Bible Review, 1994
Features
22The city of Ravenna has endured as a shimmering monument to late antique art and civilization—the imperial tombs, the palace churches, the oratorios (prayer chapels) and the baptisteries all glisten with the mosaic makers’ art. One of the most interesting buildings—and perhaps the one with the most intriguing story—in this northern Italian city is […]
Readers Letter Sparks Article When reading Victor Hurowitzs Inside Solomons Temple, BR 10:02, a question suddenly occurred to me that I should have thought of years ago.
17 That Jesus was a miracle worker is central to the Christology of the New Testament Gospels and Acts. In Mark, the earliest Gospel, 17 stories of miracles appear in the first eight chapters. Most of the stories are repeated by Matthew and Luke. In Peter’s Pentecost speech, he recalls Jesus’ ministry by saying […]
The Late Bronze Age did not die a slow, lingering death. It came to a swift end in the 12th century B.C.E., marked by sudden cultural collapse and widespread population shifts. Out of the ashes of the Bronze Age destructions emerged classical Greek culture and biblical Israel. When one considers the contributions these two cultures […]
Biblical archaeology envisions a dialogue between artifacts and the scriptural text. In many ways archaeology can provide the context that brings the text to life. Recently I completed a book on Jeremiah and archaeology in which I fill in the background of the prophet’s entire work.1 Here we will look at a single passage […]
21 There is scarcely a more poignant human story of love and tragedy in the Bible—if not in all of literature—than that of the Patriarch Jacob and his beloved Rachel. Sent by his father Isaac to find a wife among the daughters of his mother’s brother Laban in Haran, Jacob meets Laban’s daughter Rachel […]
Readers of our December issue will recall David Noel Freedman’s analysis of the organization of the Hebrew Bible and his insights into when the Hebrew Bible assumed its final shape (“How the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament Differ—An Interview with David Noel Freedman—Part I,” BR 09:06). In this concluding half of the […]
When creating the first woman, God says, “I will make [the man] a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).1
“Then Solomon said … ‘I have built thee an exalted house, a place for thee to dwell in forever.’”
Despite the close historical links between Judaism and Christianity, few scholars cross the line to work in both Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. One notable exception is Geza Vermes, professor emeritus of Jewish studies at Oxford University and director of the Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. […]
Some readers may have noticed that two beautiful paintings of the Ten Commandments in a recent BR picture them differently.aIn the Rembrandt painting, the Sixth Commandment runs “You shall not commit adultery.” In the Rembrandt painting, the Tenth Commandment includes all the prohibitions against coveting. But in the de Champaigne painting, the coveting prohibitions […]
A fissure runs through communities that take the Bible seriously, especially within American Protestantism. “Literalism” marks the divide between the two camps, the two spiritual regions, the two political forces. Listen to the two factions fighting for the spoils within a single denomination—as in the recent case of the Southern Baptist Convention1 or the […]
Sex has always been of greater interest to anthropologists than to students of the Bible. For that very reason, however, anthropology may offer an added dimension for understanding biblical texts.
What Jesus was doing at the Last Supper has not been understood for the better part of 2,000 years. The reason for the misunderstanding is that Jesus, a Jewish teacher who was concerned with the sacrificial worship of Israel, has been treated as if he were the deity in a Hellenistic cult. A generation […]
More than two centuries ago, it occurred to a few European intellectuals that Jesus as a figure of history may have been quite different from Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels. With the awareness of that potential difference, the scholarly quest for the Jesus of history began.
That food and dining in the Greco-Roman world provide the background for understanding several difficult passages in Paul’s letters is not surprising. What is surprising is that these same food and dining customs indicate that the supposed rift between the Jerusalem Christians under James and the diaspora Christians under Paul was not as wide […]
The historical-critical method of Bible interpretation is “indispensable”, declares a remarkable new report of the Pontifical Biblical Commission of the Roman Catholic Church.1 “Proper understanding [of the Bible] not only admits the use of this method but actually requires it.” Holy Scripture is the “word of God in human language”; in short, the Bible “has […]
The similarities between the Jewish Dead Sea Scroll community and early Christianity are sometimes striking. The public has been fascinated by these similarities, often forgetting the differences, which are in many ways greater. In this article, I will compare the leaders, or founders, of these two religious organizations—the Teacher of Righteousness and Jesus. Their […]
About Paul’s missionary journeys to the west much has been written. But almost nothing has been said of his trip to Arabia. No wonder; it is barely mentioned, almost as an aside, in Galatians 1:17: “I went away into Arabia, and again I returned to Damascus.”
In the previous article Bruce Chilton presents some convincing ideas regarding the eucharistic words Jesus uttered at the Last Supper: “This is my body [the bread]; this is my blood [the wine]” (with slight variations in Mark 14:22–24; Matthew 26:26–28; Luke 22:19–20; and 1 Corinthians 11:24–25). The traditional interpretation is that Jesus is referring […]
Had someone told me a decade ago that I would be teaching a course on “Women and the Bible,” I would have laughed. My academic training in Bible was quite traditional. The word “gender” never entered the classroom. Yet I have just completed teaching my department’s first-ever Women’s Studies course. I serve on the […]
The Shepherd of Hermas was one of the most popular Christian texts in the first centuries of the church. True, it did not make the final cut; that is, it was not included in the New Testament.a But it was considered canonical by the influential second-century church father Irenaeus. Tertullian, another prominent church father of […]
49 How should we imagine the Tablets of the Law that Moses twice brought down from the mountain? Whether the story is legend or history is irrelevant to this question. However we, are to appreciate the story, we should try to understand these tablets in the context of their time. In Cecil B. de […]
Three great intellectual revolutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries have profoundly shaped and transformed the way we think of ourselves and our world. The first is Marxism and its derivative, socialism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the changes in Eastern Europe may appear to have thoroughly discredited Marxism; such is […]
Call it the case of a fictional falling man who threatens to cause the downfall of a real man, or call it a case of political correctness run amok. Whatever you call it, Graydon F. Snyder, a professor of New Testament at Chicago Theological Seminary, suddenly finds himself the most famous Bible scholar in the countryand dearly wishes he werent.
In the December 1993 BR we published a lengthy review of John Van Seters’s Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (Bible Books, BR 09:06). Our reviewer, Richard Elliot Friedman, of the University of California at San Diego, leveled numerous criticisms at the book, writing at one point, “There is therefore reason to doubt the soundness of method and reasoning in Van Seters’s work. In this scholarship the [Bible’s] text rarely speaks for itself …. Rather it is the scholar’s spin on the text that houses the point.” Van Seters’s rebuttal to Friedman’s critique follows this introduction; Friedman’s reply follows that.