First Glance
Biblical stories, as familiar to us as our own family tales, can reveal hidden meanings when the text is meticulously reread. So it is with the story of Jacob and his beloved Rachel, for whom he yearned and labored for 14 years. Jacob’s impulsive vow that the person found with Laban’s stolen idols will die; his deathbed adoption of his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh; his erection of four pillars at places where critical events occurred—all are part of a tangled skein unraveled by Gordon Tucker in “Jacob’s Terrible Burden.” As the story unwinds we share Jacob’s awful revelation—that he had doomed Rachel to death—and he knew it!
Tucker holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and is assistant professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in New York. He serves on the committee on Jewish law and standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, the national organization of Conservative rabbis. From 1979 to 1981 Tucker was special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti.
Raised as a Catholic and ordained a priest, Geza Vermes eventually rediscovered his Jewish roots, a heritage the Nazis chased him across Hungary in 1944 for having. In “Escape and Rescue—An Interview with Geza Vermes,” BR editor Hershel Shanks interviews Vermes about his unusual religious background and the almost unique perspective it has given him for his scholarly work on Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. An early critic of the delay in Dead Sea Scroll publication, Vermes also assesses the history of the problem and the current state of scroll research.
A member of BR’s Editorial Advisory Board, Vermes is professor emeritus of Jewish studies at Oxford University and director of the Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. He has edited the Journal of Jewish Studies since 1971. Vermes’s writings on Christianity include Jesus the Jew (Collins, 1973), Jesus and the World of Judaism (SCM, 1983) and The Religion of Jesus the Jew (SCM and Fortress, 1993).
It is one of the commonplaces of New Testament studies: Paul, in his eagerness to make converts to Christianity in Asia Minor, ruled that gentiles need not obey the strict food laws of the Old Testament. James on the other hand, so goes the argument, as well as other leading Jewish-Christians living in Jerusalem, believed that the food laws must be adhered to even by those new to the faith. This picture, argues Ben Witherington III, turns out to be misleading. Examining Paul’s ban in 1 Corinthians 8 on eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols, Witherington finds no rift between Paul and James and shows that it was the social setting of meals and not what was consumed that concerned both men. Witherington’s article addresses the question “Why Not Idol Meat?”
Witherington is a professor of biblical and Wesleyan studies at Ashland Theological Seminary, in Ashland, Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Durham, England, and is a John Wesley Fellow for Life. His publications include Women in the Earliest Churches (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), Women and the Genesis of Christianity (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), and The Christology of Jesus (Augsburg-Fortress Press, 1990). Witherington, a baseball and basketball fan, ran the Boston Marathon last year.
What was Q? Who was Thomas? Who wrote J? These and other similar questions resound regularly in the pages of BR and have fueled scholarly debate for nearly 200 years. They are the underpinnings of the historical-critical method—the understanding of the Bible as a collection of documents written by many authors over more than a thousand years. As popular as this method is in academia, however, it has not caught on elsewhere. Why is modern biblical scholarship not reaching a wider audience? Michael D. Coogan tries to bridge “The Great Gulf Between Scholars and the Pew.”
Professor of religious studies at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts, Coogan has also taught at Wellesley College and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and literatures. Coogan co-edited The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford Univ. Press, 1993) and translated Stories from Ancient Canaan (Westminster, 1978). He is the author of “Glossary: Canaanites: Who Were They and Where Did They Live?” BR 09:03.