Markus Bockmuehl

Ancient Hebrew inscriptions : corpus and concordance

Introduction 1. Corpus of new texts 2. Concordance to the new texts Additions and corrections to AHI Synoptic tables.

Creatio ex nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity

Recent decades have witnessed a near-consensus of critical opinion (1) that the idea of Gods creation of matter ‘out of nothing’ is not affirmed in scripture, but instead (2) originated in a second-century Christian reaction against Gnosticisms convictions about matter as evil and creation as the work of an inferior Demiurge. (3) Judaisms interest, by contrast, was generally deemed late and philosophically derivative or epiphenomenal upon Christian ideas. This essay re-examines all three convictions with particular reference to the biblical creation accounts in Palestinian Jewish reception. After highlighting certain interpretative features in the ancient versions of Genesis 1, this study explores the reception of such ideas in texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. It is clear that the typically cited proof texts from biblical or deutero-canonical books indeed do not yield clear confirmation of the doctrine they have sometimes been said to prove. Genesis was understood even in antiquity to be somewhat ambiguous on this point, and merely to say that creation gave shape to formlessness need not entail any creatio ex nihilo . This much seems uncontroversial. Nevertheless, closer examination also shows that the Scrolls and the rabbis do consistently affirm Israels God as the creator of all things, explicitly including matter itself. Graeco-Roman antiquity axiomatically accepted that ‘nothing comes from nothing’, which also meant the pre-existence of matter. To be sure, the conceptual terminology of ‘nothingness’ came relatively late to Christians, and even later to Jews. Yet the substantive concern for Gods free creation of the world without recourse to pre-existing matter is repeatedly affirmed in pre-Christian Jewish texts, and constitutes perhaps the single most important building block for the emergence of an explicit doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’. In its Jewish and Christian origins, therefore, the idea of creatio ex nihilo affirms creations comprehensive contingency on the Creators sovereignty and freedom. This in fact is a point which has been rightly and repeatedly accented in both historic and modern Christian theology on this subject (e.g. by K. Barth and E. Brunner, J. Moltmann and C. Gunton). Well before its explicit articulation in dialogue with Hellenistic philosophy, the doctrine of Gods creation of all matter was rooted in biblical texts and their Jewish interpretation, which in turn came to be refined and enriched through Christian–Jewish dialogue and controversy.

A Commentator's Approach To the 'Effective History' of Philippians

This study begins by offering an introduction to the neglected role of Wirkungs geschichte in biblical interpretation, developing reflections on appropriate methods and approaches in dialogue with the work of Heikki Räisänen and especially Ulrich Luz. It is argued that the modern meaning of a biblical text cannot be fully elucidated without reference to the history of both its meaning and its effects in the period between the ancient author and the modern interpreter. Turning to the effective history of Pauls letter to the Philippians, the article then examines both the influence of the letter as a whole and that of three particular passages (1.21-23; 2.5-11; 3.20). It is suggested that the genre of the commentary is particularly well suited to a running account of the place and presence of biblical books within the history of our civilization, which could provide vital tools for the construction of a hermeneutical bridge from the world of the text to the world of the Christian reader and his or her community

The Trouble with the Inclusive Jesus

In the long-standing debate between universalist and particularist interpretations of Jesus, recent years have witnessed the relentless rise of the idea that his was a socially radical and subversive gospel ahead of its time, fully in keeping with contemporary cultural agendas of “inclusion” or “inclusiveness”. The present study attempts to contextualize this “inclusive Jesus” within New Testament studies by means of three angles of approach: (1) recent work on the “inclusive”ethics of Jesus, (2) Jacob Neusner’s critique of New Testament scholarship on Jewish particularism and Christian universalism, and (3) the reception in current debate of Joachim Jeremias’ interpretation of Jesus’ view of Gentiles. In view of the overwhelming evidence that Jesus was “inclusive” as well as “exclusive” in both theology and praxis, Concluding Observations stress the location of this problem within a wider understanding of the biblical view of Election, and identify the Israelite particularity of Jesus as essential to his mission on behalf of Israel as well as the nations.

Compleat History of the Resurrection: A Dialogue with N.T. Wright

Tom Wright is not one to do things by halves. His is the high-octane, Grand Unified Theory approach to New Testament studies. Where lesser mortals may acquiesce in losing the wood for the exegetical trees, N.T. Wright deals in inter-galactic ecosystems—without neglecting in the process to footnote a surprising number of trees. His history-cum-theology of Christian origins is now proposed to run to at least five volumes, of which The Resurrection of the Son of God (RSG) is the third and most recent.1 The project’s ambitions are expanding at a breathtaking rate: this latest instalment of 800 pages and half a million words had been planned as a 70-page conclusion to Jesus and the Victory of God (henceforth JVG)2 until the closing stages of that previous volume. The resulting tome, ironically, is 10 percent longer than its predecessor, which in turn dwarfed the first, most comprehensively titled volume of the series (The New Testament and the People of God = NTPG3). Readers with doctorates may remember tossing on their beds in sleepless dread of an oral examination to be conducted in the spirit of Mt. 12.36-37. But half a dozen Cambridge dissertations, bound end to end, still could not fill a volume of this size without exceeding their combined word limit. Tom Wright is not one to do things by halves. As an embarrassingly slow and distracted reader (and not for that reason alone a disciple of Callimachus’s maxim me/ga bibli/on me/ga kako&n), this reviewer tends to reach swiftly for the smelling salts whenever faced with

Book Review: Ancient Jewish and Christian Education: Karina Martin Hogan, Matthew Goff & Emma Wasserman (eds), Pedagogy in Ancient Judaism and Early ChristianityHoganKarina MartinGoffMatthewWassermanEmma (eds), Pedagogy in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2017.

