Extracting the historical core of Jesus’ Transfiguration from the three different gospel accounts is the goal Jerome Murphy-O’Connor sets for himself in “What Really Happened at the Transfiguration?” Murphy-O’Connor uses techniques of literary criticism to enter the worlds of the early Christian communities and to reflect upon the traditions they received concerning Jesus. Tracing the development of the Transfiguration tradition, Murphy-O’Connor emphasizes that the motivation of the early Church was to preserve the vitality of tradition, not to record historical events.
Professor of New Testament and intertestamental literature at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, Murphy-O’Connor is the author of St. Paul’s Corinth (1983) and The Holy Land: An Archaeological Guide From Earliest Times to 1700 (1980). A popular author for BR and for our sister publication, Biblical Archaeology Review, he contributed “On the Road and On the Sea With St Paul,”BR 01:02.
The violence and pitiless destruction in some biblical passages create a formidable barrier to many readers’ appreciation of the Bible. In “War, Peace and Justice in Early Israel,”Paul D. Hanson demonstrates that these passages grew out of an “ardent sense of justice” and reflect the cultural heritage of the Israelite struggle for freedom.
Hanson, his wife, and their three children left their home base of Cambridge, Massachusetts, this summer for a hiking vacation in the Rocky Mountains and in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. The Hansons also enjoy playing tennis as a family. At Harvard University, Hanson is Bussey Professor of Divinity and Professor of Old Testatment. He recently published The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible (Harper & Row, 1986).
The extent of literacy in Israel in Bible times has considerable bearing on the credibility of certain biblical passages and on how we moderns view the prophetic books. In “The Question of Israelite Literacy,”Alan R. Millard assembles abundant evidence to show that literacy in ancient Israel was probably much more widespread than scholars have generally supposed.
Author of the popular Treasures From Bible Times, Millard teaches Hebrew, Assyrian and Babylonian, and Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Liverpool in England. He is an experienced archaeologist, with field work at Tell Rifa in Syria, at Petra in Jordan and at Nimrud in Iraq.
A new BR department debuts in this issue. “Bible Lands” will focus on a site, a region, or a prominent geographical feature mentioned in the Old or New Testament, explaining its biblical importance and illustrating—in words and in stunning photographs—its physical features. In this issue, Barry J. Beitzel demystifies the unearthly, forbidding body of water called the Dead Sea.
A geographer and a biblical scholar, Beitzel is the author of The Moody Atlas of Bible Lands and the translations of 1 and 2 Samuel for the New King James Bible. At Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, he serves as associate academic dean, as well as professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages.
Extracting the historical core of Jesus’ Transfiguration from the three different gospel accounts is the goal Jerome Murphy-O’Connor sets for himself in “What Really Happened at the Transfiguration?” Murphy-O’Connor uses techniques of literary criticism to enter the worlds of the early Christian communities and to reflect upon the traditions they received concerning Jesus. Tracing the development of the Transfiguration tradition, Murphy-O’Connor emphasizes that the motivation of the early Church was to preserve the vitality of tradition, not to record historical events. Professor of New Testament and intertestamental literature at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, Murphy-O’Connor is […]
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