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One of the groups identified in the synoptic gospels is the scribes, ‘who work in tandem with the chief priests in command of the Temple, and in turn collaborate with the Roman governors’ (p 9).  Ben Sira, writer of Ecclesiasticus (a deuterocanonical writing), ‘represents scribes as serving the priestly aristocracy yet also as caught in the middle between those  heads of the temple state and the Judean people’ (p 9).

The scribes ‘devoted themselves to intense learning of the spectrum of Judean cultural tradition, including Torah, prophets and wisdom of various kinds (p 11). The temple and the high priesthood were imperial instruments to maintain order and collect revenue in Judea.

‘The subordination of the Judean temple state to imperial rulers (Hellenistic and Roman) set up several major conflicts that involved Judean scribes:  the idea of G-d as the ruler of the Judean people and the reality of imperial role; subjection of the temple-state to imperial rules set up potential conflicts between rival factions (p 14).

Horsley details scribal activity during Greek and Roman occupation and influence, pointing out scribal contributions (Daniel, Psalms of Solomon, Enoch) and their role in the nation.  They did not participate in the civil uprisings; ‘rather than preparing to engage in violent revolt, they were prepared to suffer violent repression, even the torture and death of themselves, relatives and friends… preaching and planning an organized action of nonviolent non-cooperation (p 187).

The lesson of the scribes for us is two-fold:  recognize the pressure we are under to cooperate with the dominant order and to figure out how it might be possible to resist; recognize eschatologically that history is not hopeless, and that far from being destroyed, the earth will be renewed (p 205).  We look for the end of empire, not the end of the world.

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

Raised in Egypt and teaching for forty years in institutes in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus, Bailey has tried to understand the gospels more adequately in the light of Middle Eastern culture.

The written sources he considers are ancient, medieval and modern.  The ancient sources linguistically are Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic.  The early Christian tradition was not only Greek and Latin; Syriac was the third international language of the early church (p 11).  The Arabic Christian tradition became important in the eighth century, and Bailey draws on key Arabic theologians of the middle ages; he focuses on Arabic new testaments; ‘translations are always interpretation and they preserve an understanding of the text that was current in the church that produced them’ (p 13).

Bailey’s essays ‘not only focus on culture but also on rhetoric’ (p 13).  He attempts ‘to identify new perspectives from the Eastern traditions’ (p 21), drawing from the Arabic speaking world.

Bailey does not present an Arabic commentary on the New Testament, but takes key areas of Jesus life and teaching, and illustrates these from Arabic writers from the past, and from Arabic village life today.  So he has sections on ‘the birth of Jesus’, on ‘the Beatitudes’, on ‘the Lord’s Prayer’, on dramatic actions of Jesus (eg the call of Peter, Jesus call to ministry in Luke 4’), on ‘Jesus and women’, on parables (the longest section of the book).

Bailey’s work represents the theological reflection that has influenced the ten million Arabic speaking Christians, and is an attempt to learn more from their heritage about the Galilean carpenter (eg how village life today helps us to understand village life in Jesus’ time).

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

Bauckham presents a telling argument for a paradigm that examines the gospels, a paradigm that does not depend on form criticism analyses but that looks at the gospels as eyewitness accounts conveyed by oral tradition.  ‘Mark’s gospel was written well within the lifetimes of many of the eyewitnesses…’ (p 7).

The period between the ‘historical Jesus’ and the gospels spanned not by anonymous community transmission but by the continuing presence testimony of the eyewitnesses….  In imagining how the traditions reached the Gospel writes, not oral tradition but eyewitness testimony should be our principal model (p 8).

Eyewitness reliability (testimony) provides a more reliable basis for the gospel’s meaning than the skepticism about oral traditions (a la Bart Ehrmann) provides.  ‘The ideal eyewitness (for Greek and Roman historians) was not the dispassionate observer but one who, as a participant, had been closest to the events and whose direct experience enabled him to understand and interpret the significance of what he had seen’ (p 9).  (ie the criterion used in part for canonical decisions made regarding the common scriptures.)

Bauckham details Kenneth Bailey’s category of ‘a formal controlled tradition’ (p 253), where the community exercises control to ensure that the traditions are preserved faithfully (p 255), and looks at the eyewitness accounts by victims of the Holocaust (pp491-499).

The burden of this book is that the category of testimony, eyewitness account, does most justice to the Gospels both as history and as theology, even testimony’s claim to the radical exceptionality of the event.

A fascinating study of the implications of eye witness accounts and oral tradition for understanding the gospels.

How did the early Christian church manage to win its dominant place in the Roman world?  Consensus is that Christianity revitalized life, in response to the misery, chaos, fear and brutality of life, providing new kinds of social relationships (eg Rodney Stark).

MacMullen takes a less kindly tone in attempting to identify reasons for conversion, eg mass ‘conversions’ of Bedouin at a monastic site (p 2-3).  Conversion is the change of belief by which a person accepted the reality and supreme power of G-d and determined to obey him (p 5).  Immersed as we are in the Judaeo-Christian heritage, we hold that religion means doctrine, and that conversion to Christianity involves rational and intellectual criteria.

Roman religion did not share this; it was characterized by undisturbed religious toleration, and worship was basically a self-interested activity to gain favour from powerful beings (p 13).  Christianity demanded a choice.  Jesus was not just a new deity to add to the already crowded pantheon, but the Great G-d, at war against all rivals.  And the teaching was that of monotheism, evidenced by widespread exorcism, showing the superiority of Jesus (cf John 20:30), an exchange of views ‘about wonderful cures wrought by this or that divine power’ (p 40).

