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Covenant and Community in Early Rabbinic Literature Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Tzvi Novick
This article concerns the role of covenant in early rabbinic literature in relation to biblical and especially Second Temple-era predecessors. The first part establishes that the Qumran sectarians and earlier circles were drawn to the concept of covenant because it represented, especially through the mechanism of covenant renewal, a powerful tool for defining and supporting group identity. The second
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Fleshing Out the Strength of Weakness: Intercorporeality in the Theological Discourse on Disability Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Alexander Massmann
In the context of theological interpretations of disabilities, I am arguing for the concept of “strength in weakness.” So far, a “theology of weakness,” which portrays people with disabilities as pointedly illustrating universal human weakness, has played a very prominent role in the field. I argue that this theological interpretation of disabilities should not be the dominant one. I trace the alternative
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Faith and the Absurd: Kierkegaard, Camus and Job’s Religious Protest Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2024-02-12 N. Verbin
Religious protest, such as the protest that Job expresses, reveals the manners in which believers experience the absurd while hanging on to God. The purpose of this article is to explore the “grammar” of this paradoxical faith stance by bringing Kierkegaard and Camus to bear upon it, and thereby to show the “family resemblance” between Job, Camus’s “absurd man,” and the Kierkegaardian believer. I begin
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Priestly Offering: Law and Narrative in the Aramaic Levi Document Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Hillel Mali
In this article, I propose a new reading for both law and narrative in the Aramaic Levi Document (ALD). In the first section, I show that the passage of “the law of the priesthood” pertains to the daily morning service in the Temple. In the second section, I suggest that the narrative that contains these instructions, in which Isaac speaks to Levi at Abraham’s home, exegetically connects the laws to
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’Ενευλογηθήσονται as a Speech Action Middle in Genesis 12:3b LXX Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Dan York
Interpreters unanimously read ἐνευλογηθήσονται in Gen 12:3b LXX as a passive. Good evidence, however, exists to challenge and problematize this conclusion. Recent linguistic studies on the ancient Greek middle voice reveal that aorist and future -θη- forms express a semantically middle domain. When we reexamine the word ἐνευλογέομαι within this light, a better option emerges for seeing its -θη- forms
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The Image of God and Immediate Emancipation: David Walker’s Theological Foundation of Equality and the Rejection of White Supremacy Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Michael Haspel
In the 1820s it was predominantly Black abolitionists who opposed gradualist abolitionism and the concept of colonization, while, in general, White abolitionists opposed slavery, viewing it as seductive or as sin in itself, but did not want full emancipation for Blacks. Therefore, David Walker’s Appeal from 1829 is a central document in that it calls for immediate and full emancipation as well as opposition
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Χλωρός in the Septuagint: Color or State? Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Lourdes García Ureña
The adjective χλωρός appears in the Septuagint to translate Hebrew terms that not only denote color, but state as well. In fact, in biblical Hebrew color is not a quality, but rather a “state” of the entities it describes. It is logical to wonder, then, whether it also expresses this in the Septuagint or if it denotes only color. To answer this question, it is necessary to carry out an interdisciplinary
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How the Gospel of Truth Depicts Paul’s Secret Teaching: A Study in Second-Century Reception History Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Elaine Pagels
This article shows that the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3), dense with allusions to sources now in the New Testament, most often explored for its resonances with Johannine literature, also offers significant evidence for second-century reception of Paul’s letters, while highlighting poetic images often overlooked. Correlating the language and literary structure of such Pauline passages as 1 Cor 1–6 with
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The Fiction of the Seven Letters in the Apocalypse: Representing Heavenly Authority in the Shadow of Paul Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-09-21 David Frankfurter
While scholars have traditionally taken Revelation’s “letters to the seven churches” (Rev 2–3) as documentation for the experiences of the Christ-movement in those cities, this article argues that the letters amount to a fictional device—that the Apocalypse appropriates epistolary forms in response to the increasing authority of early Pauline collections among the late first-century Asia Minor Christ-movements
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Jesus’s Secret Journey in John 7: A Symbol of the Ascension Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Hugo Méndez
In John 7:8–9, Jesus tells his brothers he will not “go up” to Jerusalem, but in the very next scene, he makes the ascent in secret. This essay interprets Jesus’s unusual, and seemingly deceptive, behavior in the episode as a symbolic action akin to others structuring the first half of the Gospel. The episode immediately precedes a dialogue in which Jesus predicts his imminent departure from the world
