Recent

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        Emeritus Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature at the U of Nottingham, Casey stresses the need to see Jesus against the background of first century Judaism, to see the historical Jesus as Jewish.  Further for Casey, the reconstruction of the Aramaic sources of the synoptic gospels is an essential step in understanding Jesus against the background of his own culture.

        (While Casey carefully points out implications for exegesis of an Aramaic background, he does not do so in a way that negates the value of the exercise for a lay reader who does not have fluency in Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic.)

        Of special interest is the framework of Jewish apocalyptic (cf Albert Schweitzer).  Casey sketches the quest for the historical Jesus, from Schweitzer to Crossan, looking at the contribution of form criticism, and Jewish NT experts such as Vermes, Meier and Sanders; he has some cutting remarks about the Jesus seminar (p 20).  He comments that the oldest documents are the synoptic gospels (at least Mark and Q) but apocryphal gospels also need consideration (and Casey’s Appendix includes them—eg Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Thomas).

        Key for Casey in terms of understanding Jesus is to attempt to develop the Aramaic backgrounds of the synoptics, and he has a fascinating chapter on key Aramaic quotations in the gospels (p 108) (Mk 5:41, Jn 4:5; Lk 11:42,13:31).  Casey also emphasizes the rivalry between Galilee and Judea and has a fascinating chapter on Christological terms (eg ‘Son of Man’, ‘Son of G-d’, p 353 -399). 

        Casey provides us with careful exegetical treatment of the Jesus story, with special emphasis on the Aramaic cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        It’s an older book but of current relevance.  It is a contextual picture of Jesus, understood in the context of Judaism and the local, social and political history of his time.  The Historical Jesus details the sources for our knowledge about Jesus, and explores the historical and social context of Jesus and his activity.  It’s a book that not only summarizes the ways in which Jesus is studied, but the results of that study and the process by which a fuller picture of Jesus emerges. 

        At 642 pages it’s a large volume that contains not only study of the Christian canon but of the apocryphal gospels and other relevant material.  The book is wondrously inclusive and dialogical, giving key components of the biblical material.  Eg geographical and social framework (Galilee), the activities and preaching of Jesus (including a section on the women around Jesus), concept of the Kingdom of G-d, Jesus’ miracles and parables, Jesus’ ethics, the Passover, the risen Jesus and the beginnings of Christology.

        A key section deals with the Last Supper—was it a Passover meal?  The book grapples with key issues of exegesis and history, but in a way that looks at the major issues, not at arcane concepts of interpretation.

        A treatment that both summarizes the theological continuum of issues and  details the exegetical faithfulness to the text.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        The victims of war are not only the soldiers, but women, children and the elderly, and the biblical record invites us to contemplate how violence affects the weakest members of society, and even the enemy.  It would have been significant if the Hebrew bible would have included descriptions of how Yahweh’s holy wars might have felt for a Philistine child.

        But violence was part of daily life in the first century.  The idea that Jews in Jesus’ day were primarily concerned with matters of dogmatic theology does not reflect cultural reality.  The pressing needs of most Jews of the period had to do with liberation from oppression, from debt, from Rome.

        Between Herod’s death and the first destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, Israel ‘was convulsed by repeated religious revolts, by violent messianic movements, political assassinations, insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare’ (p 23).  The options tempting a poor but religiously devout Palestinian young man in the West Bank or Gaza Strip were the realities that confronted Jesus, a young Jewish carpenter.  The gospels suggest that Jesus was repeatedly tempted to embrace the agendas and tactics of several competing theological-political movements.

        The political significance of Jesus’ kingdom and values emerge in sharp relief from the Jewish options of Herodians and Sadducees, sectarian withdrawal (Essenes), political activists (Pharisees), zealots (violent revolution) (p 23-29).

        Jesus called not for a ‘spiritual kingdom somewhere up in the sky’ but on  earth, a new community centred on economic justice (the Jubilee year), equality of all within the community, non-violent enemy love: a fifth way of reflecting G-d’s options in society.  Osborne opts for an anarchy that refuses to maximize the state’s primacy; ‘we must restore the image of G-d in man by defending human life and continue to pray’ (p 155).

        A powerful treatment of the Jesus-way, drawing on the life stories of Garrison, Bonhoeffer and Ellen White as models.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        We sometimes imagine the New Testament milieu consisting of contented farmers and jolly fishing families who gave up a few hours of words to hear the message of a religious teacher speaking about the deeper meanings of life.  It is more accurate to say that ‘desperation, deprivation and resentment characterized the lives of most people in Galilee and Judea’ (p 24).

