Browse results
Abstract
This article explores Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 as a migration narrative that legitimates the Jesus movement’s mission to the Gentiles. In response to the opponents’ charge that Stephen has spoken against the Law and the Temple, Luke uses Exodus rhetoric—its topoi of Liberation, Wilderness Wanderings, and Promised Land—to redefine the Exodus as an ongoing migration journey. Consequently, Luke transforms the nascent Jesus movement into a migrant caravan and portrays God as a migrant deity who is comfortable accompanying believers in a tent. Reading against the grain, Stephen’s speech contrasts the naivete of the Jesus movement with the zeal of manumitted Diaspora Jews. Thus, as a migration narrative, Stephen’s speech reveals the tensions, hopes, and disenchaments that leaving or returning to one’s home entails.
Abstract
Naming is a personal and powerful action, often tied to the identity of an individual. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ name is chosen with great care, only to be almost immediately cast aside in favor of the generic form “the child” throughout his childhood in exile. This article reads Matthew 2:13-23 through a childist lens, combining migration theory with attention to the obfuscation of the child Jesus’ identity to elucidate both the experiences represented in the Gospel account, as well as its enduring significance for generations of migrant communities living into their identities today. Seeking to read Matthew 2 together with refugee communities today, this reading highlights the limits of constructed identities such as borders, nation states, and even names, while tracing the child Jesus’ development in the infancy narrative of Matthew.
Abstract
This article aims to advance understanding of foreign nation oracles in the hb/ot by analyzing how many such oracles focus, more precisely, on subgroups within the polities named and direct their critique against that group’s articulation and enactment of imperialistic or nationalistic ideologies. The article first draws upon sociology and critical discourse analysis to sketch a theoretical perspective in which to analyze such oracles, then heuristically explores nation oracles in several prophetic books to illuminate the significance of their double focus on subgroups associated with ideologies which, as discourses of power, definitively validate and vindicate their proponents over against the Other. The article concludes with reflections on the value of ideologically-sensitive interpretation of prophetic oracles concerning foreign groups in light of this phenomenon’s overlap with sociology, imperialism, ideological critique, and justice.
But theological antisemitism did not begin with the Third Reich. Ferdinand Baur’s nineteenth-century Judaism-Hellenism dichotomy empowered National Socialist scholars to construct an Aryan Jesus cleansed of his Jewish identity, building on Baur’s Enlightenment prejudices. Anders Gerdmar takes a fresh look at the dangers of the politicization of biblical scholarship and the ways our unrecognized interpretive filters may generate someone else’s apocalypse.
But theological antisemitism did not begin with the Third Reich. Ferdinand Baur’s nineteenth-century Judaism-Hellenism dichotomy empowered National Socialist scholars to construct an Aryan Jesus cleansed of his Jewish identity, building on Baur’s Enlightenment prejudices. Anders Gerdmar takes a fresh look at the dangers of the politicization of biblical scholarship and the ways our unrecognized interpretive filters may generate someone else’s apocalypse.