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281 books match the query 'Criticism, interpretation, etc' and 17 start with p

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Patristic Exegesis in Context

Exploring the Genres of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation

Miriam De Cock

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

The essays of Patristic Exegesis in Context examine the biblical exegesis of early Christians beyond the formal genre of biblical commentary. The past couple of decades have seen a broadening of perspective on the study of patristic exegesis; the phenomenon is increasingly situated within its various literary contexts and genres, and the definition of what counts as patristic exegesis is therefore widened. This volume thus situates itself within this emerging scholarly tradition, which aims not to give an account of exegetical strategies and methodologies as found primarily in exegetical commentaries and homilies, but to demonstrate the highly sophisticated nature of biblical exegesis in other genres, and the manifold uses to which this exegesis was put. Ancient Christian authors lived and breathed scripture; it served as their primary source of theological and liturgical vocabulary, their way of processing the world, their social ethic, and their mode of constructing self and communal identity. Scripture therefore permeates all ancient Christian literature, regardless of genre, and the various contexts in which interpretation of scripture took place resulted in a wide variety of uses of the church’s authoritative texts. The essays in this volume demonstrate the interpretive skill, creativity, and sophistication of early Christian authors in a myriad of other early Christian genres, such as poetry, paraphrase, hymns, martyr accounts, homilies, prophetic vision accounts, monastic writings, argumentative treatises, encomia, apocalypses, and catenae. Accordingly, the volume aims to help the modern person, who is used to hearing the Bible explained in explicitly expository situations (for example, in academic commentaries or religious sermons) to become more habituated to ancient ways of interacting with and expounding the biblical text. These essays attempt to contextualize various types of patristic exegesis, in order for us to glimpse the complex and diverse uses of the Bible in this period.

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Paul and Scripture

Extending the Conversation

Christopher D. Stanley

SBL Press, 2012

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.

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Paul as Infant and Nursing Mother

Metaphor, Rhetoric, and Identity in 1 Thessa

Jennifer Houston McNeel

SBL Press, 2014

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

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Paul in the Summa Theologiae

Matthew Levering

Catholic University of America Press, 2014

Aquinas's commentaries on St. Paul are well known and have received significant attention in the past few years. It is widely known, too, that Aquinas quotes Paul often in the Summa theologiae. This aspect of the Summa, however, has not been studied in detail. This book seeks to fill that lacuna in scholarship.

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Pedagogy in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity

Karina Martin Hogan

SBL Press, 2017

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

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Peter Comestor's Lectures on the Glossed Gospel of John

A Study with a Critical Edition and Translation

Peter Comestor

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

This monograph encompasses the first critical edition, translation, and historical study of a series of lectures from the cathedral school of Notre-Dame, Peter Comestor’s Glosses on the Glossed Gospel of John. Delivered in Paris in the mid-1150s, Comestor’s expansive lecture course on the Glossa ordinaria on the Gospel of John has survived in no fewer than seventeen manuscript witnesses, being preserved in the form of continuous transcripts taken in shorthand by a student-reporter (reportationes). The editor has selected the fifteen best witnesses to produce a critical edition and translation of the first chapter of Comestor’s lectures on the Gospel of John. In addition to the text of the original lectures, the edition includes appendices containing accretions to the lecture materials added by Comestor and his students, as well as the corresponding text of the Glossa ordinaria from which Comestor lectured. The Latin text and translation of Peter Comestor’s lectures are preceded by a wide-ranging critical study of the historical and intellectual context of Peter Comestor’s biblical teaching. This study begins with an outline of Comestor’s scholastic career and known works, with a detailed introduction to his Gospel lectures and the relevant historiography. Subsequently, a survey is made of the intellectual landscape of Comestor’s lectures: namely, the tradition of biblical teaching originating at the School of Laon, preserved in the Glossa ordinaria, and developed in the classroom by Peter Lombard and a succession of Parisian masters, notably Comestor himself. The following section examines the portion of the lectures presented in this book, encompassing an overview of its contents and structure, a description of Comestor’s teaching method and scholastic setting, a study of the text’s sources, and a consideration of Comestor’s participation and reception in the scholastic tradition. The final chapters contain a careful description of the manuscripts and editorial principles adopted in the Latin edition and translation.

