Second-Temple-Judaism

“Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions” illustrates how modern readers can work to recover Second Temple interpretive contexts.

In a special podcast, Chris Jones and I discuss the challenging issues of Romans’s audience and the letter’s perspective on predestination.

Sarianna Metso’s edition of the Community Rule addresses all surviving witnesses for the Rule and includes a critical apparatus.

Daily Gleanings from Greg Goswell about reading Romans after Acts and from Carol Newsom about rhetoric and hermeneutics in biblical and ST literature.

The University of Cincinnati’s Department of Classics has a podcast with several noteworthy episodes, including an interview with Jodi Magness and a whole series on Qumran and Judean Desert texts.

HT: AWOL

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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Charles Haws notes that Revue de Qumrân now has a website. In commemoration of the website’s launch about a dozen articles have been made openly available.

Lexham Bible Dictionary now includes among its entries my contributions on “Aquila,” “Emesa,” “Israel, Place,” and “Law in Second Temple Judaism.”

The latest Bloomsbury Highlights notes the newly available volume 16 in the T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series. The volume is a revision of my 2011 dissertation at Southeastern Seminary and primarily explores paradigmatic, or presuppositional, aspects of the hermeneutics at play in Romans and some of the Qumran sectarian texts.

Bloomsbury presently has the hardback on sale for 10% off and is also making PDFs available at a still more substantially reduced price.

On the web:

• Logos Bible Software adds select works of C. K. Barrett and the Justification and Variegated Nomism set to their pre-publication  program.
• Lawrence Schiffman considers Jubilees’ rationale for Torah’s commandments.
• J.-L. Simonet comments on what may be some newly-identified lectionary leaves.
• Tommy Wasserman notes the forthcoming Biblia Graeca from Eisenbrauns.

The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include:

Ancient Near East and Second Temple Judaism

• Phillip R. Callaway, The Dead Sea Scrolls for a New Millennium, reviewed by Stephen Reed
• Benedikt Eckhardt, ed., Jewish Identity and Politics between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba: Groups, Normativity, and Rituals, reviewed by Joshua Schwartz
• Oded Lipschits and David S. Vanderhooft, The Yehud Stamp Impressions: A Corpus of Inscribed Impressions from the Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Judah, reviewed by Aren Maeir
• Annick Payne, Hieroglyphic Luwian: An Introduction with Original Texts, reviewed by Robert Holmstedt

New Testament and Cognate Studies

The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include:

New Testament and Cognate Studies

• Jo-Ann A. Brant, John, reviewed by Matthew Gordley
• Bart B. Bruehler, A Public and Political Christ: The Social-Spatial Characteristics of Luke 18:35–19:43 and the Gospel as a Whole in Its Ancient Context, reviewed by John Cowan
• Jaime Clark-Soles, Engaging the Word: The New Testament and the Christian Believer, reviewed by Ronald Witherup
• Gerald J. Donker, The Text of the Apostolos in Athanasius of Alexandria, reviewed by Justin A. Mihoc
• Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence, reviewed by Panayotis Coutsoumpos
• Charles W. Hedrick, Unlocking the Secrets of the Gospel according to Thomas: A Radical Faith for a New Age, reviewed by William Arnal
• Josep Rius-Camps and Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, The Message of Acts in Codex Bezae: A Comparison with the Alexandrian Tradition, Volume 4: Acts 18.24–28.31: Rome, reviewed by Vaughn CroweTipton
• Christopher D. Stanley, ed., The Colonized Apostle: Paul in Postcolonial Eyes, reviewed by Steed Davidson

Second Temple Judaism

The latest issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society arrived in yesterday’s mail and includes the following:

• David Chapman and Andreas Köstenberger, “Jewish Intertestamental and Early Rabbinic Literature: An Annotated Bibliographic Resource Updated (Part 1)”
• Armin Baum, “A Theological Justification for the Canonical Status of Literary Forgeries: Jacob’s Deceit (Genesis 27) and Petr Pokorný’s Sola Gratia Argument”
• Walter Kaiser Jr., “Is It the Case that Christ is the Same Object of Faith in the Old Testament? (Genesis 15:1–6)”
• Josh Chatraw, “Balancing Out (W)Right: Jesus’ Theology of Individual and Corporate Repentance and Forgiveness in the Gospel of Luke”
• Stanley Porter and Bryan Dyer, “Oral Texts?: A Reassessment of the Oral and Rhetorical Nature of Paul’s Letters in Light of Recent Studies”
• Adam Hensley, “Σιγάω, λαλέω, and ὑποτάσσω in 1 Corinthians 14:34 in Their Literary and Rhetorical Context”
• Victor Rhee, “The Author of Hebrews as a Leader of the Faith Community”
• Russell Moore, “The Kingdom of God in the Social Ethics of Carl F. H. Henry: A Twenty-first Century Evangelical Reappraisal”

[caption id=“attachment_7680” align=“alignright” width=“80” caption=“Marcus Tullius Cicero”] [/caption]

In his translator’s comments on Cicero’s Nature of the Gods, H. C. P. McGregor makes the following observation about the task of translation:

One can . . . choose verbal accuracy at any price, translate each sentence word for word, and so produce a safe bud deadly crib. In an opposite extreme, one may throw all scholarly impedimenta overboard, let vocabulary and syntax go, seeking only to preserve in English dress the sense and argument of the original. . . . A third method goes beyond translation altogether and creates a new work in the image of the old, as Pope and Chapman did with Iliad and Odyssey. ( 64)

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The folks at the Bulletin for Biblical Research have very kindly agreed to publish a revised version of my presentation from the November, 2009 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society: “Rewriting Prophets in the Corinthian Correspondence: A Window on Paul’s Hermeneutic.” To provide just a bit fuller picture of the essay’s argument:

In the broadest sense of the phrase, any use of Jewish scripture by a later author(s) could be understood to constitute a form of ‘rewritten Bible’. The phrase ‘rewritten Bible’ has, however, come to have a technical meaning whereby it designates a certain body of ancient, Jewish literature. The precise shape of this body of literature continues to be debated, but even with consensus on this specific point as far away as it is, ‘rewritten Bible’ can contribute valuable information to the study of Paul’s use of scripture. In particular, ‘rewritten Bible’ provides a useful foil for the study of Paul’s citations in 1 Cor 1:31 and 2 Cor 10:17 and the hermeneutical paradigm upon which these citations’ validity implicitly rests. In this case, Paul’s connections with ‘rewritten Bible’ literature especially help suggest the constitutive, hermeneutical role that Jesus played as Paul interpreted scripture for the Corinthian church within the broader context of some of the hermeneutical traditions of his near contemporaries.

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While reading Darrell Bock’s Studying the Historical Jesus in preparation for class this fall, I came across the following, insightful comment:

Every culture has its “cultural script” that is assumed in its communication. These [Second Temple Jewish] sources help us get a reading on the cultural script at work in the time of Jesus. They also help us understand the reaction to Jesus and his ministry. They also deepen our own perception of Jesus’ claims ( 40–41).

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