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Mark 1:1: How to Display Differences in Biblical Manuscripts in Editions and Translations Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Kalle O. Lundahl
This study has selected Codex Sinaiticus and Mark 1:1 as a test case to propose a new way for Greek New Testament editions and translations to present textual uncertainties in manuscripts. The article suggests that editors and translators use a partial cancellation type of erasure in a continuous line over problematic text. This method draws inspiration from a technique used by Martin Heidegger and
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The Anti-Father and His Silent Sons: Disability, Healing, and Critique in the Acts of John Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Kylie Crabbe
This article analyzes the second-century Acts of John 56–57, in which Antipatros seeks healing for his twin sons whom he claims he cannot support as he ages. I argue that this passage turns on a layered critique of Antipatros. First, the text censures medical commerce. Second, it uses his threat of murder, economic circumstances, and name to undermine Antipatros as both father and inquiring disciple
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A Smothering Embrace? Hermeneutical Issues in Catholic Discourse about Jews and Judaism Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Emma O’Donnell Polyakov
This article examines how Jews and Judaism are envisioned in the Catholic imagination, through a critical reading of contemporary Catholic discourse on Judaism. It identifies three problematic areas. The first concerns the tendency of Catholic discourse to project a specifically Christian vision of salvation history onto the Jewish people, which reflects Christian rather than Jewish self-understanding
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Fashioning the “Inner” (Bāṭin) in Baḥya ibn Paqūda’s Duties of the Hearts Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Omer Michaelis
In the seminal work, Direction to the Duties of the Hearts, Baḥya ibn Paqūda (flourished 11th century) aimed to reconstruct Jewish existence on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the “duties of the members” and the “duties of the hearts.” Baḥya’s intent was to instigate a transition towards the internalization of Jewish religious life. This paradigm shift was to take place not only by the
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Mendelssohn and the Protestant Pedants: The Skeptical Rabbis, the Principle of Noncontradiction, and Judaism’s Spiritual Dialogue Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Ze’ev Strauss
This study explores the extent to which Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem engages with Protestant sources in its portrayal of rabbinic tradition, which will allow further light to be shed on the pivotal role of rabbinic Judaism and its representations within the emotionally charged polemics surrounding Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia. This examination demonstrates that Mendelssohn’s idealized
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A “New” Fragment on the Difference between Hypostasis and Enhypostaton against Tritheists Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Francesco Celia
This article provides edition, translation, and annotation of a Greek excerpt dealing with the christological issue of “whether there is an anhypostatos nature.” Until now unedited and recently catalogued as one of the fragments of Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Synousiastas, it in fact contains a close parallel to a famous passage from Leontius of Byzantium’s Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos concerning
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The Smell of Mortal Man: When the Demonic Female Preys Upon the German Pietist Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Anna Sierka
In the esoteric writings of the Medieval German Pietists, nocturnal female demons, known as lilioth, preyed upon mortal men who crossed their paths or who laid down to sleep in their territory. These lilioth could smell the scent of a man, whose body carried with it the additional value of sexual allure, and would hunt them down with their finely attuned olfactory sense. Another odor discussed in these
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A Suitable Match: Eve, Enkidu, and the Boundaries of Humanity in the Eden Narrative and the Epic of Gilgamesh Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Will Kynes
Juxtaposing the shared emphasis on the basic human need for companionship in the Eden Narrative and the Epic of Gilgamesh provides new insight, both into how the texts respectively present companionship and into the issues of anthropology and gender that have previously distracted readers from this theme. Focus on parallels between Eve and Shamhat, who initiates Enkidu into human civilization, has
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Athanasius Pulled Apart: Heresiology and the (Dis)membered (Fe)male Body Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Jennifer Barry
In this article, I engage Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19. By the fourth century, this story of gang rape—along with other preserved stories of sexual violence—found in Judges, were scattered throughout early Christian literature. Judges 19 holds a particularly troubling history in the late ancient context. The story of the rape
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Subject Peoples and Civilizational Priority: Competition among Babylonians, Egyptians, and Judeans in the Hellenistic Era Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Philip A. Harland
This article proceeds on the principle that we need to decenter dominant ethnic groups—primarily Greeks and Greco-Macedonians in the early Hellenistic era—in order to understand other marginalized viewpoints and experiences, including but not limited to those of Judeans (Jews). An analysis of the Babylonian author Bel-re’ushu helps to provide a new angle on Judean (e.g., Artapanus) and Egyptian (e