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Plant Metaphors in the Old Greek of Isaiah

Benjamin M. Austin

SBL Press, 2019

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

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Postcolonialism and the Hebrew Bible

The Next Step

Roland Boer

SBL Press, 2013

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.

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Poverty, Law, and Divine Justice in Persian and Hellenistic Judah

Johannes Unsok Ro

SBL Press, 2018

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

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Powers Of Diaspora
Two Essays On The Relevance Of Jewish Culture
Jonathan Boyarin
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Reasserts the centrality of Jewish culture to contemporary discussions of diaspora

Diaspora: the scattering of a people, often described as a condition of helplessness and a pathology to be overcome. It can also be, as Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin assert in this provocative work, a unique source of power and strength. Focusing on Jewish experience, Powers of Diaspora forcefully argues that diasporic communities exercise a distinct form of cultural power in order to maintain themselves.
With reference to rabbinic culture and contemporary Jewish ethnography, the authors evoke the cultural strategies of Jewish diaspora—of regeneration through statelessness—that should prove increasingly relevant to the dilemmas and possibilities of the "new diasporas" born in the midst and in the aftermath of the modern world-system. Their work exposes the various methods by which peoples in diaspora "legislate" distinctive ways of life and establish formal communal structures, thus creating fluid yet effective boundaries between themselves and the others who surround them, and critiques the internal power dynamics that can sometimes result.Powers of Diaspora strongly reasserts the place of Jewish culture in contemporary discussions of diaspora, where the cultural politics of postcolonialism have remarginalized Jewish experience; at the same time, it brings insights from studies of other diasporas to bear on the study of Jews. In challenging the equation of diaspora with powerlessness, the book questions the modern nation-state ideal and suggests that diasporic cultural formations offer important clues toward an alternative means of relating culture to polity.
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Prayers and the Construction of Israelite Identity
Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher
SBL Press, 2019
Substantial insights into various identity discourses reflected in the biblical prayers

This collection of essays from an international group of scholars focuses on how biblical prayers of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods shaped identity, evoked a sense of belonging to specific groups, and added emotional significance to this affiliation. Contributors draw examples from different biblical texts, including Genesis, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Psalms, Jonah, and Daniel.

Features

Thorough study of prayers that play a key role for a biblical book’s (re)construction of the people’s history and identity

An examination of ways biblical figures are remodeled by their prayers by introducing other, sometimes even contradictory, discourses on identity

An exploration of different ways in which psalms from postexilic times shaped, reflected, and modified identity discourses

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Priests and Cults in the Book of the Twelve
Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer
SBL Press, 2016
Key essays that explore a range of attitudes toward clergy and ritual

This book discusses the depictions of the cult and its personnel in the twelve prophetic books commonly referred to as the Book of the Twelve or the Minor Prophets. The articles in the volume explore the following questions: How did these prophetic writers envision the priests and the Levites? What did they think about the ritual aspects of ancient Israelite faith, including not only the official temple cult in Jerusalem but also cultic expressions outside the capital? What, in their views, characterized a faithful priest and what should the relationship be between his cultic performance and the ways in which he lived his life? How does the message of each individual author fit in with the wider Israelite traditions? Finally, who were these prophetic authors, in which historical contexts did they live and work, and what stylistic tools did they use to communicate their message?

Features:

Essays investigate the ways in which key texts in the Book of the Twelve endorse, criticize, seek to reform, or seek to abolish the cult and clergy

Articles focus on the books of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Zephaniah, Zechariah, and Malachi, but include other texts

Exploration of how the attitudes towards cult and clergy in these key texts tie in with the attitudes found elsewhere in the Book of the Twelve

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Profaning Paul
Cavan W. Concannon
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A critical reconsideration of the repeated use of the biblical letters of Paul.

The letters of Paul have been used to support and condone a host of evils over the span of more than two millennia: racism, slavery, imperialism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, to name a few. Despite, or in some cases because of, this history, readers of Paul have felt compelled to reappropriate his letters to fit liberal or radical politics, seeking to set right the evils done in Paul’s name. Starting with the language of excrement, refuse, and waste in Paul’s letters, Profaning Paul looks at how Paul’s “shit” is recycled and reconfigured. It asks why readers, from liberal Christians to academic biblical scholars to political theorists and philosophers, feel compelled to make Paul into a hero, mining his words for wisdom. Following the lead of feminist, queer, and minoritized scholarship, Profaning Paul asks what would happen if we stopped recycling Paul’s writings. By profaning the status of his letters as sacred texts, we might open up new avenues for imagining political figurations to meet our current and coming political, economic, and ecological challenges.

