Now in Paperback!

Epiphanius, monastic founder and bishop of Salamis on Cyprus for almost forty years of the fourth century, threw heart and soul into the controversies of the time and produced the Panario or Medicine Chest, a historical encyclopedia of sects and heresies and their refutations. Book I deals with material that is also found in Nag Hammadi, other Gnostic writings, and in such patristic authors as Irenaeus and Hippolytus. Students of Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism, patrologists, historians of religion, church historians, and Judaism have found this translation useful.

Features:

• Paperback format of an essential Brill reference set
• Coverage of Gnostic and Jewish Christian groups
• Documents not available elsewhere in paperback

This book, which grew out of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Paul and Scripture Seminar, explores some of the methodological problems that have arisen during the last few decades of scholarly research on the apostle Paul’s engagement with his ancestral Scriptures. Essays explore the historical backgrounds of Paul’s interpretive practices, the question of Paul’s “faithfulness” to the context of his biblical references, the presence of Scripture in letters other than the Hauptbriefe, and the role of Scripture in Paul’s theology. All of the essays look at old questions through new lenses in an effort to break through scholarly impasses and advance the debate in new directions. The contributors are Matthew W. Bates, Linda L. Belleville, Roy E. Ciampa, Bruce N. Fisk, Stephen E. Fowl, Leonard Greenspoon, E. Elizabeth Johnson, Mitchell M. Kim, Steve Moyise, Jeremy Punt, Christopher D. Stanley, and Jerry L. Sumney.

A new reading of Pauline theology, ethics, and eschatology grounded in social-identity theory and sociorhetorical criticism

Readers often think of Paul’s attitude toward the resurrection of the body in individual terms: a single body raised as the climax of an individual’s salvation. In Paul and the Resurrected Body: Social Identity and Ethical Practice, Matt O’Reilly makes the case that, for Paul, the social dimension of future bodily resurrection is just as important, if not more so. Through a close reading of key texts in the letters to the Corinthians, Romans, and Philippians, O’Reilly argues that resurrection is integral to Paul’s understanding of Christian social identity. In Paul’s theological reasoning, a believer’s hope for the future depends on being identified as part of the people of God who will be resurrected.

Features

• A clarification of the eschatological basis for Paul’s ethical expectations
• Exploration of the social significance of Paul’s theological reasoning
• An integration of ancient rhetorical theory with contemporary social-identity theory

Explore the significance of maternal metaphors in the writings of a first-century male missionary and theologian

Paul employed metaphors of childbirth or breastfeeding in four out of the seven undisputed epistles. In this book, McNeel uses cognitive metaphor theory and social identity analysis to examine the meaning and function of these maternal metaphors. She asserts that metaphors carry cognitive content and that they are central to how humans process information, construct reality, and shape group identity.

Features:

• A focus on “identity” as the way in which people understand themselves in relation to one another, to society, and to those perceived as outsiders
• Examination of metaphor as part of Paul’s rhetorical strategy
• Integration of the work of philosopher Max Black with the work of cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Ancient iconography of Paul is dominated by one image: Paul as martyr. Whether he is carrying a sword—the traditional instrument of his execution—or receiving a martyr's crown from Christ, the apostle was remembered and honored for his faithfulness to the point of death. As a result, Christians created a cult of Paul, centered on particular holy sites and characterized by practices such as the telling of stories, pilgrimage, and the veneration of relics. This study integrates literary, archaeological, artistic, and liturgical evidence to describe the development of the Pauline cult within the cultural context of the late antique West.

"As long as there are readers of Paul, there will be always be other perspectives."

The essays in this second edition of Paul Unbound: Other Perspectives on the Apostle provide introductions to Paul's relationship to and views on the Roman Empire, first-century economic stratification, his opponents, ethnicity, the law, Judaism, women, and Greco-Roman rhetoric. Contributors Warren Carter, Charles H. Cosgrove, A. Andrew Das, Steven J. Friesen, Mark D. Given, Deborah Krause, Mark D. Nanos, and Jerry L. Sumney have added addendums to their original essays and updated the bibliography to take into account scholarship produced in the decade since the publication of the first edition. The collection provides essential background and sets out new directions for study useful to students of the New Testament and Paul's letters.