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When did Daimones become Demons? Revisiting Septuagintal Data for Ancient Jewish Demonology Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Annette Yoshiko Reed
Recent research on Jewish demonology has been significantly advanced by evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. In light of these advances, this article revisits the use of daimones and related terms in the Greek translations of Jewish scriptures commonly called the Septuagint (LXX). Against the tendency to conflate these LXX data into one intermediate stage in the development of the demonology of the
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Spartans or Samaritans? Revealing the Creativity of the Author of 1 Maccabees Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Matan Orian
A majority of scholars view the Hasmonean-Spartan correspondence, reported in 1 Maccabees, as inauthentic, since it contains many improbabilities, including the assertion that the Jews and the Spartans are fraternal nations. However, its patent implausibility also renders it unimaginable that the correspondence was intended to be understood literally. Hence, the binary choice offered in research, whereby
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Oil Lamps, Spearheads and Skulls: Possible Evidence of Necromancy during Late Antiquity in the Te’omim Cave, Judean Hills Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Eitan Klein, Boaz Zissu
The Te’omim Cave is a large karst cave located in the Jerusalem Hills. Since 2009, the cave has been explored by our team as a joint project of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University and the Cave Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Over 120 intact oil lamps were collected in the 2010–2016 survey seasons from all sections of
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The Reason a Woman Is Obligated: Women’s Ritual Efficacy in Medieval Kabbalah Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Jeremy Phillip Brown
The short fragment prompting this study is a kabbalistic inquiry into three of the positive commandments in which women are especially obligated—the so-called commandments of Hannah. When accounting for these commandments in kabbalistic terms, the fragment endorses the ritual efficacy of Jewish women. It does this in a manner analogous to descriptions of commandments performed by men, in which the
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Moses Stuart and the Unintentional Secularization of American Biblical Studies Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Erik Lundeen
Building off recent work investigating the development of modern biblical criticism, this essay argues that the broadly conservative scholar Moses Stuart (1780–1852) should be seen as playing a key but unintentional role in the secularization of biblical studies in nineteenth-century America. Stuart played this role in several ways. Hermeneutically, he imbibed and popularized naturalistic assumptions
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Bringing Philo Home: Responses to Harry A. Wolfson’s Philo (1947) in the Aftermath of World War II Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-07-04 René Bloch
In 1947 Harry Austryn Wolfson published his massive and revisionary Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. With the book, Wolfson aimed at proving that Philo was an innovative and highly influential philosopher—by no means an isolated Jew of no consequence to the history of philosophy. As becomes clear from numerous letters written to Wolfson on the occasion
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“The Canaanites were then in the Land” and Other Shechemite Ironies Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Mark G. Brett
The Hexateuchal narrative arc begins with Abram’s encounter with Yhwh in Shechem in Gen 12:6–7 and ends with Joshua’s covenant at the same place in Josh 24:25–26. These “bookends” make mention of a particular tree in Shechem, which also features in Gen 35:1–4. The inherited Priestly tradition claimed that none of the ancestors in Genesis knew the name Yhwh, but the Hexateuchal editors of the Persian
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Gilayon and “Apocalypse”: Reconsidering an Early Jewish Concept and Genre Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Alexander Kulik
This paper examines various ways in which apocalyptic studies can benefit from the introduction of the term and concept of gilayon, a reconstructed Hebrew counterpart of the Judeo-Greek apocalypse. The term gilayon, which combines the meanings of “revealed book” and “book of revelation,” refers to a central image of early Jewish revealed literature and could serve to define an important corpus, the
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The Kuzari and Early Kabbalah: Between Integration and Interpretation regarding the Secrets of the Sacrificial Rite Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Avishai Bar-Asher
The proper place of Judah Halevi’s thought in the initial emergence and subsequent development of medieval kabbalah has been the subject of debate for centuries. The general consensus has it that the Kuzari was not much more than a convenient repository of terms. This study measures the extent of Halevi’s impact on early kabbalah by using the Kuzari’s reasons for the sacrificial rite as a test case
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Causality and the Procession of the Holy Spirit in Manuel Kalekas’s De fide deque principiis catholicae fidei Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Reginald M. Lynch
