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The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity
Gillian Feeley-Harnick
(Washington: Smithsonian, 1994), 200 pp., $14.95
This is essentially a reprint of a 1981 work and seems hard to justify. The book was supposed to be an anthropological study based on the viewpoint that food works like language, yet the author never succeeded in demonstrating the point. If food works like language, then it should have a grammar that realizes meanings from a social system. While Judeans in Judea can be said to have had a social system realizable in language and food, can the same be said of non-ethnics such as Christians? The book is sprinkled with ethnocentric observations (where the behavior of ancient Judeans is fused with that of modern Jews) and blatant anachronisms (she has “Jews” leaving Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs!).
Feeley-Harnick’s remarks on anthropology and the Bible were inadequate in 1981; they are now hopelessly out of date.
What Are They Saying About Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount?
Warren Carter
(New York: Paulist, 1994), 136 pp., $7.95
Warren Carter, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and assistant professor at St. Paul’s School of Theology in Kansas City, has summarized clearly and comprehensively the most significant commentaries on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) from among the flood of literature that has inundated New Testament studies during the last 30 years. The first chapter charts out the sources of the Sermon on the Mount in an early collection (assumed by scholars to have existed and referred to as Q) and other pre-Matthean writings and lays out various theories of the Sermon’s origin. The structure of the Sermon, which has provoked much debate, takes up the second chapter. The Sermon’s function and socio-historical setting fills the third. Most scholars believe the Sermon was addressed to a Jewish-Christian community in conflict with a more traditional Jerwish community and was used to establish an identity and way of life in the face of internal and external strife. The fouth chapter treats the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and other famous passages, and the fifth considers numerous applications of the Sermon to modern Christian living. Notes and a select bibliography offer a rich mine for further reading.
The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity
Gillian Feeley-Harnick
(Washington: Smithsonian, 1994), 200 pp., $14.95