MacMullen cites examples of non-religious factors in conversion, eg wealthy church members had strong influence on would be converts (p 54).  ‘Conversion gave to strong pressures that affected the course of the new religion’ (p 85). Emperors and ecclesiastical officials controlled the distribution of material benefits (p 114).  Silencing, burning and destruction were all forms of the church’s demonstration of supremacy; monks and bishops and emperor had driven the enemy from the field’(p 119).

A hard hitting book that avoids some of the sentimentality we attach to the early church.

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

Myers, pastor of a Congregational church in Oklahoma City, has walked with his congregation on a path that looks more to relationships than to creeds as normative for Jesus’ friends.  It is the path that leads away from adoration of the ‘nation state and standing armies, away from closed religious scriptures’ (p 10).

Back to the days of the early church when the call of G-d was experiential, not creedal (‘right belief instead of right worship’, p 10).  He focuses on ‘What does the Bible really say?  What does it mean to say it is inspired by G-d? Why do we believe that G-d’s voice is exclusively in the past tense? (p 19).  He describes religion at its best: ‘biblically responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying and socially significant’ (p 22).  He looks at the way in which the bible has been shaped:  a process of review and selection that condensed an enormous amount of material down to four gospels, a pseudo-history we call the Acts of the Apostles, and the letters that complete the New Testament’ (p 24).

Myers does several chapters on emphasizing the relational dimensions of the drop-out carpenter:  ‘Original blessing, not Original Sin’, ‘Christianity as Compassion, not Condemnation’, ‘Discipleship as obedience, not Observance’, ‘Justice as Covenant, not Control’, ‘Prosperity as Dangerous, not Divine’; ‘Religion as Relationship, not Righteousness’.

Myers expresses powerfully his conviction that following Jesus in social compassion is what we do, not in what we creedally subscribe to. ‘The most important question is not about what we believe; it is about how we relate’ (p 223).

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

I know it’s an old book, but after I reread it after many years I realized how insightful Malherbe had been in focusing differently on the biblical writings.

One of the major changes in the biblical landscape has been the interest in religious studies in universities and colleges not affiliated with ecclesial bodies; ‘the perspective from which early Christianity is studied is no longer that of the church’ (p 3).

Malherbe widens the interpretation of early Christian literate and the communities with which the writings are associated.  ‘It is at least possible that some documents were rescued from obscurity not because they represented the viewpoints of communities but precisely because they challenged them.  It is too facile to view literature as the simple product of communities; (p 13).  And the New Testament deals with concrete situations and should be understood in relation to these precise situations.  Any sustained attempt at homogenization will lead to imprecision’ (p 17).

Malherbe cites writers whose emphases have been on the historical/cultural background of the material.  Where church history tended to emphasize doctrinal development, he (and others like Wayne Meeks and Gerd Theissen) worked at sociological analysis, and characterization of belief and ethics seen from the reactions of the biblical letters.

Social Aspects probes church history with analysis of literary scope, house churches and hospitality (with particular reference to 3 John).

Of sharp interest to me was his treatment of thiasos, ‘guild’ or ‘association’, which was one of the names given to the early Christian bodies (pp 88-91).

A good read, again and still! And a helpful hermeneutic.

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

A fascinating summary of the first four generations of storytellers who created the New Testament and Christian faith, the story of the origins and developments of the Christian movement as told by the people who lived it.  White deals with the story as reflecting four generations (a generation is about forty years).

The first generation runs from the death of Jesus to the end of the first Jewish revolt against Rome (70 CE); the second generation runs from 70-110 CE and deals with the changes that took place within the Jewish movement; tensions between the Jesus sect and other Jews begin to emerge; the third generation (110-150) shows the movement breaking away from its Jewish roots and becoming a separate institution; issues of church leadership, relation to the Roman state and regional diversity make up this period; the fourth generation (150-190) sees the Christian movement coming of age socially and intellectually.

This is the generation that sees the first efforts to shape the New Testament canon.  ‘The New Testament is the source for much of our understanding of the development of early Christianity, but it is also a product of the development.’

White writes a fascinating story of that dialogue, probing the implications of the oral traditions that shaped the written form (p 118).  One example:  Paul’s account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:23-26); the account of the Lord’s Supper is about 30 CE, Paul’s letter is about 53 CE, the written form (the gospels) are 70 CE (or later).  Of real value is White’s summary of non-canonical writings that shaped the developing theology of the community of faith (eg 1st Enoch, Gnostic writings, Acts of Paul and Thecla).

A superb read of the origins of our canon and our faith.

‘The Bible is necessarily misunderstood if one’s reading of it is not grounded in an appreciation of the social system from which its documents arose’ (p 5).  This is the basic orientation of Malina’s discussion of the New Testament documents, as he examines cultural anthropological dimensions and backgrounds.

Malina identifies the social institutions comprising the biblical story:  kinship, politics, religion and economics (of which only kinship and politics were of explicit focal concern’ (p 5). Biblical authors never spoke of economics simply…the vocabulary of the various ideologies expressed in the bible worked within kinship and politics.  ‘Religion is to be understood through belonging and power (not reasoned influence).  Economics is meaningless unless convertible into honour, and thus has no focus in and of itself’ (p 17).

The two major Mediterranean social institutions were kinship and politics; patronage marked the relationships within these.  Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of G-d challenges these institutions and their embodiment in Roman structures.  For the Kingdom of G-d to make sense to Israelites living in Galilee and Judea, it would have to speak to what was wrong:  ‘the Roman political economy and its appropriation by the local Israelite aristocracy.  This is  the role that the G-d of Israel would play on behalf of his people: not that of monarch but of ‘Father’ (p 84).  ‘The kingdom of G-d was to take the form of personal and representative theocracy’ (p 161).

A good treatment of the interplay of social structures in Jesus’s proclamation.

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