First Glance
Lost sayings of Jesus, rediscovered? It may sound like something out of the vast pseudo-literature of modern apocrypha—hoaxes with titles like The Unknown Life of Christ, the Nazarene Gospel or The Lost Airplane Tickets of Jesus—but this time it may be true! One of the Nag Hammadi codices, a library of ancient writings found in Egypt in 1945, contains a tractate that purports to be a collection of Jesus’ sayings compiled by the apostle Thomas. As Helmut Koester and Stephen J. Patterson show in “The Gospel of Thomas: Does It Contain Authentic Sayings of Jesus?” this collection, once thought to be a late apocryphal work, contains many sayings that appear to be earlier versions of sayings in the canonical Gospels as well as early parables that do not appear in the Gospels.
A leading authority on the history of the first centuries of Christianity, Koester is the John H. Morison Professor of New Testament Studies and the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Harvard University Divinity School. His major contributions have been studies of the Gospels and of other Christian traditions and their developments in the second century A.D., including his two-volume Introduction to the New Testament (Fortress, 1982), comprising History, Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic Age and History and Literature of Early Christianity. He also serves as chairman of the New Testament editorial committee of Hermeneia, the distinguished biblical commentary series, and as editor of Harvard Theological Review.
Patterson, who received his Ph.D. in 1989 from Claremont Graduate School, serves as assistant professor of New Testament at Eden Theological Seminary, in St. Louis, Missouri. His forthcoming book is entitled The Gospel of Thomas and the Jesus Tradition (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press).
Though their story is confined to portions of a mere seven chapters in Genesis, there are few biblical characters more vivid than Leah and Rachel. What reader of the Bible can forget the substitution of Leah for Rachel on Jacob’s wedding night? Who is not familiar with the twelve sons borne by these two matriarchs and their concubines—the twelve sons who were to spawn the twelve tribes of Israel? Yet as familiar as we may think we are with Leah and Rachel, there are many new insights still to be gained into each woman’s personality and into their relationship with Jacob and with each other, as Samuel Dresner convincingly demonstrates in “Rachel and Leah—Sibling Tragedy or the Triumph of Piety and Compassion?” Not content to accept the story as merely one of sibling conflict, Dresner examines each woman’s actions—especially their naming of their children—and mines the rich vein of rabbinic commentary and Christian art devoted to these two pivotal figures.
Dresner received his rabbinic ordination, in 1951, and a doctorate in Hebrew Letters, in 1954, from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he studied under the esteemed Abraham Joshua Heschel. He is currently a visiting professor at the same institution. Dresner has authored or edited 13 books on Jewish thought and practice, including World of a Hasidic Master (Shapolsky, 1986). He is preparing three books for publication: an introduction to Hasidism, a work on Rachel (from which his article has been adapted) and a biography of Heschel.
It had always been considered an intriguing yet baffling aside: In the midst of his farewell address to the Israelites in Deuteronomy, Moses refers to a large iron bed belonging to Og, king of Bashan. What was so special about this bed that it merited inclusion in the Bible? As Alan R. Millard explains in “King Og’s Iron bed—Fact or Fancy?” this was no ordinary piece of furniture. Drawing on his expertise in archaeology and his familiarity with ancient texts, Millard shows that a large royal bed decorated with iron would have been a wondrous object in the Late Bronze Age, fully worthy of mention in an ancient history.
Valuable objects from the past are something of a specialty of Millard’s. He is the author of Treasures from Bible Times (Lion, 1985), which has been translated into eight languages, and Discoveries from the Time of Jesus (lion, 1990). In the May/June 1989 issue of our sister publication, Biblical Archaeology Review, Millard contributed “Does the Bible Exaggerate King Solomon’s Golden Wealth?” BAR 15:03. He last appeared in the pages of BR with “The Question of Israelite literacy,” BR 03:03. Millard is Rankin Reader in Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool, England. He has excavated in Syria (Arpad and Qadesh), Jordan (Petra) and Iraq (Nimrud).
Huldah who? you might ask. Not one of the better known figures in the Bible, Huldah was a prophetess who lived in the time of Josiah, king of Judah (640–609 B.C.). When Hilkiah the high priest found the book of the law (probably Deuteronomy) in the Temple, a distraught Josiah sought to determine whether it contained the authentic word of God. Josiah sent Hilkiah and some other servants to “inquire of the Lord” (in other words, to consult a prophet), and they went to ask Huldah, who confirmed the scroll’s authenticity (2 Kings 22:8–20). But why did Josiah’s representatives consult with Huldah, rather than with the prophets Jeremiah, Zephaniah or Nahum, who also lived nearby? In “A Woman Was the First to Declare Scripture Holy,” William E. Phipps offers a plausible solution to this mystery and examines the effect that Huldah had on the subsequent position of women in the church.
Since 1956, Phipps has been the department chairman and professor of religion and philosophy at Davis and Elkins College, in Elkins, West Virginia. In addition to a Ph.D. in biblical criticism from St. Andrews University in Scotland, he has an extensive background in comparative religion, including study at the Institute in Chinese Civilization, Tunghai University, in Taiwan; at the. University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for African Study; and at an NEH Seminar at Princeton University. Phipps is the author of nine books, four in the last three years, including Paul Against Supernaturalism: The Growth of the Miraculous in the Christian Tradition (Philosophical Library, 1987) and Genesis and Gender: Biblical Myths of Sexuality and their Cultural Impact (Praeger, 1989).