This article examines the way in which Manuel Kalekas describes the procession of the trinitarian persons in one of his earliest systematic treatises. As a member of so-called “Kydones circle,” Kalekas was part of a fourteenth-century group of Latinophrone Byzantine theologians who were interested in ecclesial union with the Latin West and in Latin theological sources. In addition to certain texts
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On Practical Uses of Ten Sefirot: Material Readings in an Early Modern Kabbalistic Collectaneum (MS Michael 473) Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Agata Paluch
By the end of the sixteenth century, textual manifestations of kabbalah—a variety of Jewish mysticism that first emerged in medieval Provence and Catalonia—achieved the status of elite but authoritative lore in Eastern and Central Europe, even if at times they stirred religious opposition. At the same time, and especially in the seventeenth century, the so-called practical kabbalah, associated with
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Kinship, Incest, and Slavery: A Thematic Constellation in the Triteuchal Political Theology of the Divine Name Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Bruce Rosenstock
Incest (“revealing the nakedness of the flesh of one’s flesh”) and slavery are presented in the Triteuch (Gen 1 through Lev 26) as twin threats to kinship creation (becoming “one flesh”) as the uniquely human matrix for fulfilling the commandment “be fruitful and multiply.” The serpent’s duplicitous nakedness symbolizes incestuous reproduction; the Tower builders, who seek to preserve their “one lip
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Textualizing Pauline Revelation: Self-Referentiality, Reading Practices, and Pseudepigraphy in Ephesians Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Christopher S. Atkins
This article argues for a new interpretation of Ephesians based on its self-referentiality. Taking as my starting point the standard view that Eph 3:3–4 refers to the preceding portion of Ephesians, I explore how the text works rhetorically. I argue that in Ephesians 3:3–4 the author reflexively authorizes Ephesians as a revelatory text that provides privileged access to “the mystery” and to “Paul”
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Hyperbole and the Cost of Discipleship: A Case Study of Luke 14:26 Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Stephen Robert Llewelyn, Will Robinson
Luke 14:26 has commonly been viewed as an example of hyperbole. This article applies modern studies on hyperbole that hold as its principle criteria both a scalar property and an evaluative/expressive function. We apply these criteria, analyzing Luke 14:26 in terms of encoded language, co-text, and context. We argue that hyperbole arises from the choice to use “hate” rather than “love more than” but
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Prooftexting from Other People’s Scriptures? “Prophets and Patriarchs” in Acts of Philip 5–7 Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Julia Snyder
What role has the “Old Testament” played in the self-understanding of Christians over the centuries, and what can we learn from the fact that Israel’s scriptures are often cited in early Christian texts? Using the Acts of Philip as a case study, this article argues that we should not assume all early Christian writers thought of these as “my own scriptures.” When we encounter citations from Israel’s
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Jonasian Gnosticism Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Aviram Sariel
This article proposes that Jonas’s understanding of gnosticism differs substantially from the account typically associated with him. That standard account takes the basic tenets of existentialism as the foundation to its discussion of alienated individuality, whereas Jonas’s system uses neo-Kantian epistemology to construct both alienation and individuality out of a unified field of human interaction
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How Jewish Orthodoxy Became a State: Isaac Breuer and the Invention of the Statist Theocracy Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Itamar Ben Ami
This article traces the incorporation of the modern state and the notion of sovereignty into Jewish Orthodox thought, culminating in the idea that the role of Orthodoxy is to establish a statist theocracy. Unlike narratives that emphasize the continuation of theocratic thought from ancient to modern Judaism on the one hand, and the relationship between religious Zionism and contemporary forms of Jewish
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The Religions of Human Rights Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-11-25 James Loeffler
The modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions in the mid-twentieth century. Yet attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religious thought have almost exclusively taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. This focus on intellectual genealogies obscures the fact that much of human rights
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Paul the Middle Platonist? Exegetical Traditions on Timaeus 28c and the Characterization of Paul in Acts 17:16–31 Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Jeffrey M. Hubbard
Paul’s speech to the Areopagus in Acts 17 places the apostle in philosophical dialogue with Stoics and Epicureans. This article identifies important points of contact between Paul’s speech and Middle Platonic exegesis of a famous Platonic phrase from Timaeus 28c. There, the philosopher declares that the maker and father of the world is hard to find, and even more difficult to talk about. Many later
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A Dramatic Heist of Epic Proportion: Iphigenia among the Taurians in the Acts of the Apostles Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Mark G. Bilby, Anna Lefteratou
While scholars have explored the profound influence of Iphigenia among the Taurians (IT) on Greco-Roman fiction, including Christian apocryphal Acts, the play has yet to be considered seriously as a potential inspiration on the canonical Acts of the Apostles. A close comparison of IT with the story of the Ephesian riot (Acts 19:21–20:1) reveals a compelling relationship in matters of plot, setting
