The Lukan Passion and the Praiseworthy Death
Published: Oct 2005
£40.00
In the ancient world, crucifixion epitomized all that was shameful, servile and lowly. Jesus' death on a cross would have been a stumbling block for many. Luke recognized this prevailing attitude toward crucifixion, and sought to show that Jesus' death was noble and praiseworthy, even according to the Roman world's own standards.
Scaer argues that Luke drew upon the Noble Death tradition, especially as found in Graeco-Roman rhetoric, in depicting Jesus as a man of courage and virtue. Luke also made use of Jewish-Hellenistic martyrological traditions to present Jesus' death as worthy not only of honour, but even of emulation. Most provocatively, Scaer contends that the third evangelist drew specific motifs from the Socrates story in order to show that the founder of the new Christian movement was a noble and just man, deserving of the utmost respect.
In using these Graeco-Roman sources as he fashioned his narrative of Jesus' death, Luke reveals himself as a masterful author in the classical tradition, intent on portraying Christianity as a world class religion.
The Lukan Passion and the Praiseworthy Death
£40.00
In the ancient world, crucifixion epitomized all that was shameful, servile and lowly. Jesus' death on a cross would have been a stumbling block for many. Luke recognized this prevailing attitude toward crucifixion, and sought to show that Jesus' death was noble and praiseworthy, even according to the Roman world's own standards.
Scaer argues that Luke drew upon the Noble Death tradition, especially as found in Graeco-Roman rhetoric, in depicting Jesus as a man of courage and virtue. Luke also made use of Jewish-Hellenistic martyrological traditions to present Jesus' death as worthy not only of honour, but even of emulation. Most provocatively, Scaer contends that the third evangelist drew specific motifs from the Socrates story in order to show that the founder of the new Christian movement was a noble and just man, deserving of the utmost respect.
In using these Graeco-Roman sources as he fashioned his narrative of Jesus' death, Luke reveals himself as a masterful author in the classical tradition, intent on portraying Christianity as a world class religion.
The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity
Published: July 2005
£25.00
The Older Testament is a radically new approach to many problems of both Old and New Testaments. It takes as a basis the theology of the book of Enoch, lost to western Christendom for many centuries, but here recognized as providing the most consistent set of clues to the nature of Israel's pre-exilic religion. Reformers and editors of the Second Temple period sought to remove from the biblical texts all traces of the older ways, which now survive only in the apparently bizarre themes and imagery of certain Pseudepigrapha.
Margaret Barker traces some of the ways in which the Deuteronomic standpoint came to dominate future readings of the Hebrew Bible as well as scholarly conceptions of Israel's religious development. Her reconstruction of the pre-Deuteronomic religion throws a startling light on much of the imagery of the New Testament and shows how closely the earlier Christian expectations were based upon the ancient royal cult in Jerusalem.
This book represents an important and original contribution to our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity.
The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity
£25.00
The Older Testament is a radically new approach to many problems of both Old and New Testaments. It takes as a basis the theology of the book of Enoch, lost to western Christendom for many centuries, but here recognized as providing the most consistent set of clues to the nature of Israel's pre-exilic religion. Reformers and editors of the Second Temple period sought to remove from the biblical texts all traces of the older ways, which now survive only in the apparently bizarre themes and imagery of certain Pseudepigrapha.
Margaret Barker traces some of the ways in which the Deuteronomic standpoint came to dominate future readings of the Hebrew Bible as well as scholarly conceptions of Israel's religious development. Her reconstruction of the pre-Deuteronomic religion throws a startling light on much of the imagery of the New Testament and shows how closely the earlier Christian expectations were based upon the ancient royal cult in Jerusalem.
This book represents an important and original contribution to our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity.
Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the New Testament
Published: Jan 2005
£70.00
The burgeoning field of corpus linguistics studies aspects of a language that are susceptible to computer processing once a sizable electronic corpus of the language has been assembled. In this groundbreaking work, O'Donnell takes the unusual step of applying the techniques of corpus linguistics to Hellenistic Greek and especially the Greek of the New Testament, and in three areas shows, with a multitude of worked examples, how it could sharpen our appreciation of the language.