Engage fourteen essays from an international group of experts

There is little direct evidence for formal education in the Bible and in the texts of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. At the same time, pedagogy and character formation are important themes in many of these texts. This book explores the pedagogical purpose of wisdom literature, in which the concept of discipline (Hebrew musar) is closely tied to the acquisition of wisdom. It examines how and why the concept of musar came to be translated as paideia (education, enculturation) in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Septuagint), and how the concept of paideia was deployed by ancient Jewish authors writing in Greek. The different understandings of paideia in wisdom and apocalyptic writings of Second Temple Judaism are this book's primary focus. It also examines how early Christians adapted the concept of paideia, influenced by both the Septuagint and Greco-Roman understandings of this concept.

Features

A thorough lexical study of the term paideia in the Septuagint

Exploration of the relationship of wisdom and Torah in Second Temple Judaism

Examination of how Christians developed new forms of pedagogy in competition with Jewish and pagan systems of education

Who are the people beside Paul, and what can we know about them?

This volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars with a broad range of expertise and a common interest: Philippi in antiquity. Each essay engages one set of contextual particularities for Paul and the ordinary people of the Philippian assembly, while simultaneously placing them in wider settings. This 'people's history' uses both traditional and more cutting-edge methods to reconsider archaeology and architecture, economy and ethnicity, prisons and priestesses, slavery, syncretism, stereotypes of Jews, the colony of Philippi, and a range of communities. The contributors are Valerie Abrahamsen, Richard S. Ascough, Robert L. Brawley, Noelle Damico, Richard A. Horsley, Joseph A. Marchal, Mark D. Nanos, Peter Oakes, Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Angela Standhartinger, Eduard Verhoef, and Antoinette Clark Wire.

Features

• An examination of the social forms and forces that shaped and affected the Philippian church
• Essays offer insight into standard questions about the letter s hymn and audience, Paul's 'opponents,' and the sites of the community and of Paul's imprisonment
• A focused exploration of more marginalized topics and groups, including women, slaves, Jews, and members of localized cults

The search for the biblical Philistines, one of ancient Israel’s most storied enemies, has long intrigued both scholars and the public. Archaeological and textual evidence examined in its broader eastern Mediterranean context reveals that the Philistines, well-known from biblical and extrabiblical texts, together with other related groups of “Sea Peoples,” played a transformative role in the development of new ethnic groups and polities that emerged from the ruins of the Late Bronze Age empires. The essays in this book, representing recent research in the fields of archaeology, Bible, and history, reassess the origins, identity, material culture, and impact of the Philistines and other Sea Peoples on the Iron Age cultures and peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. The contributors are Matthew J. Adams, Michal Artzy, Tristan J. Barako, David Ben-Shlomo, Mario Benzi, Margaret E. Cohen, Anat Cohen-Weinberger, Trude Dothan, Elizabeth French, Marie-Henriette Gates, Hermann Genz, Ayelet Gilboa, Maria Iacovou, Ann E. Killebrew, Sabine Laemmel, Gunnar Lehmann, Aren M. Maeir, Amihai Mazar, Linda Meiberg, Penelope A. Mountjoy, Hermann Michael Niemann, Jeremy B. Rutter, Ilan Sharon, Susan Sherratt, Neil Asher Silberman, and Itamar Singer.

The Philo of Alexandria Scripture Index identifies and lists every instance in which Philo of Alexandria cites or alludes to passages from Jewish Scripture. With 7,831 references, this book is the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. Unlike other volumes with a single index of Philo’s citations and allusions organized by biblical book, this volume includes a second index that follows Philo’s treatise order. This second format allows students and scholars easily to examine Philo’s engagement with Scripture in individual treatises and to interrogate how Philo collected and grouped intertexts. In addition to the indices, Sean A. Adams and Zanne Domoney-Lyttle provide an introduction to their methodology and their selection of texts, including Philo’s fragmentary works and those that survive only in the Armenian tradition.

