Judith Lieu

The Jews among pagans and Christians : in the Roman Empire

M. Hengel, University of T^D:ubingen, H. Drijvers, University of Groningen, Fergus Millar, Oxford University and M. Goodman, Oxford University

Circumcision, women and salvation

The title of this paper sets its own agenda when considered in the form of a syllogism. What is the relationship between circumcision and women, what between circumcision and salvation? Merely to raise the question in this form is to indicate the ambiguity which might surround any answer, at least within the sort of debate with which NT scholarship is familiar. The immediately obvious solution would be to object that the question, together with the presuppositions and concerns which apparently inspire it, is born of a modern consciousness inappropriate to the critical study of the past: that it is an imposition on the text. 1 However, we may for the moment postpone the hermeneutical questions such an objection should provoke: the title is inspired not by the modern agenda of ‘womens rights’ or feminism but by that of the second century.

TEMPLE AND SYNAGOGUE IN JOHN

Jesus’ answer to the High Priest in 18.20 offers a key to the pattern of his ministry. Each of the pairs ‘openly: secretly’; ‘the world: the Jews’ and ‘synagogue and Temple’ function significantly in the Gospel, but the last named are most important. In each of the Gospels, ‘synagogue’, ‘house’, and ‘Temple’ play narrative roles in the exploration of the relationship between Jesus with his community and the community of the Scriptures and contemporary Judaism. Johns use of these narrative spatial-markers is very different and does not trace the separation of Johns community from the synagogue, as often supposed. Instead, the Temple is the place for divine manifestation and where Jesus must be both revealed and rejected.

What was from the beginning: scripture and tradition in the Johannine epistles

‘That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, concerning the word of life’ (1 John 1.1). However that claim to ear-, eye- and touch-witness is to be understood, there can be no dispute that for 1 John a claim to ‘that which was from the beginning’ is a linch-pin in the argument and in the theology of the letter. Yet the question of the use of Scripture in 1 John points further – to the relation between New Testament and Old, theologically and historically, but also to the origins and development of Johannine Christianity.

Faith and the Fourth Gospel: A Conversation with Teresa Morgan

In Roman Faith and Christian Faith Teresa Morgan brings a classicist’s sensitivities to a subject that lies at the heart of the New Testament but that is often taken as self-evident. This article engages in a conversation with its insights, with particular reference to the Johannine literature. It suggests that more nuancing might be needed, not least from a recognition of the demands of the genre of the gospel, but also finds much to provoke further reflection.

Marcion's Gospel and the New Testament: Catalyst or Consequence?

These three short papers were delivered in the ‘Quaestiones disputatae’ session at the 71st General Meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, held at McGill University, Montreal, on 3 August 2016. The session was chaired by Professor Carl Holladay, President of the Society.

Household and family in Diaspora Judaism

Abstract Any study of religiosity in the Graeco-Roman world must include an account of the Jewish experience, so often seen as precursor or shadowy reflection, of the Christian. Here the primary sources are archaeological and epigraphic, with literary texts reflecting the intentions of sometimes hostile observers. Exploring these sources affords more glimpses than might be expected of the impact of religious identity on social and domestic life, but also demonstrates the fluidity between the categories of domestic or family and institutional, provoking questions that are equally applicable to the ‘pagan’ and Christian contexts.

Letters and the Topography of Early Christianity

While embedded in contemporary letter-writing conventions, early Christian letters were also instrumental in the creation of a distinctive Christian world-view. Fundamental to letters of all types, ‘real’ and fictional, is that they respond to, and hence negotiate and seek to overcome, actual and imagined spatial and temporal distance between author and recipient(s). In practice and as cultural symbols, letters, sent and transmitted in new contexts, as well as letter collections, produced in the Christian imagination new trans-locational and cross-temporal dynamics of relationality that can be mapped onto the standard epistolary topoi – ‘absent as if present’, half a conversation, a mirror of the soul.

Book Reviews : Timothy and Titus

To judge by The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (London: Continuum, 2001. L14.99pp. 178. ISBN I-84I2’~-23g-8), Mark Goodacre must be an exciting lecturer, who is aware of the problems that his students face. In this introduction he sets out the arguments with extreme clarity, providing many examples (in English translation) and inserting summaries in boxes and at the end of each chapter. After explaining what the problem is, he discusses the priority of Mark, the case for Q and his rejection of that hypothesis in favour of the Farrer theory that Matthew used Mark and Luke used Mark and

What did Women do for the Early Church? The Recent History of a Question

The question posed in the title deliberately reverses one that has accompanied me through my academic career: what did the early church do for women? The reversal signals what will prove to be an underlying theme of what follows, namely the role of women in history as objects or as the subjects of action and of discourse. Yet already the question as conventionally phrased highlights different points of stress that reflect where it belongs within reflective historiography, the subject of this volume. Firstly, ‘ What did the early church do ?’ The coming of early Christianity, it is implied, brought blessings or perhaps curses, evoking a way of writing church history which goes back to Eusebius and which continues both through Edward Gibbon and through those who still portray the social and religious context of the time as one of the inarticulate search for alternative conceptions of the divine or for alternative social values that Christianity would answer. Secondly, ‘for women ’: thus, a deliberate rejection of any universalizing interpretation of such effects; a recognition, or at least a suspicion, that any apparently universalizing claim is actually spoken from a ‘normal’ that is already gendered as male; an invitation to ask how women’s experience could be recovered, what the sources would look like, and, indeed, whether it can be recovered from the extant sources.