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Hide the Outcasts: Isaiah 16:3–4 and Fugitive Slave Laws Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-11-09 J. Blake Couey, Jeremy Schipper
Isaiah 16:3–4, part of an obscure prophecy about ancient Moab, appeared frequently in nineteenth-century writings about slavery in the United States, particularly in the context of opposition to fugitive slave laws. The verses were linked with other biblical passages to create a network of proof texts to justify assisting persons who escaped slavery. Eventually, the line “hide the outcast” from verse
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Beyond the Underdog Mentality: Philo-Semitism amongst Protestant Rescuers in Wartime Ukraine Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Raisa Ostapenko
In Ukraine, as was the case across occupied Europe, while most residents of any given locality divided into bystanders, collaborators, and accomplices during the Holocaust, a minority turned to rescue work. Faith-motivated rescue work by large institutions or individuals representing prominent branches of Christianity is well documented; its prevalence exemplifies the critical role that the altruism
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A Tembel Hat in the Streets of Nazareth: Paul Gauthier’s Israeli Experience Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Silvana Kandel Lamdan
The French priest Paul Gauthier (1914–2002) was a former theology professor who, after a short period as a prêtre-ouvrier (worker-priest) in Marseille, decided in 1956 to settle in Nazareth and practice his working apostolate there. For the next eleven years, and until his abrupt departure shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel became Gauthier’s home. Some years after his arrival, Gauthier was
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Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Isaac Portilla
This article focuses on the meeting of faith traditions—interfaith dialogue—from the perspective of mystical consciousness. In doing so, it aims to understand the dynamics and potentialities of interfaith mysticism. The contribution of this article to religious studies, in combination with theological inquiry, is threefold: first, it illuminates how the Trinity is directly experienced in interfaith
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Past Paul’s Jewishness: The Benjaminite Paul in Epiphanius of Cyprus Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Matthew Chalmers
Paul’s Jewishness has often acted as a pivot in scholarship about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, especially in recent conversation about the date and duration of the so-called “Parting of the Ways.” Too little attention has been paid, however, to who represented Paul as Jewish (or not) and why. I examine the late antique reception of Paul’s ethnic identity in Epiphanius of Cyprus
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“The Vision of Daniel” from the St. Petersburg Genizah Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Menahem Ben-Sasson
This article includes translation of a “new” Vision of Daniel as it survived, albeit incomplete. It reflects a “meeting point” between three monotheistic religions in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. A comparative study of the work enables the reconstruction of its missing parts. The Vision may have been composed in the area where al-Muʿtaṣim battled Theophilos in the 830s CE, namely, northern Syria
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Five Hundred Bones from Constantinople: Monks, Manuscripts, and Memory at the Eastern Borders of Byzantium Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Reyhan Durmaz
This article traces the diachronic uses of the literary motif of “relics coming from Constantinople to monasteries in the East” in Syriac hagiography. Although this motif was seen in Syriac literature as early as the sixth century, there seems to be an increase in the employment of these stories around the twelfth century in saints’ lives local to northern Mesopotamia. In light of two texts—the Life
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Two Moments in the Biography of Qedushah (a.k.a. Holiness) Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Josef Stern
This paper analyzes two transformative conceptions of qedushah (holiness) in medieval Jewish thought, Moses Maimonides’s and Moses Nahmanides’s. Maimonides reduces qedushah to the Mosaic commandments which he reconceives as communal institutions to constrain bodily desires and promote intellectualist values and as training for perfected individuals to de-corporealize themselves in imitation of God
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Manuscript Discoveries and Debates over Orthodoxy in Early Christian Studies: The Case of the Syriac Poet-Theologian Jacob of Serugh Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Philip Michael Forness
The uncovering of manuscripts over the last one hundred years has repeatedly changed how early Christian history is told. With no signs of this trend abating, this article seeks to take stock of how scholars respond to manuscript discoveries by focusing on three debates over the orthodoxy of an early Christian figure that extend over two hundred and fifty years. New manuscript evidence sparked no less
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“The People Do Not Understand”: R. Ḥayim Hirschensohn and Political Elitism in Modern Judaism (The Vilna Gaon, Rabbi N.Ts.Y. Berlin, I. B. Levinsohn, and Herzl) Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Benjamin Brown