In his comprehensive exposition of the Tenth Commandment (Spec. 4.79–131), Philo considers the prohibition “You shall not desire”: what sort of desire it prohibits (and why) and how the Mosaic dietary laws collectively enforce that prohibition. This volume offers the first complete study of Philo’s exposition, beginning with an overview of its content, context, and place in previous research. In-depth studies of Philo’s concept of desire and his concept of self-control provide background and demonstrate Philo’s fundamental agreement with contemporary Middle-Platonic moral psychology, especially in his theory of emotion (pathos). A new translation of the exposition, with commentary, offers a definitive explanation of Philo’s view of the Tenth Commandment, including precisely the sort of excessive desire it targets and how the dietary laws work as practical exercises for training the soul in self-control.

The first English translation of On Anger

This latest volume in the Writings from the Greco-Roman World series provides a translation of a newly edited Greek text of Philodemus’s On Anger, now supplemented with the help of multispectral imaging. As our sole evidence for the Epicurean view of what constitutes natural and praiseworthy anger as distinguished from unnatural pleasure in vengeance and cruelty for their own sake, this text is crucial to the study of ancient thought about the emotions. Its critique of contemporary Stoic and Peripatetic theories of anger offers crucial new information for the history of philosophy in the last two centuries BCE. The introduction and commentary also make use of newly revised texts and readings from several other ancient treatises on anger.

Features

• An apparatus representing work on the text since the papyrus was opened in 1805
• A full explication of the Epicurean theory of natural anger as an emotion without pleasure
• One of the Herculaneum papyri that survived the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE

Philodemus was an important Epicurean philosopher active in southern Italy in the first century B.C.E. His treatise On Property Management, whose surviving part is completely translated here into English for the first time, focuses primarily on the vices or virtues involved in the acquisition and preservation of property and wealth. The extant remains of the work contain the most extensive and thorough treatment of property management found in any Hellenistic author. Philodemus criticizes rival writings by Xenophon and Theophrastus on the subject of oikonomia, or property management, and defends his own Epicurean views on the topic. More systematic and philosophical than rival approaches, the treatise clarifies many moral issues pertaining to the possession and preservation of property and wealth and provides plausible answers to a cluster of moral questions.

Pagan rhetor, (Neo-)Platonist philosopher, Christian theologian

This collection of essays is devoted to the rhetoric, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology of Marius Victorinus, a mid-fourth-century professor of rhetoric and philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life. Scholars from eight different countries, some of whom have not previously published in English, reflect on debates about his writings and theological development. These topics include Victorinus's deployment of philosophical sources for trinitarian theology, possible connections in his work to Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Gnosticism, as well as his contributions to Latin rhetoric and dialectic. Contributors include Jan Dominik Bogataj, Michael Chase, Nello Cipriani, Stephen A. Cooper, Volker Henning Drecoll, Lenka Karfíková, Josef Lössl, Václav Němec, Thomas Riesenweber, Guadalupe Lopetegui Semperena, Miran Špelič, Chiara O. Tommasi, John D. Turner, and Florian Zacher. The chapters in this volume are of great interest to students of late antique philosophy, Christian theology, and Latin rhetoric.

A close look at Phoenician religion

The Hebrew Bible contains a prohibition against divine images (Exod 20:2-5a). Explanations for this command are legion, usually focusing on the unique status of Israel's deity within the context of the broader Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. Doak explores whether or not Israel was truly alone in its severe stance against idols. This book focuses on one particular aspect of this iconographic context in Israel's Iron Age world: that of the Phoenicians. The question of whether Phoenicians employed aniconic (as opposed to iconic) representational techniques has significance not only for the many poorly understood aspects of Phoenician religion generally, but also for the question of whether aniconism can be considered a broader trend among the Semitic populations of the ancient Near East.

Features:

• More than fifty images and illustrations
• Examination of textual and archaeological evidence
• Application of art historical methods

Tina M. Sherman offers a first-of-its-kind, detailed analysis of prophetic passages that depict people as plants—from grasses and grains to fruit trees and grapevines—examining how the biblical authors exploited these metaphors to portray the condemnation and punishment of Israel and Judah in terms of the everyday work of crop farming and plant husbandry. Additionally, she explores how the prophetic authors employed plant imagery to construct national identities that emphasize the people’s collective responsibility for the kingdoms’ fate. Plant Metaphors in Prophetic Condemnations of Israel and Judah demonstrates the usefulness of combining conceptual metaphor theory with aspects of frame semantics in the analysis of patterns of thought and expression in biblical metaphor.

