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Roman Judaea, Christian origins, and Roman-Judaean-Christian relations are flourishing fields of endless fascination. Amid the flurry of new research, however, which uses ever new methods in the humanities and social sciences, basic questions about what happened and how people then understood events are easily obscured. This book argues that a simple but consistent historical method can throw new light – and challenge entrenched views – on such familiar topics as Roman provincial governance, the Jewish War, Flavian politics, Judaea after King Herod, Jewish and Christian historiography, Pharisees and Essenes, John the Baptist, the apostle Paul, and Luke-Acts.
In Synagogues in the Works of Flavius Josephus, Andrew Krause analyses the place of the synagogue within the cultural and spatial rhetoric of Flavius Josephus. Engaging with both rhetorical critical methods and critical spatial theories, Krause argues that in his later writings Josephus portrays the Jewish institutions as an important aspect of the post-Temple, pan-diasporic Judaism that he creates. Specifically, Josephus consistently treats the synagogue as a supra-local rallying point for the Jews throughout the world, in which the Jewish customs and Law may be practiced and disseminated following the loss of the Temple and the Land. Conversely, in his earliest extant work, Bellum judaicum, Josephus portrays synagogues as local temples in order to condemn the Jewish insurgents who violated them.
The study of 1st century CE Galilee has become an important subfield within the broader disciplines of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. In Mapping Galilee, John M. Vonder Bruegge examines how Galilee is portrayed, both in ancient writings and current scholarship, as a variously mapped space using insights from critical geography as an evaluative lens. Conventional approaches to Galilee treat it as a static backdrop for a deliberate and dynamic historical drama. By reasserting geography as a creative process rather than a passive description, Vonder Bruegge also reasserts ancient Galilee as an interpreted space—a series of conceptualized "maps"—laden with meaning, significance, and purpose for each individual author.
This selection of essays by Luther Martin brings together studies from throughout his career—both early as well as more recent—in the various areas of Graeco-Roman religions, including mystery cults, Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism. It is hoped that these studies, which represent spatial, communal, and cognitive approaches to the study of ancient religions might be of interest to those concerned with the structures and dynamics of religions past in general, as well as to scholars who might, with more recent historical research, confirm, evaluate, extend, or refute the hypotheses offered here, for that is the way scholars work and by which scholarship proceeds.
How early Christian gospels were written is an old question that continues to engage scholars. Moving beyond the traditional approach of reading Luke as a "gentile" gospel composed primarily using Greco-Roman methods of history and biography writing, this book argues that Luke’s use of the earlier Gospel of Mark should be understood in the context of contemporaneous early Jewish writings known as "Rewritten Scripture." Texts like the Book of Jubilees and Josephus’s Antiquities interpret Scripture by rewriting it in such a way that ambiguities and contradictions are diminished, while also adapting it to contemporary beliefs and practices. A similar strategy of interpretation through rewri...
Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark, 2005.
The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history. Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conqu...
John the Baptist as a Rewritten Figure in Luke-Acts compares the Gospel of Luke’s account of John’s ministry with those of Matthew, Mark, and John to make the case for the hypertextual relationship between the synoptic gospels. The book is divided into three parts. Part I situates the Gospel of Luke within the broader context of biblical rewritings and makes the general case that a rewriting strategy can be detected in Luke, while Parts II and III combined offer a more detailed and specific argument for Luke’s refiguring of the public ministry of John the Baptist through the use of omitted, new, adapted, and reserved material. While the "two source hypothesis" typically presupposes the...
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This book discusses the Herod narratives of Josephus in the light of narratology and rhetoric. It offers an innovative interpretation of the rhetorical and dramatic makeup of the parallel accounts of Herod's history and suggests new ways of understanding Josephus' complexity as a historian between two cultures.