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These five essays deal with the influence of Judaic haggadah or lore, especially in the form of “creative historiography” or “imaginative dramatization,” on four enigmatic passages in the Gospels, and one in Acts. They point to their deeper theological truths and negate the alternatives of true or false, historical or non-historical, usually applied to the narratives.
This study uses early Jewish sources to analyze the significance of Day of Atonement and High Priest imagery in the narrative of Simon Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus. It then describes the influence of other early Jewish sources on Jesus’ commissioning his main disciple Simon Peter as his own successor in John 21:15-19. Aus relates this event to Moses’ commissioning his main disciple Joshua as his successor.
For many, the Middle Ages in general evokes a sense of the sinister and brings to mind a world of fear, superstition, and religious fanaticism. For Jews it was a period marked by persecutions, pogroms, and expulsions. Yet at the same time, the Middle Ages was also a time of lively cultural exchange and heightened creativity for Jews. In The Jewish Middle Ages, contributors explore the ways in which the stories of biblical women, including, Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Zipporah, Ruth, Esther, and Judith, make their way into the rich tapestry of medieval Jewish literature, mystical texts, and art, particularly in works emanating from Ashkenazic circles. Contributors include Carol Bakhos, Judith R. Baskin, Elisheva Baumgarten, Dagmar Börner-Klein, Constanza Cordoni, Rachel Elior, Meret Gutmann-Grün, Robert A. Harris, Yuval Katz-Wilfing, Sheila Tuller Keiter, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Gerhard Langer, Aurora Salvatierra Ossorio, and Felicia Waldman. These essays give us a glimpse into the role women played and the authority they assumed in medieval Jewish culture beyond the rabbinic centers of Palestine and Babylonia.
How could the Apostle Paul maintain in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth that all their ancestors were baptized into Moses at the Red Sea / exodus event (10:2), and how could he tolerate some of them having themselves baptized again on behalf of the dead (15:29)? Answers to these puzzling questions can be found in early Jewish sources now located both in Greek and Hebrew, all here translated.
This Festschrift honours Günter Stemberger on the occasion of his 75th birthday on 7 December 2015 and contains 41 articles from colleagues and students. The studies focus on a variety of subjects pertaining to the history, religion and culture of Judaism – and, to a lesser extent, of Christianity – from late antiquity and the Middle Ages to the modern era.
Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic religions, is one of the pillars of modern civilization. A collective of internationally renowned experts cooperated in a singular academic enterprise to portray Judaism from its transformation as a Temple cult to its broad contemporary varieties. In three volumes the long-running book series "Die Religionen der Menschheit" (Religions of Humanity) presents for the first time a complete and compelling view on Jewish life now and then - a fascinating portrait of the Jewish people with its ability to adapt itself to most different cultural settings, always maintaining its strong and unique identity. Volume II presents Jewish literature and thinking: the Jewish Bible; Hellenistic, Tannaitic, Amoraic and Gaonic literature to medieval and modern genres. Chapters on mysticism, Piyyut, Liturgy and Prayer complete the volume.
The rabbis of late antiquity produced a score of exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures of Ancient Israel («the Old Testament»), in which they took various approaches to the study and interpretation of what they called «the written Torah». These exegesis, called collectively «Midrash», form an important part of «the oral Torah», that is, the tradition of Sinai formulated and transmitted for memorization and ultimately written down by the ancient sages in the first six centuries A.D. These three volumes present large selections of the Midrash-documents of ancient Judaism, in the translation of Jacob Neusner, who has now translated into English nearly all of the Rabbinic literature of late antiquity. The selections are organized by type, so that readers see the various ways in which, in form and in intellectual program, the documents of Midrash-compilation were formulated and set forth. In this way, the vast body of biblical exegesis put forth by Judaism in its formative age is made available to the contemporary reader.
Writing with Scripture, the ancient sages of Judaism made use of Scripture by making Scripture their own, and making themselves into the possession and instrument of Scripture as well, a reciprocal process in which both were changed, each transformed into the likeness and image of the other. This they did by effecting their own selections, shaping a distinctive idiom of discourse, all the while citing, responding to, reflecting upon, Scripture's own words in Scripture's own context and for Scripture's own purpose: the here and now of eternal truth. And the rabbis of the first six centuries A.D. through the compilation presented here not only wrote with Scripture, but set forth a statement th...
A widespread early Palestinian Jewish saying was 'As the first redeemer of Israel, so the last redeemer of Israel': as Moses, so the Messiah. This was the major reason why the death, burial, and translation of Moses to heaven in primarily Palestinian early Jewish tradition greatly influenced the descriptions of numerous accounts in the Gospels. The most significant examples of this are Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea in Mark 15:42-46, and the narrative of the empty tomb in 16:1-8. Striking new insights into the background and significance of these episodes are gained here through an analysis of early Jewish materials.