The New Testament And Hellenistic Judaism

A substantial portion of the New Testament was either written in the Jewish Diaspora or addressed to members of the Diaspora. This means that Hellenistic Judaism outside of Palestine was to a great extent the matrix from which New Testament thought developed, so that New Testament teachings and presuppositions about the relationship of the followers of Jesus to the "Old Covenant" must be understood in terms of Hellenistic Jewish understandings of that covenant. These papers, which were presented at a conference held at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in 1992, investigate different aspects of the relationship of formative Christianity to its Hellenistic Jewish matrix. Contributors are European scholars, such as the volume editors and Marinus de Jonge, and Americans, including James Charlesworth and Adela Yarbro Collins. Topics include: ownership of the covenant according to the "Epistle of Barnabas; "Alexandrian Jewish religious life as seen in texts prior to Philo; the universality of Torah in Hellenistic Judaism as a preparation for gentile Christianity; the Jewishness of the "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs" and of certain magical texts; the Jewish background of Mark's empty tomb account, Mark's "theios aner" christology, and the New Testament love command; comparisons of Philonic and Pauline biblical exegesis; the role of Hellenistic philosophy in the Corinthian conflict; the influence of passion traditions on Pauline hardship catalogs; and the semiotics of the Adam-Christ typology in Romans. All articles are in English, including one newly translated from German for this edition.

In Christian Origins and Hellenistic Judaism, Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts assemble an international team of scholars whose work has focused on reconstructing the social matrix for earliest Christianity through reference to Hellenistic Judaism and its literary forms. Each essay moves forward the current understanding of how primitive Christianity situated itself in relation to evolving Greco-Roman Jewish culture. Some essays focus on configuring the social context for the origins of the Jesus movement and beyond, while others assess the literary relation between early Christian and Hellenistic Jewish texts.

Like Philo and Josephus, as well as those who earlier produced the Septuagint and the Hellenistic Jewish fragmentary texts, the writers of the New Testament were Jews writing in Greek. They may have been articulating and promoting a particular form of Jewish messianism that eventually became a distinctive form of religious belief, but in the first and early second centuries, those Christ-followers who were writing in various genres operated with many of the same assumptions as their Jewish counterparts in the land of Israel and in other places such as Alexandria and Rome. This collection of essays, spanning the scholarly career of Carl R. Holladay, investigates the Hellenistic Jewish writings in their own contexts and explores how they illuminate the writings of the New Testament. Included are six new essays on such topics as Hellenistic Judaism, the Beatitudes, and Luke-Acts.

This short but highly significant study is the first real sequel to Professor Martin Hengel's classic and monumental work 'Judaism and Hellenism'. It demonstrates from a wealth of evidence, much of it made readily available here for the first time, that in the New Testament period Hellenization was so widespread in Palestine that the usual distinction between Hellenistic Judaism and Palestinian Judaism is not a valid one and that the word Hellenistic and related terms are so vague as to be meaningless. The consequences of this for New Testament study are, of course, considerable.

In this exploration of Jewish wisdom during the Hellenistic period, internationally renowned scholar John J. Collins examines the books of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon, the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides, and the recently discovered Qumran Sapiential A text from the Dead Sea Scrolls - offering one of the first such examinations of this text in print. This commentary is a compelling analysis of these important texts and their continuing traditions.

Did the Bible only take its definitive form after Alexander conquered the Near East, after the Hellenisation of the Samaritans and Jews, and after the founding of the great library of Alexandria? The Bible and Hellenism takes up one of the most pressing and controversial questions of Bible Studies today: the influence of classical literature on the writing and formation of the Bible. Bringing together a wide range of international scholars, The Bible and Hellenism explores the striking parallels between biblical and earlier Greek literature and examines the methodological issues raised by such comparative study. The book argues that the oral traditions of historical memory are not the key factor in the creation of biblical narrative. It demonstrates that Greek texts – from such authors as Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus and Plato – must be considered amongst the most important sources for the Bible.

While the first American edition of this book, published more than a decade ago, was a revised translation of the German book, Einführung in das Neue Testament, this second edition of the first volume of the Introduction to the New Testament is no longer dependent upon a previously published German work. The author hopes that for the student of the New Testament it is a useful introduction into the many complex aspects of the political, cultural, and religious developments that characterized the world in which early Christianity arose and by which the New Testament and other early Christian writings were shaped.

The ancient world believed that the universe was made up of elements both material and spiritual. These elemental forces affected human life positively or negatively and any human being who could share their energy was a person of great significance - a human agent of cosmic power. This is a significant part of the background of the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth. The present work is a reappraisal of Synoptic accounts of Jesus and his followers in the light of recent developments in the study of ancient magic.

This insightful book intends to do away with the traditional strategy of playing Judaism and Hellenism out against one another as a context for understanding Paul. Case studies focus specifically on the Corinthian correspondence.

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