Rabbi Ḥayim (Chaim) Hirschensohn (1857–1935) was one of only a handful of Jewish thinkers to work out a Jewish political theology, and on account of his progressive stances he became a favorite of liberal circles within contemporary Judaism. Therefore, a passage in his book Malki Bakodesh, in which he expresses clear opposition to universal suffrage, “invited” mitigating interpretations. Yet, a survey
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Sacrificial Fathers and the Death of Their Children: How the Story of Job Challenges the Priestly Tradition Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Mark A. Awabdy, Tobias Häner
Job’s burnt offerings for his sons and daughters followed by their death (Job 1) resembles the sequence of Aaron’s burnt offerings for himself and his sons followed by the death of his oldest sons (Lev 8–10). Within this common sequence of events, the two stories share a cluster of important, identical lexemes. Although it is not impossible that these features could have resulted unintentionally from
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An Archaeology of Ancient Thought: On the Hebrew Bible and the History of Ancient Israel Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Daniel Pioske
The question of how to approach the Hebrew Bible as a source for the histories we write of ancient Israel continues to divide scholars. This study responds to such concerns by pursuing an approach informed by a historicized view of knowledge, or a framework in which the claims we make are understood to be reflective of the eras in which they are realized. What this line of research encourages, I argue
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The Rise of the Holy Spirit in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Adam Afterman
This article examines the development and transformation of the holy spirit within Jewish mysticism. It begins with a brief analysis of primary trends concerning the holy spirit in biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish texts that served as crucial material for the holy spirit’s ascendence in sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism. Following, it examines the writings of leading Jewish mystics: Moses Cordovero
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Epistemic Perspectives on Enthusiasm in Late Seventeenth-Century England Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Alessia Pannese
This study examines the late seventeenth-century reception of enthusiasm in England in the context of the contemporary epistemological debate. Challenging characterizations of responses to enthusiasm as partitioned along the rationalist-empiricist divide, I show how parallel critiques of enthusiasm by natural philosophers and theologians suggest shared epistemic commitments across methodological and
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Abject Objects: The Lives and Times of Early Christian Material Culture Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Sarah E. Rollens
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Millenarianism in Puritan New England, 1630–1730: The Exceptional Case of Samuel Sewall and the Mexican Millennium Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Richard W. Cogley
The American Puritan layman Samuel Sewall (d. 1730) is perhaps best known as a diarist and as a repentant judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. But he was also the author of Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica (first edition 1697), a work which argued that the New Jerusalem would arise in Mexico City. Sewall’s unusual millennial doctrine may seem undeserving of study, for no other American Puritan thought
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Vessels of Wrath and God’s Pathos: Potter/Clay Imagery in Rom 9:20–23 Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Jason A. Staples
Starting from the concept of divine patience in Rom 9:22, this article argues that Paul employs the potter/clay metaphor not (as often interpreted) to defend God’s right to arbitrary choice but rather as an appeal to what Abraham Heschel called divine pathos—the idea that God’s choices are impacted by human actions. The potter/clay imagery in Rom 9:20–23 thus serves to highlight the dynamic and improvisational
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How the “Jerusalem Scrolls” Became the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran Cave 1: Archaeology, the Antiquities Market, and the Spaces In Between Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-02-24 Brent Nongbri
Seven animal hide scrolls with Hebrew and Aramaic writing were sold in Jerusalem in 1947. Additional smaller fragments of similar scrolls were sold from 1948 to 1950. Within a few years of their appearance, these “Jerusalem Scrolls” as they were then known, became “the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran Cave 1.” While this change of names may seem trivial, it glosses over some difficult questions about the
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Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish “Monotheism” Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-02-24 Paula Fredriksen
Many gods lived in the Roman Empire. All ancient peoples, including Jews and, eventually, Christians, knew this to be the case. Exploring the ways that members of these groups thought about and dealt with other gods while remaining loyal to their own god, this essay focuses particularly on the writings and activities of three late Second Temple Jews who highly identified as Jews: Philo of Alexandria
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Hospitality, not Honors: Portraits and Patronage in the Acts of John Harvard Theological Review Pub Date : 2022-02-24 Travis W. Proctor
In this article, I examine how the apocryphal Acts of John depicts wealthy Christian converts as part of the “Christianization” of Ephesus. I note how the Acts of John uses its portrayal of leading citizens not only to critique, but to preserve and adapt prevailing expectations surrounding Greco-Roman cultic patronage. My analysis comprises two parts. In the first part, I discuss the ways in which