to:

• give access to some important sources, providing as much information as possible: images, original text, translation
• provide the reader with an original and detailed analysis of each source, a service that is very rarely offered on the internet, and which makes this website comparable to a rich sourcebook
• promote interdisciplinary discussion between scholars working on Roman history, Jewish Studies, Epigraphy, Numismatics, Classics, Patristics, History of Christianity, etc.”

Several interesting resources have already been made available with the promise of more to come.

Access to the Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting is open and available online. JJMJS is:

a peer-reviewed academic open access journal, published electronically (immediate free online availability) in co-operation with Eisenbrauns, with support of McMaster University and Caspari Center….

The journal aims, uniquely, to advance scholarship on this crucial period in the early history of the Jewish and Christian traditions when they developed into what is today known as two world religions, mutually shaping one another as they did so. JJMJS publishes high-quality research on any topic that directly addresses or has implications for the understanding of the inter-relationship and interaction between the Jesus movement and other forms of Judaism, as well as for the processes that led to the formation of Judaism and Christianity as two related but independent religions.

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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

According to Amazon,

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The latest issue of Currents in Biblical Research includes:

• Kristin De Troyer, “The Seventy-two and their Many Grandchildren: A Review of Septuagint Studies from 1997 Onward”
• Nicholas Perrin and Christopher W. Skinner, “Recent Trends in Gospel of Thomas Research (1989–2011): Part II: Genre, Theology and Relationship to the Gospel of John”
• Timo S. Paananen, “From Stalemate to Deadlock: Clement’s Letter to Theodore in Recent Scholarship”
• Jonathan S. Milgram, “Then and Now: A Summary of Developments in the Field of Talmudic Literature through Contributions to the First and Second Editions of the Encyclopaedia Judaica”

The New Perspective on Paul has its beginnings in what N. T. Wright has called “the Sanders revolution.”