First Glance

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Aside from Jesus himself, no New Testament figure speaks his mind to us as voluminously as Paul. Despite this written record, however, many uncertainties remain regarding Paul’s views on Judaism and the Law. How did Paul and others see the relationship of Christianity to Judaism? What was the place of the Law, for Jews and for gentiles, in Paul’s conception of Christianity? Why do Paul’s views sometimes seem inconsistent? Daniel J. Harrington looks at recent scholarly discussions of these and other questions in “Paul and Judaism: Five Puzzles.”

Harrington is professor of New Testament at Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate in biblical languages from Harvard University in 1970, and he was ordained a priest in 1971. He has been general editor of New Testament Abstracts since 1972 and is a past president of the Catholic Biblical Association. The most recent of his 15 books is Paul on the Mystery of Israel (Liturgical Press, 1992).

For early Christians, the Holy Land was crowded with places intimately linked with the life and work of Jesus and his followers—a geography that fueled their faith and inspired them to pilgrimage and to settle in the most daunting of surroundings. We even have their own words: “As you go out of the wall of Sion, towards the right, below in the valley, are walls, where was the house of Pontius Pilate. Here our Lord was tried before his passion. On the left is the little hill of Golgotha where the Lord was crucified. About a stone’s throw from thence is a vault wherein His body was laid, and rose again on the third day.” So wrote the fourth-century Pilgrim of Bordeaux, recording some of the important sites he had visited in Jerusalem. Robert L. Wilken traces “The Holy Land in Christian Imagination,” and shows how faith and topography became intertwined. More from the Bordeaux Pilgrim’s account, and from the diary of a second traveller to the Holy Land, can be found in the sidebar to the article.

Wilken is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia and a past president of the American Academy of Religion. He is the author, most recently, of The Land Called Holy (Yale Univ. Press, 1992).

Those armchair pilgrims who never left home could travel to Jerusalem through the maps that flourished following the development of the printing press. Early maps, showing more symbols and scenes than actual streets and buildings, evolved into fairly accurate representations of the Jerusalem of the time. In “Fantasy & Reality—Ancient Maps of Jerusalem,” Rehav Rubin examines these two very different ways of looking at one of the most revered spots in the world.

A native of Israel, Rubin is a senior lecturer in the department of geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book, Jerusalem in Maps and Views (in Hebrew), was published in 1986, the same year he traveled to the University of Maryland as a visiting faculty member. In 1992 he received the M. Ish-Shalom Prize from the Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi Institute for his 1990 book (in Hebrew), The Negev as a Settled Land, Urbanization and Settlement in the Desert in the Byzantine Period.

Why is it that, although hundreds of versions of the New Testament exist today, almost all have the same table of contents with the same books in the same order? In “How the Books of the New Testament Were Chosen,” Roy W. Hoover explains the long and arduous process by which 27—in the Western church, at least—out of the many early Christian writings were set apart as sacred.

Hoover, the Weyerhaeuser Professor of Biblical Literature and professor of religion at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, received his Th.D. from Harvard in 1968. He is the coeditor, with Robert W. Funk, of The Five Gospels—The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, the report on the conclusions drawn by the first six years of the Jesus Seminar (forth coming), and is the author of The Gospel of Luke in the Scholar’s Bible series.

Aside from Jesus himself, no New Testament figure speaks his mind to us as voluminously as Paul. Despite this written record, however, many uncertainties remain regarding Paul’s views on Judaism and the Law. How did Paul and others see the relationship of Christianity to Judaism? What was the place of the Law, for Jews and for gentiles, in Paul’s conception of Christianity? Why do Paul’s views sometimes seem inconsistent? Daniel J. Harrington looks at recent scholarly discussions of these and other questions in “Paul and Judaism: Five Puzzles.” Harrington is professor of New Testament at Weston School of Theology […]