Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities

Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities PDF Author: Christine E. Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198034466
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In ancient Jewish culture the ideas of purity and impurity defined the socio-cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Hayes argues that different views of the possibility of conversion, based on varying ideas about Gentile impurity, were the key factor in the formation of Jewish sects in the second temple period, and in the separation of the early Christian Church from what later became rabbinic Judaism.

Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities

Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities PDF Author: Christine E. Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198034466
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In ancient Jewish culture the ideas of purity and impurity defined the socio-cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Hayes argues that different views of the possibility of conversion, based on varying ideas about Gentile impurity, were the key factor in the formation of Jewish sects in the second temple period, and in the separation of the early Christian Church from what later became rabbinic Judaism.

Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World

Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World PDF Author: Jörg Frey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047421558
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
The articles discuss various aspects of Jewish identity in the Greco-Roman period. Was there a common ‘Jewish’ identity, and how could it be defined? How could different groups develop and maintain their identity within the challenge of Hellenistic and early Roman culture? What about the images of ‘others’? How could some of those ‘others’ adopt a Jewish lifestyle or identity, whereas others, abandoned their inherited identity? Among the questions discussed are the translation of Ioudaios, Jewish and universal identity in Philo, the status of women and their conversion to Judaism, the participation of non-Jews in the temple cult, the practice of Emperor worship in Judaea, and the image of Egypt and the Nile as ‘others’ in Philo. Two articles enter the debate whether Jewish identity had an ongoing influence within early Christianity, in Paul and in the rules known as the Apostolic Decree.

Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages

Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages PDF Author: David C. Kraemer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000159388
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book explores the history of Jewish eating and Jewish identity, from the Bible to the present. The lessons of this book rest squarely on the much-quoted insight: 'you are what you eat.' But this book goes beyond that simple truism to recognise that you are not only what you eat, but also how, when, where and with whom you eat. This book begins at the beginning – with the Torah – and then follows the history of Jewish eating until the modern age and even into our own day. Along the way, it travels from Jewish homes in the Holy Land and Babylonia (Iraq) to France and Spain and Italy, then to Germany and Poland and finally to the United States of America. It looks at significant developments in Jewish eating in all ages: in the ancient Near East and Persia, in the Classical age, throughout the Middle Ages and into Modernity. It pays careful attention to Jewish eating laws (halakha) in each time and place, but it does not stop there: it also looks for Jews who bend and break the law, who eat like Romans or Christians regardless of the law and who develop their own hybrid customs according to their own 'laws', whatever Jewish tradition might tell them. In this colourful history of Jewish eating, we get more than a taste of how expressive and crucial eating choices have always been.

Arguing with Aseneth

Arguing with Aseneth PDF Author: Jill Hicks-Keeton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190879017
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient Jewish romance known as Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel's God. Written in Greco-Roman Egypt around the turn of the era, Joseph and Aseneth combines the genre of the ancient Greek novel with scriptural characters from the story of Joseph as it retells Israel's mythic past to negotiate communal boundaries in its own present. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth's tale "remixes" Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel's sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel's God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God's mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundary lines the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth's very conclusions or offering alternative, competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation--one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers, including our earliest example from the Jesus Movement, negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel's God.

Paul and the Creation of a Counter-Cultural Community

Paul and the Creation of a Counter-Cultural Community PDF Author: Sin-pan Daniel Ho
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 056765589X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This study offers a new interpretation of 1 Corinthians 5-11:1. Taking a social identity approach, Ho investigates the inner logic of Paul from the ears of the Corinthian correspondence. Ho argues that Paul consistently indoctrinates new values for the audience to uphold which are against the mainstream of social values in the surrounding society. It is shown that Paul does not engage in issues of internal schism per se, but rather in the question of the distinctive values insiders should uphold so as to be recognisable to outsiders. While church is neither a sectarian nor an accommodating community, it should maintain constant social contact with outsiders so as to bring the gospel of Christ to them. In addition, insiders should practice radical values that could challenge the existing shared social values prevalent in the urban city of Corinth. These new values are based mainly on Scripture, ancient Jewish literature and the new social identity of the church defined by Jesus Christ. This fresh interpretation renders the logical flow, unitary design and coherence of 1 Cor 5 -11.1 more apparent.

