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Archive for the ‘Second Temple’ Category


The Things that Make for Peace

In Gospels, Jesse Nickel, Kendall A. Davis, Second Temple, Violence on March 13, 2024 at 8:29 pm

2024.03.02 | Jesse P. Nickel. The Things that Make for Peace: Jesus and Eschatological Violence. BZNW 244. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021.

Review by Kendall A. Davis, University of Edinburgh.

In this revision of his PhD thesis, Jesse Nickel seeks to answer the following question: “how does understanding eschatology and violence together … enable us to make better sense of the presence and/or absence of violence in Jesus’ life and ministry?” (p. 3). In particular, Nickel seeks to refute what he calls the “seditious Jesus hypothesis” (SJH), the idea that the historical Jesus was really a violent revolutionary and that Jesus’ rejections of violence are later additions to the Jesus tradition. Scholars who hold to the SJH, according to Nickel, include S. G. F. Brandon, Dale Martin, and Fernando Bermejo-Rubio. Nickel argues that such perspectives fail in large part because they misunderstand Jewish eschatology. In particular, they assume that eschatology is “other-worldly” and therefore “irrelevant to ‘this-worldly’ matters” (p. 5). By contrast, Nickel argues that “certain elements of Jewish eschatology … inherently involved violence; and that such expectations played a motivational role in the revolutionary violence that was frequent during the Second Temple period” (p. 7). Nickel calls such violence “eschatological violence” and argues that Jesus’ “nonviolence” should be understood as a rejection of this pervasive concept of eschatological violence. 

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The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity

In Canon, Eva MROCZEK, Hebrew Bible, Oxford University Press, Scribal culture, Second Temple, Shelby Bennet on December 11, 2019 at 11:56 pm

9780190279837

2019.12.17 | Eva Mroczek. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. pp xi+269. ISBN: 9780190886080.

Review by Shelby Bennett, Trinity Western University.

Eva Mroczek makes a powerful contribution to re-thinking a central concept in Judaism and Christianity: “canon.” She explores and challenges the role and purpose of those who composed sacred texts that fall both inside and outside the covers of modern biblical collections. The book places the reader in the Second Temple period’s literary culture and illuminates a world teeming with scripture, but without a Bible.

The first chapter introduces a dominant theme of the book: the impact of a post-printing press “book” culture on our understanding of the Jewish literary culture that produced the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible. Mroczek argues that anachronistic concepts of canon and “book” still shape biblical scholarship today despite awareness of the issue. Read the rest of this entry »


The Jewish Literary Imagination in Antiquity

In Book of Psalms, Eva MROCZEK, Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah Coogan, Oxford University Press, review, Scribal culture, Second Temple, Uncategorized on November 9, 2017 at 8:04 am

Mrocz mare

2017.11.23 | Eva Mroczek, The Jewish Literary Imagination in Antiquity. New York, NY/Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780190279837

Reviewed by Jeremiah Coogan, University of Notre Dame.

Before the categories of “book” and “Bible” dominated the literary imagination, Mroczek asks, “What did this literary world seem like to Second Temple writers?” (4). How did the creators and users of literary artifacts organize and conceptualize writing? We note that this literary world of Second Temple Judaism is explicitly textual; Mroczek avoids the temptation to see orality as the only alternative to our familiar models of textuality: she explores literary modes that are “deeply, self-consciously textual, but shaped differently from our own” (5). Read the rest of this entry »


Contours in the Text

In Bloomsbury, Garrick V. Allen, Hebrew Bible, Jonathan D. H. NORTON, Josephus, Manuscripts, New Testament, Paul, Qumran, Romans, Scribal habits, Scripture, Second Temple, Septuagint, Textual Criticism on December 19, 2013 at 9:01 am

CIT

2013.12.23 | Jonathan D. H. Norton. Contours in the Text: Textual Variation in the Writings of Paul, Josephus and the Yahad. Library of New Testament Studies 430; London: T&T Clark, 2011. xiii + 210 pages (PB). ISBN 9780567521996.

Review by Garrick V. Allen, University of St Andrews.

Many thanks to Bloomsbury for providing a review copy.

facebook.com/RBECS.org

In this volume, Norton explores Paul’s reuse and awareness of multiple antecedent scriptural traditions in the textually pluriform environment of first century Palestine. His approach blends text-critical acumen and an awareness of exegetical issues in the contemporary discussion. His study “questions Paul’s awareness and encounter with textual plurality in Jewish scripture” (p. 1). Read the rest of this entry »