First Glance

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Featured in Time and Newsweek and on network television, the Jesus Seminar has sought for the past decade to etch out a portrait of the historical Jesus. One of its purported conclusions—that Jesus never uttered the vast majority of sayings attested in the Gospels—has raised storms of bitter controversy. Seminar member Robert J. Miller asks, “Why the Ugly Attacks?,” pointing out that a majority of mainstream scholars have long held that the Gospels are a complex blend of historical memory and literary fiction. Seminar critic Ben Witherington III disagrees; in “Buyer Beware!,” he observes that flaws in the methods by which the seminar determines what Jesus did or did not say have led to an underestimation of the Gospels’ historicity. Miller’s rejoinder, “The Gospel Truth?” challenges us to read the Bible critically—as we would read any other text.

Associate professor of religion and philosophy at Midway College in Kentucky, Miller has been an active member of the Jesus Seminar since 1986. His article “The Gospels that Didn’t Make the Cut” appeared in BR 09:04.

Ben Witherington III, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, in Wilmore, Kentucky, is the author of Women in the Earliest Churches (Cambridge University, 1988). His “Why Not Idol Meat?”—on early Christian attitudes toward dietary prohibitions—was published in BR 10:03.

Acrostics—poems whose verses begin with successive letters of the alphabet—appear in the books of Psalms, Proverbs and Lamentations. But translators, struggling to capture the precise meaning of each word, often ignore acrostics’ overall structure: Contemporary Bible translations rarely indicate that particular passages form acrostics in the original Hebrew. Does the acrostic form in fact contribute meaning that we have lost in translation? Essential meaning—that’s what Harvey Minkoff argues in “As Simple as ABC: What Acrostics in the Bible Demonstrate.”

Fan of karate and sailing, Minkoff is associate professor of linguistics at Hunter College in New York. Guides to writing and language number among his many books. His previous BR articles include “How to Buy a Bible,” BR 08:02.

Woe to you…you brood of vipers!” So Jesus curses the Pharisees in Matthew 23, labeling them hypocrites and even murderers—language that over the centuries has been used to justify the brutality of anti-Semitism. But how can we reconcile the venom of Jesus’ diatribe against the Pharisees with his call for the brotherhood of men? Didn’t Jesus say “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9)? In “Understanding Matthew’s Vitriol,” Anthony J. Saldarini suggests that Matthew (not Jesus) attacks the Pharisees as part of a struggle among late-first-century C.E. Jewish-Christian groups for leadership in the Jewish community—to which Matthew belonged.

Saldarini, a professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College, is the author of Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community (University of Chicago, 1994). He has written numerous articles on Judaism in the Greco-Roman period and is one of BR’s book review editors.

The Old Testament boasts a Book of Judges, but how many of this book’s figures ever spent time in court? In “A Case of Mistaken Identity: The Judges in Judges Don’t Judge,” Ellis Easterly traces the errors in translation that have obscured the true role of Israel’s early military leaders for centuries.

Easterly is assistant professor of religion at Villa Julie College in Stevenson, Maryland. He is also a former pastor and participant in excavations at Timnah and Beersheba.

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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.

Featured in Time and Newsweek and on network television, the Jesus Seminar has sought for the past decade to etch out a portrait of the historical Jesus. One of its purported conclusions—that Jesus never uttered the vast majority of sayings attested in the Gospels—has raised storms of bitter controversy. Seminar member Robert J. Miller asks, “Why the Ugly Attacks?,” pointing out that a majority of mainstream scholars have long held that the Gospels are a complex blend of historical memory and literary fiction. Seminar critic Ben Witherington III disagrees; in “Buyer Beware!,” he observes that flaws in the methods […]