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Abstract
This article is an appreciative and critical engagement with Tucker Ferda’s book, Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis.
Abstract
The author offers a grateful reply to his three respondents before clarifying a few matters and responding to queries. Nothing emerges that would require modifications to the main arguments of the book.
Abstract
This article reviews Tucker Ferda’s recent book on the Galilean Crisis Theory, a scholarly theory that holds that Jesus encountered hostility and rejection in Galilee, which spurred significant changes in his mission, including his rather abrupt transition to Jerusalem. This lucid and deftly executed study charts the development of this scholarly theory, before offering its own assessment of Jesus’ mission and its success. With his perceptive assessment of early scholarship, Ferda makes an important contribution to the on-going meta-critical work in historical Jesus studies.
Abstract
This article explores the historiographical consequences of depending on Markan chronology to reconstruct Jesus’s mission. Mark highlights a “Galilean crisis” as well as the scene in the temple courts (Mk 11:18) as twinned moments of dramatic reversal (peripeteia) that serve to drive his story home to its conclusion, connecting Jesus’s Jewish mission with his Roman death. Analyzing Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis with Mark’s literary deployment of peripeteia in mind, the essay then raises several questions about Ferda’s reconstruction of the reception of Jesus’s message among his Galilean hearers. Jerusalem, not the Galilee, emerges as the true site of “crisis.” Jesus’s popularity among Jews, not a rejection by them, explains most directly Pilate’s decision to neutralize Jesus. Were it not for the narrative shaping of Mark’s story, would we have any reason to presuppose a “Galilean crisis” at all?
Abstract
Thiessen’s book is a systematic attempt at making obsolete an entire research paradigm, which has portrayed Jesus and the gospels as targeting for eradication the Jewish purity system itself, understood as an oppressive social mechanism with which the elite controlled the masses, rather than these texts describing a war against the impurity that this system defined and was meant to control. This essay engages this thesis.
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This book is a comprehensive contribution to the ongoing effort to integrate findings in cognitive science into New Testament studies. Altered states of consciousness are particularly suitable for this attempt as they are a common human property and a widespread religious practice. This study contains an introduction to the basics of philosophy of mind and cognitive studies as well as a hermeneutical reflection. The wide portrayal of ASCs in ancient religious contexts according to the type of induction rituals provides the historic context for the cognitive analysis of the Transfiguration narrative.
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This book is a comprehensive contribution to the ongoing effort to integrate findings in cognitive science into New Testament studies. Altered states of consciousness are particularly suitable for this attempt as they are a common human property and a widespread religious practice. This study contains an introduction to the basics of philosophy of mind and cognitive studies as well as a hermeneutical reflection. The wide portrayal of ASCs in ancient religious contexts according to the type of induction rituals provides the historic context for the cognitive analysis of the Transfiguration narrative.
Abstract
In the first half of the fourth century Bishop Porphyrius donated a mosaic floor for the “Basilica of Paul” at Philippi’s city center. What can we know about Christians in Philippi in the three and a half centuries between Paul’s correspondence with Philippi and the founding of Porphyrius’ Church? To answer this question, this article describes the earliest archaeological data, summarize the information derived from Paul’s correspondence, the mission-narratives in three Acts of Apostles as well as the Letter of Polycarp and some indications of the reception of the letter to the Philippians. While historical Christians remain almost invisible at Philippi, there is ample evidence that Philippians was read as a becoming martyrs farewell address to his beloved community and that Philippi became one (among other) important pilgrimage sides at which the Paul’s martyrdom was remembered.