What's Divine about Divine Law?

What's Divine about Divine Law? PDF Author: Christine Hayes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
How ancient thinkers grappled with competing conceptions of divine law In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What's Divine about Divine Law? untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition—Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis—struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy. Christine Hayes shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutability, while for the biblical authors, divine law was divine because it was grounded in revelation with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. Hayes describes the collision of these opposing conceptions in the Hellenistic period, and details competing attempts to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance. She shows how Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish writers, from the author of 1 Enoch to Philo of Alexandria, were engaged in a common project of bridging the gulf between classical and biblical notions of divine law, while Paul, in his letters to the early Christian church, sought to widen it. Hayes then delves into the literature of classical rabbinic Judaism to reveal how the talmudic rabbis took a third and scandalous path, insisting on a construction of divine law intentionally at odds with the Greco-Roman and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized West. A stunning achievement in intellectual history, What's Divine about Divine Law? sheds critical light on an ancient debate that would shape foundational Western thought, and that continues to inform contemporary views about the nature and purpose of law and the nature and authority of Scripture.

Sinners, Works of Law, and Transgression in Gal 2:14b-21

Sinners, Works of Law, and Transgression in Gal 2:14b-21 PDF Author: Nicolai Techow
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3161612124
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description


Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation

Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation PDF Author: Kathy Ehrensperger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567395081
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This new collection celebrates the distinguished contribution of William S. Campbell to a renewed understanding of Paul's theologizing and its influence on the shaping of early Christian identity. The essays are clustered around two closely related topics: Paul's theologizing, and the way it influenced Christian identity within the context of Roman Empire. The essays consider the continued relevance of previous identities in Christ', the importance of the context of the Roman Empire, and the significance of the Jewishness of Paul and the Pauline movement in the shaping of identity. The political context is discussed by Neil Elliott, Ekkehard Stegemann, Daniel Patte, and Ian Rock whilst the Jewish roots of Paul and the Christ-movement are addressed in essays by Robert Jewett, Mark Nanos, Calvin Roetzel, and Kathy Ehrensperger. Paul's specific influence in shaping the identity of the early Christ-movement is the concern of essays by Robert Brawley, Jerry Sumney, Kar Yong Lim, and J. Brian Tucker. Finally, methodological reflection on Paul's theologizing within Pauline studies is the concern of essays by Terrence Donaldson and Magnus Zetterholm.

Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities

Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities PDF Author: Stephen Sharot
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814337015
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Provides sociological analyses of religious developments and identities in both historical and contemporary Jewish communities. In Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities author Stephen Sharot uses his work published in journals and collected volumes over the past thirty-five years to examine a range of Jewish communities across both time and geography. Sharot's sociological analyses consider religious developments and identities in diverse Jewish communities from Imperial China and Renaissance Italy to contemporary Israel and the United States. As Sharot examines these groups, other religions enter into the discussion as well, not only as major elements in the environments of Jewish communities but also with respect to certain religious phenomena that too have been present in Judaism. The book is divided into four parts: the first compares religious developments in pre-modern and early modern Jewish communities; the second focuses on Jewish religious movements, especially messianic-millennial and antinomian, in the pre-modern and early modern period; the third examines Jewish religious and ethnic identities in the modern period; and the fourth relates developments in Judaism in the modern period to theoretical debates on secularization, fundamentalism, and public religion in the sociology of religion. The afterword sums up the findings of the previous sections and compares the boundaries and boundary shifts among Jewish communities. As the plural "Judaisms" in the title indicates, Sharot discusses extensive differences in the religious characteristics between Jewish communities. Scholars of religion and sociology will appreciate this informative and fascinating volume.

Jewish Identity and Politics Between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba

Jewish Identity and Politics Between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba PDF Author: Benedikt Eckhardt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004210466
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Based on an interdisciplinary conference held in Münster, this volume discusses the interrelation between political change and Jewish identity in the three centuries between the Maccabean and the Bar Kokhba revolt (168 BCE – 135 CE).