This article argues that John’s christology affirms the material visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an “unseen” God to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents. Three pieces of evidence support this claim. The first is that “unseen” and “invisible” are not synonymous. A survey of Second Temple, biblical, and rabbinic literature reveals that one may not assume that all hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. Second, Jesus presents the Father as visible, however restricted that visibility may be to Jesus’s person. Third, John’s use of Isaiah suggests that the visibility of God in the theophanies is consonant with God’s visibility in Jesus.

A distinctive kind of theoretical and analytical discourse on ritual sacrifice evolved within the Indian and Jewish traditions, in Mīmāṃsā and in Talmudic literatures, respectively, introducing special modes of analyzing ritual sacrifice, and elaborate methods of conceptualizing the relations between text and practice. Despite the significant role that comparative studies of Vedic/Brahmanical and biblical/Jewish sacrifice played in the development of the modern study of religion, a detailed comparative study of these emic “sciences of sacrifice” has not yet been carried out.

This study examines two pericopes addressing a similar dilemma—the treatment of ritual byproducts—from the Jaimini-Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra and from the Babylonian Talmud, each discussed within its commentarial tradition. The texts reveal a significant degree of convergence (major differences notwithstanding) in terms of dialectic discourse, terminology, thought-structures, hermeneutic assumptions, and more. Factors that may have contributed to this convergence are discussed, as are the broader implications of this comparative experiment.

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 the story of Isaac, whose father offered him up on an altar, and reflects a priestly theology that views the priest himself as an offering.

Contrary to much of the commentary tradition, the book of Job is not primarily a discourse on how to properly speak (or withhold speech) about God in the midst of innocent suffering, nor is it aimed primarily at offering up the character of Job as an exemplar of how to suffer correctly (or incorrectly). Neither is it a treatise about human submission to (or rebellion from) God’s mysterious sovereign prerogative in permitting evil. It is instead a theological exploration of the dilemmas and demands of consolation that confront us given the inexplicable enormities of human suffering. Its unifying aim is to confront us with multiple voices that pull us into an open-ended—and decidedly pessimistic—reflection on what innocent suffering reveals to us about our creaturely limits and the fragility of our hope in God, features of the human condition that require our capacities for compassion to exceed our capacities for theological sense-making.

Toward the end of the Noahide commandment pericope in the Talmud (b. Sanh. 56–60), we find a sugya (pericope) featuring the prohibition on meat consumption imposed on Adam and its permission to the Noahides. This unique sugya pieces together halakic and haggadic sources that reinterpret the Garden of Eden story and address the complex relationship between humans and animals. This article will examine this sugya, focusing on its closing story, which describes a pietist who merits a gift of heavenly flesh. I will demonstrate that the story has many levels of meaning, grounded in both its immediate and wider contexts, and claim that it conceals a polemic with a similar Christian story (Acts 10), which describes impure meat that descends from the sky, undermining the cultural and halakic divisions between Jews and non-Jews. The comparison between the two stories reveals opposing worldviews with regard to law and lawlessness, utopia and redemption.

Scholarship assumes no significant differences among various “terms for anger” in the Hebrew Bible, but it does assume an essential difference between human and divine anger. This article challenges these preconceptions by presenting a novel semantic analysis of כעס, considered a “term for anger.” It shows that in Classical Biblical Hebrew, כעס does not denote anger but rather sorrow or insult associated with קנאה, “jealousy.” This analysis leads to a new, deeper, and more precise understanding of the phrase “to cause כעס to Yhwh” and of its meaning in biblical literature and theology in general and in Deuteronomistic writings in particular.

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 study of color and color language. The methodology followed will first study the concept of color in the Hellenistic world and in the Septuagint, as well as the cultural context in which the Septuagint translators lived. Subsequently, an approximate account of the “encyclopedic knowledge” that those translators possessed will be given, followed, finally, by a semantic analysis of χλωρός in the Septuagint. After applying this methodology, it will be shown that in the Septuagint, as in the Hellenistic world in general, natural color expresses both color and state, with color being the visual reflection of that state.

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 as manifestations of speech actions within this middle domain. In their own unique ways, the LXX as well as Philo, Paul, and Acts further corroborate this alternative. As a result, we may read ἐνευλογηθήσονται in Gen 12:3b LXX as a speech action middle: “to pronounce blessings.” The proposed reading promotes a better understanding of Abraham within Genesis LXX. Rather than a means to an end, Abraham remains at the center of God’s blessing as the earth’s families cry out: “God make me like Abraham!”