        Hunger was prevalent in first century Palestine. King points out that the parables are grounded in socio-economic, spiritual and political realities that challenged the status quo and confronted the powers, principalities and system.  ‘It was dangerous for Jesus to talk about the kingdom of G-d in a land ruled by an emperor who commanded legions of troops.  It would have been a safer option to speak about the family of G-d or the age of the Spirit’ (p 6).

        Most of the people who heard his stories lived on the margins, contending with hunger, poverty and a growing sense of resistance to the Kingdom of Rome and its religious puppets.

        Jesus used parables, King reminds us, to cast the vision of an alternative kingdom which offered personal and social transformation.  ‘The parables critiqued the social conditions of first-century Galilee and Judea.  G-d was not content with the economic inequities that left Lazarus dying outside the gate of a rich man.  Nor was G-d content that rich men enjoyed dinner parties while the poor and physically challenged suffered from hunger. Nor did he look favourably on the occasion in which men abandoned the righteous cause of a marginalized woman.

        Jesus the story teller had a restless discontent with the structures and dominant discourse of his time.’ (p 168, 169).  That was then. ‘Today the power of the empire is exercised through finances, technology, resource extraction and regulation of information’ (p 172).

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        Meeks, of the Department of Religious Studies, Yale University, explores a fascinating range of studies embracing social theory, history and literature, from the figure of the androgyn to New Testament pictures of Christianity’s separation from Jewish communities.

       (Androgyn:  myth of a bisexual progenitor of the human race, using metaphors of clothing symbolism, spiritual marriage, even baptism; ‘there is no longer male nor female’ cf. Galatians 3:28.  Androgyny.)

        A major theme dealt with by Meeks is the discussion of roles of women in the Christian congregations.  He lists the women who were leaders and patrons in the early churches, who shared Paul’s struggles.  ‘There are a number of signs that in the Pauline school women enjoyed a functional equality in leadership roles that were unusual in Greco-Roman society as a whole and quite astonishing in comparison with contemporary Judaism’ (p 20).

        The early Paul (eg 1 Cor 12) does not deny women the right to engage in charismatic leadership’ (p 22).  Meeks tellingly points out ‘that the most normal and startlingly ways of talking about Jesus—precisely the language that would lead the church later to define its great, complex creedal formulae about Christ’s divine and human nature and the doctrine of the Trinity—first appears in the records as poetry’ (p xxvii).

        A wonderful treatment of the early church’s beliefs and faith, a faith that will embrace rather than fear a certain kind of skepticism.  ‘Faith can never rest easily with the necessary skepticism of a good historian but the two need not be enemies’ ( 261).

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        Most of us assume that when we read the New Testament we are reading an exact copy of Jesus’ words or St. Paul’s writings.  Yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural, theological and political disputes of their days.  Mistakes and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making the original words difficult to reconstruct.

        Ehrman reveals when and why these changes were made.  He had a ‘born again’ experience in high school, and attended Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, concentrating on Greek; the more he studied Greek the more he became interested in the manuscripts that preserve the New Testament for us.

        Studies took him to Princeton, where studies in Mark suggested that there were mistakes (eg a mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds; was Jesus crucified on the day after the Passover or on the day before?).  To hold to the theory of scriptural inerrancy when a study of the manuscripts showed ‘mistakes’ was proving impossible; most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant.

        Ehrman is interested in seeing how we got our New Testament, seeing how the words occasionally get changed and how we might reconstruct what these words really were.  Eg the King James version was not given by G-d but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early seventeenth century who based their rendition of the Trinity (eg 1 John 5:7,8), the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11) and Mark’s conclusion (16:9-19) on faulty Greek texts.

        ‘The scribes tried to understand what the authors wrote while also trying to see how the words of the authors’ texts might have significance for them and how they might help them make sense of their own situations and their own living’ (p 218).

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        Stjerna’s primary goal is to present stories of several women (eight have a chapter to themselves) in varied visible leadership roles in different Reformation contexts (politics, religious matters, households, writing, teaching, hosting, partnering). (One chapter treats Katharine von Bora, Martin Luther’s wife.)

        Second, the women’s lives are interpreted in light of the reformers’ teachings about women’s place in the church and in society.  Stjerna examines whether the Reformation had a distinctive appeal to women, what Protestant women did to bring about religious change, what impact the Reformation had on their lives (and vice versa).  Stjerna sketches the concept of reformation, the different reforming movements and actions (church, theology, religious practises, resulting in the formation of distinct denominational traditions).

        In each of these reformational areas, there was the importance of education, literature and understanding of vocational models (eg the 1530 Augsburg Confession).  The reformation shaped lives in different ways for men from women.  ‘The strongest female protest against the reformation in Germany was from the convents where women were used to expressing themselves on religious matters.  This although the Protestant reformers did champion a woman’s role as wife and mother by closing the convents and they cut off women’s opportunities for expressing their spirituality in an all-female context’ (p 26).

