First Glance

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Mentioned only six times in the New Testament, Prisca and Aquila are probably not counted among the better known biblical personages. Nevertheless, they played an important role in preparing the way for the establishment of churches in Rome, Corinth and Ephesus, as Jerome Murphy-O’Connor shows in “Prisca and Aquila—Traveling Tentmakers and Church Builders.&rd Combining the biblical evidence with the historical context provided by ancient writers and archaeology, Murphy-O’Connor manages to reconstruct a remarkably full and coherent biography of the couple.

A Roman Catholic priest of the Dominican Order, Murphy-O’Connor is professor of New Testament and intertestamental literature at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem and a member of BR’s Editorial Advisory Board. His many books include St. Paul’s Corinth (Glazier, 1983) and, most recently, The Holy Land: An Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700 (Oxford Univ. Press, 3rd ed., 1992). O’Connor has previously contributed two other articles to BR: “On the Road and on the Sea with St. Paul,” BR 01:02 and “What Really Happened at the Transfiguration?” BR 03:03.

Stories of Abram at age 14 scaring birds away from the newly sown seed, Abram at 60 burning idols—and not incidentally, his brother Haran, Lot’s father—came to light in 1844 when a German scholar saw a copy of an ancient Ethiopic manuscript and identified it as the lost Book of Jubilees. The discovery of 15 different copies of Jubilees among fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls renewed interest in the book scholars call “The Rewritten Bible.” James C. VanderKam discusses its importance in “Jubilees: How It Rewrote the Bible.”

A member of the official Dead Sea Scroll editing team, VanderKam was assigned the Jubilees fragments previously studied by J. T. Milik. Currently professor of Old Testament at the University of Notre Dame and the chair of the Ancient Manuscripts Committee of the American Schools of Oriental Research, VanderKam is the author of Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (Catholic Biblical Association, 1984) and The Book of Jubilees (Peeters, 1989). Two previous BR articles, “The People of the Scrolls: Essenes or Sadducees?” BR 07:02 and “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Christianity,” BR 07:06 and “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Christianity,” BR 08:01 have been reprinted in Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (Random House, 1992).

This has been a year of summation for the highly respected scholar Frank Moore Cross. Cross retired this spring as Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University. On the occasion of his retirement from active teaching, Cross granted BR a wide-ranging interview in which he shared his sometimes controversial ideas on the route of the Exodus, the emergence of the Israelites and the development of Israelite religion. In this issue we present the third and final installment of “Frank Moore Cross—An Interview.” Cross and BR editor Hershel Shanks discuss one of humankind’s greatest inventions—the alphabet—and how it differed from writing systems such as hieroglyphics and cuneiform that preceded it, when the ancient Greeks first borrowed the Semitic alphabet and the democratizing effect the alphabet had on civilization.

Cross serves on BR’s Editorial Advisory Board and is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Ancient Library at Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies (Baker Book House, rev. ed. 1980) and Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Harvard Univ. Press, 1973).

Our expanded books section and our columnists round out the issue. In Bible Books, read about how Judaism was actually lived in the years just before and just after the turn of the era, how one scholar is trying to retrieve the lost traditions of the matriarchs and how Jewish and Stoic beliefs contributed to the Christian understanding of suffering. As for the columnists, Marcus J. Borg explains his view of “The First Christmas,” while Jacob Milgrom completes his examination of the biblical diet laws with “Food and Faith.”

Mentioned only six times in the New Testament, Prisca and Aquila are probably not counted among the better known biblical personages. Nevertheless, they played an important role in preparing the way for the establishment of churches in Rome, Corinth and Ephesus, as Jerome Murphy-O’Connor shows in “Prisca and Aquila—Traveling Tentmakers and Church Builders.&rd Combining the biblical evidence with the historical context provided by ancient writers and archaeology, Murphy-O’Connor manages to reconstruct a remarkably full and coherent biography of the couple. A Roman Catholic priest of the Dominican Order, Murphy-O’Connor is professor of New Testament and intertestamental literature at the […]