Author: John Dominic Crossan
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2008-03-01
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1725221845
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →John Dominic Crossan's In Parables demonstrated how Jesus's parables demolished an idolatry of time. In this book, he shows how the parables likewise preclude an idolatry of language. In a new, creative synthesis, Raid on the Articulate juxtaposes the sayings and parables of Jesus with the works of modern Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to reveal fresh interpretations. Crossan locates both men as literary iconoclasts, parablers who can evoke for us the other side of silence. The gift they bring is "cosmic eschatology," the ability to "stand on the brink of nonsense and absurdity and not be dizzy." The discussion begins with Comedy and Transcendence, "a comedy too deep for laughter." Language is seen most openly and acknowledged most freely as structured play, opening the narrow gate to transcendence. This precludes language being mistaken for the gate itself. This in turn raises the question of Form and Parody. As Crossan writes, "Why mock the craftsman skilled in silver and gold and not mock the artisan skilled in form and genre? What if the aniconic God became trapped in icons made of language?" In Jesus we find the most magisterial warning against graven words and encapsulation of God in case law, proverb, or beatitude. When Jesus says, "Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it" he presents a paradox insoluble by faith in language. Borges performs a similar function in literature when he inserts footnotes referring to nonexistent books. Both are arguing against the idolatry of imprisoning reality in the words that point to it. Parable and Paradox makes the case for parable as paradox formed into story. It is in this context that Jesus and Borges must be understood. Analyzing many of Jesus's parables, especially "The Good Samaritan," and comparing them structurally to Borges's work, Crossan sees them as single or double reversals of their audiences" most profound expectations. It is these that lend them both their power and their paradox. Raid on the Articulate concludes with considerations of the plasticity of time in Jesus and Borges and what, finally, we can say about them as men from their "fragile and aphoristic art." Emphasizing both biblical and literary materials, John Dominic Crossan achieves a deepened understanding of New Testament texts and forms, an understanding possible only when the unique literary aspect of Jesus's sayings is acknowledged.
Author: Tania Oldenhage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-04-10
Total Pages: 365
ISBN-13: 0190287802
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Over the centuries, New Testament texts have often been read in ways that reflect and encourage anti-Semitism. For example, the parable of the "wicked husbandmen," who kill the son of their landlord in order to seize the land, has been used to blame the Jews for the death of Christ. Since the Holocaust, Christian scholars have increasingly recognized and rejected this inheritance. In Parables for Our Time Tania Oldenhage seeks to fashion a biblical hermeneutics that consciously works with memories of the Holocaust. New Testament scholars have not directly confronted the horror of Nazi crimes, Oldenhage argues, but their work has nonetheless been deeply affected by the events of the Holocaust. By placing twentieth-century biblical scholarship within its specific historical and cultural contexts, she is able to trace the process by which the Holocaust gradually moved into the collective consciousness of New Testament scholars, both in Germany and in the United States. Her focus is on the scholarly interpretation of the parables of Jesus. She sets the stage with the work of Wolfgang Harnisch who exemplifies the problems surrounding Holocaust remembrance in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s. She then turns to Joachim Jeremias's eminent work on the parables, first published in 1947. Jeremias's anti-Jewish rhetoric, she argues, should be understood not only as a perpetuation of an age-old interpretive pattern, but as representative of German difficulties in responding to the Holocaust immediately after the war. Oldenhage goes on to explore the way in which Jeremias's approach was challenged by biblical scholars in the U.S. during the 1970s. In particular, she examines the turn to literature and literary theory exemplified in the works of John Dominic Crossan and Paul Ricoeur. Nazi atrocities became part of the cultural reservoir from which Crossan and Ricoeur drew, she shows, although they never engaged with the historical facts of the Holocaust. In conclusion, Oldenhage offers her own reading of the parable of the wicked husbandmen, demonstrating how the turn from historical to literary criticism opens up the text to interpretation in light of the Holocaust. If the parables are to be meaningful in our time, she contends, we must take account of the troubling resonances between these ancient Christian stories and the atrocities of Auschwitz.