(ch. 7)—purposefully moving from micro to macro level analysis. Each test case follows a recurring pattern: first, an overview of scholarly interpretations of each test-case and how it is ‘like but not the same’ a multiplicity of OT texts; a similar interpretative issue in a film (or filmic genre) is chosen (eg., Once Upon a Time in the West, Far from Heaven, film noir), read through the lens of pastiche; the insights from the filmic reading are then creatively developed as a fresh vantage point from which to reread the Revelation test-case as pastiche. The sensitive literary readings yield rich insights, particularly on Rev 18 and the genre apocalypse. This is an important, groundbreaking study that merits a wide readership. It offers an illuminating lens through which to observe the affective force of a text which is so achingly similar to OT prophetic texts and yet which can never be quite the same again.

54.95. pp. xxii + 401. ISBN: 978-1-62837-165-9).

For Paul, where is Jesus now? The Apostles Christ-mysticism provides one important clue to his sense of continued personal presence, but this coexists with an important eschatological dialectic that involves absence as much as presence. Moreoever, straightforward sublimation in terms of the Holy Spirit in no way exhausts the register of Jesus’ personal presence for Paul, which also finds specific application in repeated visionary experiences, as well as in the church gathered for worship, baptism, and eucharist. The dialectic of absence and presence appears on the one hand personally attuned in the assurance of Pauls Jesus that ‘My grace is sufficient for you’ (2 Cor 12:7), but it is also eschatologically and spatially articulated in the promise that ‘the Lord is near’ (Phil 4:5).

The personal presence of Jesus in the writings of Paul

Whereas New Testament criticism has tended to focus on historical and literary and dimensions of each evangelist’s account of Jesus’ baptism, this evidently important Gospel narrative became a crucial vehicle of specifically Trinitarian thought in the patristic period. The present brief ‘think piece’ explores the potential for a correlation between the baptism story in its historical context of Jewish renewal and its highly theological impact in patristic interpretation. The enormous exegetical import of this episode may be said to derive from its function as the ‘super-sacrament’ of Israel’s and Adam’s redemption (cf. J. Macquarrie).

The baptism of Jesus as ‘super-sacrament’ of redemption

One of the more difficult and long-standing puzzles in the Christian Bible is the fact that the first threequarters of it consists of the ancient folklore of a tiny middle Eastern tribe. Then suddenly in the final quarter the Bible shifts gear dramatically to employ both the language and the publishing technology of the world’s first global culture to articulate a message addressed apparently to the entire planet. How can this be? And what sense can it possibly make to have these two parts of the same volume? In some fashion these two parts of the Christian Bible were presumably believed to belong together by those who decided to bind them between the covers of a single book. In some sense each must have been thought to speak to the other, either singularly or reciprocally. But how? Even Christians have long struggled with that question of the relationship between the two Christian testaments; and they continue to do so. One classic position dates back at least to the second century, and in various permutations has had admirers ever since. You might think of it in terms of driving your old car to a dealer and swapping it for a shiny new one. This is essentially the view that the Old Testament serves as a kind of historical foil for the New, representing everything that has been transformed, abandoned, exchanged and replaced in order for Christianity to emerge as a world faith. The Old Testament on that reading may be of archival or historical interest, but it has served its purpose and is now left behind. Given its many awkward features including what people often see as a loathsome and offensive God who in key respects seems the opposite to the New Testament God, we should probably stop reading the Old Testament in Christian churches or for that matter printing it in Christian Bibles. In one form or another, this was the view of the second-century Christian philosopher Marcion and also of the early 20th century’s most learned New Testament scholar, Adolf von Harnack. For the early church, Harnack thought, retention of the Old Testament as part of Christian Scripture was a necessity; for the Reformers, an inescapable foible; but for Protestants in the modern world, it could only be the result of a culpable religious paralysis.1 This is because “Jesus,” he wrote, “opens up to us the prospect of a union among men, which is held together not by any legal ordinance, but by the rule of love”—a glorious egalitarian ideal that “ought to float before our eyes as the goal and guiding star of our historical development”.2 Clearly the ethnic peculiarities of ancient shellfish-shunning Semites can have no part in this grand conception of an enlightened society brokered by the umpires of progressive culture in Berlin or Paris. Old car, new car. Sadly, as we should have known then, and certainly know now, that view of the Hebrew Bible”s cultural inferiority also has the potential to bear consequences of unspeakable horror for the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. A second long-standing Christian approach to the Old Testament has a rather more homely flavour, and treats it like you might raid your grandmother’s kitchen larder for some missing ingredients when baking cookies at her house. It is a place both familiar and strange at the same time, containing yummy old favourites alongside shrivelled abominations we would not dream of using even under sufferance. We go to it to pick and choose exactly the right amount of eggs and raisins we need to prepare the recipe we want. In the case of the Old

The Macbride Sermon, Hertford College, Oxford 25/01/2009: Messianic Prophecy and Abrahamic Faith

Yet, in the second place, something else is noteworthy. With the down-grading of the partly illusory objectivity supposed to have been provided by historical criticism and authorial intent, imagination in New Testament exposition may often seem to lack all control and subjective manipulation emerge as king. What we hear is indeed affected by what we bring; but checks and balances remain essential. One such may be a keen attention to the details of first-century context and setting provided by social science enquiry. Another may be the critical filter provided by the corporate readings both of the scholarly guild and of the People of God across time and space. A third, however, should surely be the engagement of tested theological perspectives as provisional compass bearings. That is why the sub-title of this book: ’A Theologian Looks at Mark’ is of considerable positive significance. NEVILLE CLARK, CARDIFF