A thorough analysis of metaphor translation techniques used in Isaiah

In this study Benjamin M. Austin analyzes all the plant metaphors in Isaiah and classifies them according to the metaphor translation techniques used by the Septuagint translator. Austin illustrates how the translator took the context of each metaphor into account and demonstrates how the natural features of the plants under discussion at times influenced their translation. He argues that the translator tried to render metaphors vividly and with clarity, sometimes adjusting them to match the experience of his audience living in Egypt. Austin also examines metaphors in terms of their vehicles (the objects of comparison), so that the translation of similar metaphors can be compared.

Features

• A comparison of the Masoretic Text to the Septuagint and Targum
• A classification of metaphor translation strategies
• An introduction to the Hellenistic and the Jewish conception of metaphors

A Greek edition of Plotinus's philosophical works with notes for students of Classical Greek

Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, composed the treatise On Beauty (Ennead 1.6) as the first of a series of philosophical essays devoted to interpreting and elucidating Platonic ideas. This treatise is one of the most accessible and influential of Plotinus's works, and it provides a stimulating entrée into the many facets of his philosophical activity. In this volume Andrew Smith first introduces readers to the Greek of Plotinus and to his philosophy in general, then provides the Greek text of and English notes on Plotinus's systematic argument and engaging exhortation to foster the inner self. The volume ends with the text of and notes on Plotinus's complementary statements in On Intelligible Beauty (Ennead 5.8.1–2).

Features:

• An overview of Plotinus's life
• Background discussion of Plotinus's thought and outline of his philosophical system
• Analysis of the relationship of Plotinus's thought to Plato’s

An up-to-date analysis of the history of the ancient Near East and the Arameans

K. Lawson Younger Jr. presents a political history of the Arameans from their earliest origins to the demise of their independent entities. The book investigates their tribal structures, the development of their polities, and their interactions with other groups in the ancient Near East. Younger utilizes all of the available sources to develop a comprehensive picture of this complex, yet highly important, people whose influence and presence spanned the Fertile Cresent.

Features:

• The best, recent understanding of tribal political structures, aspects of mobile pastoralism, and models of migration
• A regional rather than a monolithic approach to the rise of Aramean polities
• Thorough integration of the complex relationships and interactions of the Arameans with the Luwians, the Assyrians, the Israelites, and others

An interdisciplinary study of the Persian Period

Various disciplines that deal with Achaemenid rule offer starkly different assessments of Persian kingship. While Assyriologists treat Cyrus's heirs as legitimate successors of the Babylonian kings, biblical scholars often speak of a "kingless era" in which the priesthood took over the function of the Davidic monarch. Egyptologists see their land as uniquely independently minded despite conquests, while Hellenistic scholarship tends to evaluate the interface between Hellenism and native traditions without reference to the previous two centuries of Persian rule. This volume brings together in dialogue a broad array of scholars with the goal of seeking a broader context for assessing Persian kingship through the anthropological concept of political memory.

Features

• Articles present the results of an international symposium held in Leiden, the Netherlands, 2014
• More than twenty illustrations
• Seventeen articles, an introduction, and a summary response

Scholars attempt to resolve the problem of the book of Ecclesiastes’ heterodox character in one of two ways, either explaining away the book’s disturbing qualities or radicalizing and championing it as a precursor of modern existentialism. This volume offers an interpretation of Ecclesiastes that both acknowledges the unorthodox nature of Qoheleth’s words and accounts for its acceptance among the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible. It argues that, instead of being the most secular and modern of biblical books, Ecclesiastes is perhaps one of the most religious and primitive. Bringing a Weberian approach to Ecclesiastes, it represents a paradigm of the application of a social-science methodology.