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Prophets Male and Female
Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the
Jonathan Stökl
SBL Press, 2013
Because gender is an essential component of societies of all times and places, it is no surprise that every prophetic expression in the ancient social world was a gendered one. In this volume scholars of the biblical literature and of the ancient Mediterranean consider a wide array of prophetic phenomena. In addition to prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, the essays also look at prophecy in ancient Mesopotamia and early Christianity. Using the most current theoretical categories, the volume demonstrates how essential a broad definition of gender is for understanding its connection to both the delivery and the content of ancient prophecy. Attention to gender dynamics will continue to reveal the fluidity of prophetic gender performance and to open up the ancient contexts of prophetic texts. The contributors are Roland Boer, Corrine Carvalho, Lester L. Grabbe, Anselm C. Hagedorn, Esther J. Hamori, Dale Launderville, Antti Marjanen, Martti Nissinen, Jonathan Stökl, Hanna Tervanotko, and Ilona Zsolnay.
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Psalm Studies, Volume 1
Sigmund Mowinckel
SBL Press, 2014
Sigmund Mowinckel is widely recognized as one of the leading forces in Psalms research during the twentieth century. Indeed, the culmination of Mowinckel’s thought and work, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, continues to play a significant role in Psalms scholarship today. Not as well known are the seminal studies that prepared the ground for Mowinckel’s later work, the six Psalmenstudien that are translated here into English for the first time. In these studies Mowinckel explores with care and in detail such topics as: “'Awen and the Psalms of Individual Lament”; “YHWH’s Enthronement Festival and the Origin of Eschatology”; “Cultic Prophecy and Prophetic Psalms”; “The Technical Terms in the Psalm Superscriptions”; “Blessing and Curse in Israel’s Cult and Psalmody”; and “The Psalmists.” Anyone interested in Psalms study, especially the possible role of the New Year’s enthronement festival within Israel’s cult and its relation to the Psalter, will find much to consider in these classic works.
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Psalm Studies, Volume 2
Sigmund Mowinckel
SBL Press, 2014
Sigmund Mowinckel is widely recognized as one of the leading forces in Psalms research during the twentieth century. Indeed, the culmination of Mowinckel’s thought and work, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, continues to play a significant role in Psalms scholarship today. Not as well known are the seminal studies that prepared the ground for Mowinckel’s later work, the six Psalmenstudien that are translated here into English for the first time. In these studies Mowinckel explores with care and in detail such topics as: “'Awen and the Psalms of Individual Lament”; “YHWH’s Enthronement Festival and the Origin of Eschatology”; “Cultic Prophecy and Prophetic Psalms”; “The Technical Terms in the Psalm Superscriptions”; “Blessing and Curse in Israel’s Cult and Psalmody”; and “The Psalmists.” Anyone interested in Psalms study, especially the possible role of the New Year’s enthronement festival within Israel’s cult and its relation to the Psalter, will find much to consider in these classic works.
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Psychoanalytic Mediations between Marxist and Postcolonial Reading of the Bible
Tat-siong Benny Liew
SBL Press, 2016
The first sustained conversation between Marxism, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis in biblical studies

This volume pursues critical readings of the Bible that put psychoanalysis into conversation with Marxist and postcolonial criticism. In these essays psychoanalysis provides a way to mediate between Marxism's materialist groundings and postcolonialism's resistance against empire. The essays in the volume illuminate the way empire has shaped the biblical text by looking at the biblical texts' silences, ruptures, oversights, over-emphases, and inexplicable elements. These details are read as symptoms of a set of oppressive material relations that shaped and continue to haunt the text in the ascendancy of the text in the name of the West.

Features:

Essays and responses from multiple perspectives and geographical locations, including Africa, Australia, Oceania, Latin America, and North America

Psychoanalysis that considers how the traumas of colonialism manifest both materially and psychically

Close readings of biblical texts

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