First Glance
Even if philistines fill the streets, you can no longer meet any real Philistines. But you can meet the living namesakes of another biblically based catchphrase: the Samaritans. Although immortalized by the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), the Samaritans survive only in two small communities, in Nablus, on the West Bank, and Holon, in Israel, with a total population of less than 600. The longevity of this sect is more than matched by the purported age of their most important religious document, a Torah scroll said to have been written by Abisha, the great-grandson of Moses’ brother, Aaron. This claim comes not from some wild-eyed supporter, but from the scroll itself, which contains a cryptogram describing the scroll’s authorship. In “The Abisha Scroll—3,000 Years Old?” Alan D. Crown examines the origins and significance of this scroll and places it alongside the Septuagint and the Masoretic text as an important variant text of the Pentateuch.
Crown heads the department of Semitic Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He also serves on the Advisory Council of the World Union of Jewish Studies, on the board of the Australian Institute for Holocaust Studies and as vice president of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies. A well-traveled guest lecturer, Crown gave a seminar on Samaritan codicology at the Smithsonian Institute Libraries in 1986 and organized the Congress of Samaritan Studies at Oxford in 1990. Crown has recently received a grant for a critical edition of the Samaritan pentateuch.
While Crown focuses on the scroll behind the people, Reinhard Pummer introduces us to the people behind the scroll. In “The Samaritans—A Jewish Offshoot or a Pagan Cult?” he conducts an illustrated tour of Samaritan life, taking us into their homes, into their synagogue and on their holy mountain, Mt. Gerizim, to observe their sacred pilgrimage. Although the Samaritans exhibit a Muslim influence in some details of their culture, Pummer finds the Samaritan religion to be largely Jewish in nature.
Pummer received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. Since 1967 he has taught world religions at the University of Ottowa, Canada. Pummer is the author of Samaritans (Leiden: Brill, 1987) and of an impressive number of articles and reviews on various Samaritan topics. He is now at work on the forthcoming A Companion to Samaritan Studies (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr), which he will co-edit with Crown and A. Tal. Pummer enjoys photography as a hobby, and several of his photos illustrate his and Crown’s articles in this issue.
Just because the Bible is a serious book doesn’t mean you cannot approach it with humor. That, at least, is the attitude of a handful of cartoonists who regularly turn to the Good Book for inspiration—not of the spiritual variety but creative inspiration with which to fill their comic strips. Several well-known strips—“Frank and Ernest,” “Peanuts” and “Dennis the Menace” among them—often cast a lighthearted glance at Scripture. Leonard Greenspoon surveys the comic canon in “The Bible and the Funny Papers,” and shows that besides providing a hearty chuckle or two, cartoons reveal which biblical topics are best known by the general public and how those topics reflect contemporary concerns.
Professor of religion at Clemson University, Greenspoon cannot remember when he wasn’t collecting something. His collection of cartoons, stuffed into manila envelopes in a desk drawer, must compete for space with stamps and coins. When not pursuing his interest in the Bible and popular culture, Greenspoon concentrates on his work on the Septuagint and on Bible translations. His “Mission to Alexandria: Truth and Legend About the Creation of the Septuagint, the First Bible Translation,” appeared in the August 1989 BR.
Moving away from the light side, there was nothing humorous about readers’ reactions to J. Edward Barrett’s “Can Scholars Take the Virgin Birth Seriously?” BR 04:05. The avalanche of letters that followed was the most ever generated in response to an article in these pages, and, of the 27 we subsequently printed, only two saw any merit whatsoever in Barrett’s viewpoint. That disparity has prompted James E. Crouch to take a new look at the entire topic. In “How Early Christians Viewed the Birth of Jesus,” Crouch finds that various understandings of Jesus’ birth were current in the early Church. At one time, for example, the pre-existence of Christ, rather than the mode of his birth, was considered by many Christians to be the crucial hallmark of their faith. Handling theological issues and literary concerns with equal aplomb, Crouch also details the ways in which the infancy narratives in the Gospels echo birth stories in the Hebrew Bible.
Crouch, an ordained minister, has taught New Testament studies at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan, Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, and Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma. He received his doctorate in theology at Eberhard-Karls-Universitat in Tübingen, Germany and has published articles in academic journals in Japan and Germany.