First Glance

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God’s promise to give “all the land of Canaan” to Abraham’s descendants fills the aged patriarch with hope—and despair. He has no heir! The tension created by God’s pledge and Abraham’s lack of an heir drives the story related in Genesis 11–25. But when Abraham attempts to ease his situation by finding himself an inheritor, one obstacle after another thwarts his plans; the tension merely increases as God rejects Abraham’s choices. Only through faith in God, Abraham ultimately perceives, will the covenant be fulfilled, writes Larry Helyer in “Abraham’s Eight Crises—The Bumpy Road to Fulfilling God’s Promise of an Heir.” Helyer’s conclusion, and Philip Davies’s more playful, not to say iconoclastic, treatment of the same text in the last issue of BR (“Abraham & Yahweh—A Case of Male Bonding”), remind us of the myriad possibilities of interpreting biblical stories.

A Baptist minister, Helyer is professor of biblical studies at Taylor University, in Upland, Indiana. His publications include Yesterday, Today and Forever: The Continuing Relevance of the Old Testament (Sheffield, forthcoming) and Jewish Literature of the Second Temple (Inter-Varsity, forthcoming).

Hanukkah, the Jewish festival commemorating the second-century B.C.E. recapture of the Jerusalem Temple, is familiar to most of us. And many will recall the name of the family that led the successful Jewish forces—the Hasmoneans. But the author of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, written hundreds of years earlier, could not possibly have known these names. Or could he? Or could He? Which is it? A team of mathematical statisticians has discovered hundreds of pairs of related words like this—including the names of Jewish leaders and events that postdate the composition of the biblical text—embedded in the text of the Hebrew Bible. The odds of this happening by chance, according to one study, are 1 in 50,000,000,000,000,000. In “Divine Authorship? Computer Reveals Startling Word Patterns,” Jeffrey B. Satinover weighs the study’s results and the awesome implications of its findings.

A psychiatrist with a private practice in psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychopharmacology, Satinover also serves as medical director for the Temenos Institute Psychiatric Clinic, in Westport, Connecticut. His Skein of Darkness, Skein of Gold, a politico-religious thriller, is forthcoming from Grove Books.

A man of many gods, the emperor Julian (ruled 361–363 C.E.) sought to revive paganism in the Roman Empire, which had become officially Christian under Constantine I. Julian’s interest in diverse religious practices—from the Eleusinian mysteries to Mithraism—also extended to Judaism, which he hoped to incorporate into his expansive pagan pantheon. All this earned him the bitter enmity of the burgeoning Christian community—and the epithet “Apostate.” In “Julian the Apostate and His Plan to Rebuild the Jerusalem Temple,” Jeffrey Brodd describes what, for many Christians, was Julian’s sin of sins: He intended to restore the Temple of the Jews, which the Roman’s had destroyed in 70 C.E. Although this project was probably begun, as may be evidenced by an inscription on the wall of the Temple Mount, it came to a halt upon Julian’s death in his Persian wars.

An adjunct professor at Winona State University, Brodd delivered a paper on Julian’s plans to rebuild the Temple at the 1993 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. His interests include Graeco-Roman religions and Judaism in late antiquity.

Because the gospels of Matthew and Luke have much in common with Mark, many scholars argue that Matthew and Luke drew on Mark’s gospel when writing their own. But Matthew and Luke also share sayings and language not found in Mark. So where did they get that material? From a lost fifth gospel—the hypothetical Q, consisting of Jesus’ sayings but lacking the passion, crucifixion and resurrection narratives. In the last issue of BR, Eta Linnemann (“Is There a Gospel of Q?”) mounted an attack on Q’s advocates, arguing that they exaggerate the overlap between Matthew and Luke to suggest that not all early Christians held Jesus’ 005crucifixion and resurrection central to their faith. In “Yes, Virginia, There is a Q,” Stephen J. Patterson responds. The Q hypothesis, he points out, is a product of informed reasoning and historical analysis; it is not a weapon to undermine any specific form of Christian faith.

Assistant professor of New Testament Studies at Eden Theological Seminary, Patterson also serves as BR’s contributing editor. He is the author of The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Polebridge Press, 1993) and of several BR articles, including “Q—The Lost Gospel” BR 09:05.

A Note on Style

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors and often used in scholarly literature, are the alternative designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

God’s promise to give “all the land of Canaan” to Abraham’s descendants fills the aged patriarch with hope—and despair. He has no heir! The tension created by God’s pledge and Abraham’s lack of an heir drives the story related in Genesis 11–25. But when Abraham attempts to ease his situation by finding himself an inheritor, one obstacle after another thwarts his plans; the tension merely increases as God rejects Abraham’s choices. Only through faith in God, Abraham ultimately perceives, will the covenant be fulfilled, writes Larry Helyer in “Abraham’s Eight Crises—The Bumpy Road to Fulfilling God’s Promise of an […]