A long-standing tradition within biblical scholarship sets the Greek text of the Septuagint constantly in relationship with its supposed Hebrew or Aramaic Vorlage, examining the two together in terms of their grammatical alignment as a standard. Yet another tradition frames the discussion in different terms, preferring instead to address the Septuagint first of all in light of its contemporary Greek linguistic environment and only then attempting to describe its language and style as a text. It is this latter approach that William A. Ross employs in this textually based study of the Greek versions of Judges, a so-called double text in the textual history of the Septuagint. The results of his study offer a window into the Old Greek translation and its later revision, two distinct stages of Greek Judges with numerous instances of divergent vocabulary choices that reflect deliberateness in both the original selection and the subsequent change within the textual development of the book. Ross’s study illustrates the practicalities and payoff of a Greek-oriented lexicographical method that situates the language of the Septuagint squarely within its contemporary historical and linguistic context.

This volume foregrounds biblical interpretation within the African history of colonial contact, from North Atlantic slavery to the current era of globalization. It reads of the prolonged struggle for justice and of hybrid identities from multifaceted contexts, where the Bible co-exists with African Indigenous Religions, Islam, and other religions. Showcasing the dynamic and creative approaches of an emerging and thriving community of biblical scholarship from the African continent and African diaspora, the volume critically examines the interaction of biblical texts with African people and their cultures within a postcolonial framework. While employing feminist/womanist, postcolonial, Afrocentric, social engagement, creative writing, reconstruction, and HIV/AIDS perspectives, the authors all engage with empire in their own ways: in specific times, forms, and geography. This volume is an important addition to postcolonial and empires studies in biblical scholarship. The contributors are David Tuesday Adamo, Lynn Darden, H. J. M. (Hans) van Deventer, Musa W. Dube, John D. K. Ekem, Ernest M. Ezeogu, Elelwani B. Farisani, Sylvester A. Johnson, Emmanuel Katongole, Malebogo Kgalemang, Temba L. J. Mafico, Madipoane Masenya (ngwan’a Mphahlele), Andrew M. Mbuvi, Sarojini Nadar, Elivered Nasambu-Mulongo, Jeremy Punt, Gerrie Snyman, Lovemore Togarasei, Sam Tshehla, Robert Wafawanaka, Robert Wafula, Gerald West, Alice Y. Yafeh-Deigh, and Gosnell L. Yorke.

This volume returns to where initial interest in postcolonial biblical criticism began: the Hebrew Bible. It does so not to celebrate the significant achievements of postcolonial analysis over the last few decades but to ask what the next step might be. In these essays, established and newer scholars, many from the interstices of global scholarship, discuss specific texts, neo/post/colonial situations, and theoretical issues. Moving from the Caribbean to Greenland, from Ezra-Nehemiah to the Gibeonites, this collection seeks out new territory, new questions, and possibly some new answers. The contributors are Roland Boer, Steed Davidson, Richard Horsley, Uriah Y. Kim, Judith McKinlay, Johnny Miles, Althea Spencer-Miller, Leo Perdue, Christina Petterson, Joerg Rieger, and Gerald West.

A view of Persian and Hellenistic Judean communities through theological and socioeconomic lenses

Johannes Unsok Ro employs philological, historical, and sociological approaches to investigate the close connections between socioeconomic structures, social inequality, and theological developments in the Judean communities in Persian- and Hellenistic-era Palestine. Ro contends that competing points of view from communities of lay returnees, priestly returnees, and communities of resident Judeans and Samaritans were juxtaposed within the Hebrew Bible, which took shape during the postexilic period. By exploring issues such as the relationship between the shaping of the canon and literacy in the Judean community, the term strangers in the biblical law codes, the socioeconomic structures of Judean communities reflected in the biblical law codes, the development of the theological concept of divine punitive justice, the piety of the poor in certain psalms, and the concept of poverty in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ro illustrates that the communities behind each text and its redactions can be ascertained through sociological and theological lenses.

Features

• Demonstration that a theology of the poor materialized orally among the poor but found written expression among Levites
• Insight into the socioeconomic and theological concerns of the authorial groups behind various biblical law codes
• A case that biblical “poverty” sometimes refers to humility and a theologically reflected consciousness of lowliness toward God