        Gender determined a woman’s ability to respond to the reformers.  The acceptable responses were domestic, personal and familial:  prayer, meditation, teaching the catechism to children, singing or writing hymns.  ‘Gender equality and women’s status was not the ultimate concern of the reformers.  We need to name ‘the ills of sexism and the distortion of power’ (p 222).

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        First-century Palestine was an age awash in political and religious zealotry, of scores of prophets, preachers and would be messiahs bearing messages from G-d.  An age of zealotry, a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty for all Jews.  Zealot talks about a Jewish revolutionary who gathered followers for a messianic movement with the goal of establishing the kingdom of G-d.  And of how his followers reinterpreted Jesus’ mission and identity.

        His followers saw him primarily as a religious reformer; Aslan places Jesus within the social, religious and political context, an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against Rome.

        (We need to remember that the Roman execution of this Galilean by crucifixion saw him not as a cute harmless story teller, but as a seditious threat to the empire.)

        Aslan spells out the role of the temple in Jewish life; it is the centre of commerce for all Judea; it not only houses the sacred writings and scrolls of law but it is the main repository for the legal documents and genealogical records of the Jewish nation.  The Jewish community has only one cultic centre, for all Jews wherever they live in the empire:  the temple.  The temple is a kind of feudal state and its priests a ‘band of lovers of luxury’ (Josephus).

        Aslan sketches the role of temple and of Roman occupation as the continuing pressure on Jewish identity.  His section on Galilee as the home of nationalism (zealotism) gives careful data on Galilean dynamics:  cultural dynamics, the anti Judean and anti Temple that permeated the Galilee, and was part of Jesus’ agenda, an agenda that the writers of the New Testament documents softened or negated.  Jesus was less concerned with the pagan empire occupying Palestine than he was with the Jewish imposters occupying G-d’s temple.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

        Smith’s book is an intriguing extended metaphor, using weaving as a central lens of understanding.  Weaving is an art, an expression of our time, and Smith uses the components of weaving as illustration, as an organizing image in women’s lives:  weaving, loom, warp, weft.  Weaving involves interlocking threads to create joyful instances of textures and colours.  Loom: keep threads in order and under tension.  Warp: binding together differing threads.  Weft:  the most prominent threads.  This is Smith’s extended metaphor for preaching.

        Smith believes there is some ‘qualitative distinctiveness surrounding the preaching of feminist women (p 9); there is a distinctive quality to women’s preaching (p11).  Women use more images and more stories than men do.  ‘The texts women choose are less abstract and more related to everyday life/ (p 12); they are more creative and imaginative in dealing with the text.

        Smith has a good section on authority.  Religious authority has usually referred to ordination, giving them the ‘right’ to speak. ‘Criteria for effective preaching held by many male homileticians appear to be persuasion and the ability to influence the listener.  The criteria for many women preachers appear to be creating the quality of faith connection….  Authority has to do with a quality of content, a mode of communication and an authenticity of message’ (p 46).

        Smith looks at issues of gender.  She looks at issues of gender.  Eg how ‘can a male Jesus of Nazareth be considered a normative model for all humanity/ (p 80).  She suggests key areas for this definition that entail much broader understandings of incarnational theology’s ‘power’ in relations, radical activity of love, Jesus as parable of G-d, concepts of salvation, hermeneutics.

        It’s a book that looks carefully at the possibilities for preaching as shaped by gender and its social implications.  The metaphor of ‘weaving’ may complicate the process.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

        Herzog focuses on the parables from the social/cultural analysis of Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator, whose work with the poor brought new attention to what could help people accept a perspective that would move beyond the immediate poverty and loss of hope.

        Herzog traces carefully the shifting interpretation systems of Jesus ‘the Parabaler’ and presents an interpretational approach that compares it with Freire’s methodology. Jesus and Freire have much in common. They both worked with the poor and oppressed. Both lived in advanced agrarian societies, an imperial or colonial situation. In both Palestine and Brazil religion plays a leading role (religion can both liberate and oppress).

        Jesus used parables shaped by the Torah, spelling out the justice of G-d’s reign. He was shaped by his social location as the son of a village artisan who became an itinerant rabbi, wandering through the client kingdom of Herod Antipas and the Roman administered province of Judea (p 17). The parables give details of everyday life, but they by themselves remain isolated and contentless.

        To understand the parables means one must know what larger work was being accomplished. So the interpreter needs to articulate what social constraint of reality is being presented in the given parable. What do they reveal about the large social, political, cultural and economic systems within which Jesus spoke and the crowd heard? Herzog does this kind of analysis with ten parables. ‘Jesus ministry was concerned with political and economic issues’ (p 264).

        A wonderfully illuminating treatment of Jesus the Parabaler.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.