Author: Gregory A. Boyd
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2010-10-01
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 160899953X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Not since David Strauss' Life of Jesus shook European Christianity to its foundations in the nineteenth century has any scholarly discussion of the historical Jesus made the impact on a popular level that the Jesus Seminar is presently making in America. Popular magazines have provided a remarkable amount of space for the Jesus Seminar, including Time and Newsweek which made their work cover stories. At the forefront of the movement lies the work of John Dominic Crossan and Burton L. Mack, who have popularized the Jesus as Cynic sage view. The growing popularity of this new paradigm should be of significant concern for all who hold to the historic Christian faith. To date, however, no thorough evangelical response has been provided to these revisionist views of the historical Jesus. This book is written to fill this void. It provides a serious critique of the Cynic thesis, accessible to laypeople and of interest to thoughtful observers. With interest in the quest for the historical Jesus continuing anew, Boyd's Cynic Sage or Son of God? provides an orthodox defense of the biblical Jesus.
Author: Robert B. Stewart
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780800637859
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Two of today's most important and popular New Testament scholars, John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright, here air their very different understandings of the historical reality and theological meaning of Jesus' Resurrection. The book highlights points of agreement and disagreement between them and explores the many attendant issues.This book brings two leading lights in Jesus studies together for a long-overdue conversation with one another and with significant scholars from other disciplines.
Author: Richard Robert Osmer
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: 1992-01-01
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780664252175
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This useful, theologically informed guide "prepares the soil" for teachers in the church, whose purpose is to awaken, support, and challenge faith. Richard Osmer offers practical suggestions for preparing good lectures and leading lively discussions. He explores four important dimensions of faithfaith as belief, as commitment, as relationship, and as mysteryand describes different teaching approaches that can address each of these dimensions. Osmer demonstrates that teaching is a crucial task in the church today.
Author: Anthony C. Thiselton
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Published: 2009-10-09
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 1467433950
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Anthony Thiselton here brings together his encyclopedic knowledge of hermeneutics and his nearly four decades of teaching on the subject to provide a splendid interdisciplinary textbook. After a thorough historical overview of hermeneutics, Thiselton moves into modern times with extensive analysis of scholarship from the mid-twentieth century, including liberation and feminist theologies, reader-response and reception theory, and postmodernism. No other text on hermeneutics covers the range of writers and subjects discussed in Thiselton’s Hermeneutics.
Author: Vernon K. Robbins
Publisher: SBL Press
Published: 2018-09-14
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 0884143228
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Explore insights, methodologies, and advances in socio-rhetorical interpretation Essays in this volume from Vernon K. Robbins merge social and rhetorical strategies of interpretation and set the stage for how socio-rhetorical interpretation has developed in the context of research into the rhetoric of religious antiquity. This book contains “By Land and By Sea: The We Passages and Ancient Sea Voyages” (1978), which initially received widespread praise and then became an object of significant criticism. The volume includes Robbins’s varied, detailed responses to both encouragement and critique of his approach. Features: Introduction to the collection by David B. Gowler Twelve essays that programmatically study early Christian texts using resources from the social sciences Reflections on the future of socio-rhetorical criticism
Author: Donald L. Denton
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2004-05-27
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 0567082032
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This work identifies two distinct methodological approaches in Jesus studies, as represented by the work of two prominent historical Jesus scholars, Dominic Crossan and Ben Meyer. Crossan's work is the apotheosis of a venerable approach centered on "tradition criticism." Meyer offered a critique of this approach in the form of a historiographic "holism." This work brings Meyer's proposals to light in a sharp comparison with the historiographic assumptions he criticized. It goes beyond Meyer, recognizing the full significance of narrativity in historical method.
Author: Robert B. Stewart
Publisher: University Press of America
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 9780761840961
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Quest of the Hermeneutical Jesus is a study in how reading documents referring to Jesus influences conclusions as to who Jesus was as a figure in history. In this book, author Robert B. Stewart leads his readers through the projects of two of the most important and influential scholars in the field of historical Jesus research, in order to show his readers how the philosophical presuppositions and hermeneutical methods of Crossan and Wright impact their respective historical conclusions concerning Jesus. There is arguably no more important question in religious studies than what can we know about Jesus. Stewart takes on the task of filling the void in this area by addressing how hermeneutics influences history. In addition to highlighting the work of two great scholars, Stewart also provides a useful introduction and guide through much of the maze of contemporary literary criticism. Book jacket.