First, in New Testament textual criticism decisions for a preferred reading would be better founded if all analogous data in all the manuscript traditions were available. And in source criticism, where statistical methods have already been applied, more advanced statistical and graphical techniques, including dotplot, can now be exploited.
The second application of corpus linguistics is to lexicography, where, for example, collocational analysis of a corpus of texts leads to sharper definition of synonyms; the case of the pair egeiro and anistemi ('raise'), considered in detail, proves the point.
Thirdly, corpus-based techniques can be applied to discourse analysis. Here O'Donnell fine-tunes —by means of a subtle discourse annotation model —answers that may be given to questions about the situation and purpose of the letters of Jude and of Paul to Philemon. This book, though technical in many parts, opens up a new field to many biblical scholars, who may be surprised to discover how much they still have to learn about the Greek of the New Testament.
Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the New Testament
£70.00
The burgeoning field of corpus linguistics studies aspects of a language that are susceptible to computer processing once a sizable electronic corpus of the language has been assembled. In this groundbreaking work, O'Donnell takes the unusual step of applying the techniques of corpus linguistics to Hellenistic Greek and especially the Greek of the New Testament, and in three areas shows, with a multitude of worked examples, how it could sharpen our appreciation of the language.
First, in New Testament textual criticism decisions for a preferred reading would be better founded if all analogous data in all the manuscript traditions were available. And in source criticism, where statistical methods have already been applied, more advanced statistical and graphical techniques, including dotplot, can now be exploited.
The second application of corpus linguistics is to lexicography, where, for example, collocational analysis of a corpus of texts leads to sharper definition of synonyms; the case of the pair egeiro and anistemi ('raise'), considered in detail, proves the point.
Thirdly, corpus-based techniques can be applied to discourse analysis. Here O'Donnell fine-tunes —by means of a subtle discourse annotation model —answers that may be given to questions about the situation and purpose of the letters of Jude and of Paul to Philemon. This book, though technical in many parts, opens up a new field to many biblical scholars, who may be surprised to discover how much they still have to learn about the Greek of the New Testament.
The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings
Published: Nov 2004
£22.50
Many are saying that the prevailing paradigm of New Testament origins is going nowhere. In its place, Brodie’s stunning book invites us to suspend all ‘knowledge’ we already have about the history of the New Testament’s development, and to be willing to entertain the following thesis.
Everything hinges on Proto-Luke, a history of Jesus using the Elijah–Elisha narrative as its model, which survives in 10 chapters of Luke and 15 of Acts. Mark then uses Proto-Luke, transposing its Acts material back into the life of Jesus. Matthew deuteronomizes Mark, John improves on the discourses of Matthew. Luke–Acts spells out the story at length. Add the Pauline corpus, the descendant of Deuteronomy via the Matthean logia, and the New Testament is virtually complete.
This is a totalizing theory, an explanation of everything, and its critics will be numerous. But even they will be hugely intrigued, and have to admit that Brodie’s myriads of challenging observations about literary affinities demand an answer.
The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings
£22.50
Many are saying that the prevailing paradigm of New Testament origins is going nowhere. In its place, Brodie’s stunning book invites us to suspend all ‘knowledge’ we already have about the history of the New Testament’s development, and to be willing to entertain the following thesis.
Everything hinges on Proto-Luke, a history of Jesus using the Elijah–Elisha narrative as its model, which survives in 10 chapters of Luke and 15 of Acts. Mark then uses Proto-Luke, transposing its Acts material back into the life of Jesus. Matthew deuteronomizes Mark, John improves on the discourses of Matthew. Luke–Acts spells out the story at length. Add the Pauline corpus, the descendant of Deuteronomy via the Matthean logia, and the New Testament is virtually complete.
This is a totalizing theory, an explanation of everything, and its critics will be numerous. But even they will be hugely intrigued, and have to admit that Brodie’s myriads of challenging observations about literary affinities demand an answer.