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 part shows that for the rabbis, the importance of covenant lay chiefly, instead, in its capacity to conceptualize the notion of Israel as a collective body defined by corporate responsibility. The third part suggests that this novel deployment of covenant arose in part to counter the individuating force of halakah as law, another innovation of the rabbis.

The editorial history of the two Pseudo-Clementine narratives known as the Recognitions and the Homilies is intricate, to say the least. From an ever-elusive “basic writing” spring two novelistic stories with extensive translation histories, subjected to significant editorial interventions, and anthologized alongside other late ancient and medieval texts. This article focuses on the addition of pseudonymous epistles as prefatory material for these Pseudo-Clementines and follows one of these letters in particular, the Epistula Clementis (Ep. Clem.). The Epistula Clementis accompanies the Latin Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions in a host of medieval anthologies concerned with Petrine hagiography and ecclesial succession, as well as histories, dialogues, and epistolary texts with anti-Judaic resonances. I argue that the Epistula Clementis, as a prefatory text, was integral to the success of the Recognitions in these later anthologies, highlighting the transformative power of the preface upon its associated text as well as the hermeneutical force of the anthology itself.

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 Jacques Derrida known as sous rature (under erasure). This form of limited cancellation aims to expel indifference and elicit a visceral reaction in the reader. The technique also has a philosophical and theological aim, namely, to work within Heidegger’s view of truth as a process of hiding and revealing. Finally, the limited cancellation, which both conceals and shows, fits with the theme of “messianic secret” in Mark’s Gospel, wherein Jesus both reveals and hides his identity.

There is no scholarly consensus on whether Paul’s mandates on head coverings were directed solely to married women or to all women in the Corinthian community. I suggest the discussion can be tentatively advanced by considering two factors that have not received the attention they warrant in conjunction with this passage: first, the presence of slaves in the community, and second, that the Genesis material which Paul alludes to in these verses was understood in some ancient thought as addressing the institution of marriage rather than creation. I propose that, in view of these considerations, it is more likely that Paul directed his exhortations towards free(d) married women.

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. Jesus insists that he will soon “go” to God so that unbelievers “will seek” him “but … not find” him (7:33–34; cf. 20:17). Foreshadowing this future, Jesus “goes up” to Judea but in such a way that leaves unbelievers unaware of his whereabouts, leaving them to ask, “Where is he?” (7:10–11). The article highlights half-truth as an important speech device in the episode and dialogue that follows. It also concludes that the episode is key to interpreting other scenes sharing a motif of misdirection, delay, and secret reversal.

This article asks what Paul’s claims about cosmology signify in terms of his competitive position on the nature and purpose of the moon. Specifically, in an age in which discourses and demonstrations involving the moon were rife, I argue that Paul is invoking principals shared by writers like Plutarch on the “double death” of the human being (first as soma on the earth, then as psyche/nous in orbit around and on the moon) and that he envisions an afterlife among the stars in pneumatic form that, to the degree it is anthropomorphic, is ideally male. I also posit that this aspect of Paul’s thought has been overlooked, in part due to the idiosyncratic-yet-pervasive translation of doxa in Paul as “glory” rather than in terms related to typologies and judgment, as it is elsewhere in Greek philosophical literature.

There is a wrinkle in the story of common features in West Syrian anaphoras, which John Fenwick called “the Missing Oblation.” In this article, I argue that the importance of the “missing oblation” highlighted by Fenwick, Robert Taft, Stefano Parenti and others needs to be balanced against the verbs of oblation that are present. The emphasis on the missing oblation, combined with the tendency to summarize the Antiochene structure with little reference to the importance of these verbs, results in an inaccurate and unbalanced sense of the degree to which the anaphora expresses the belief that the action of offering bread and wine is constitutive of the eucharistic action. This should lead to a caution with the unhelpful heuristic about the spiritualization of sacrifice in contemporary scholarship and the underemphasis of the belief in the materiality of the eucharistic sacrifice in writers such as John Chrysostom and earlier anaphoras.

The coinage of Bar Kosiba (Bar Kokhba), the leader of the Second Jewish Revolt (132–135/6 CE), has long been acknowledged as a source of data for understanding the ideology and goals of the rebel regime he headed. In particular, the imagery and legends on Bar Kosiba’s tetradrachms have been the subject of many interpretations and controversies. This article proposes that the facade of the temple on the obverse of Bar Kosiba’s tetradrachms and the four species on its reverse side are complementary symbols, joined together to represent the future inauguration ceremony of the restored temple. Furthermore, this imagery on the tetradrachms may have been intended to respond to the coins issued to commemorate the founding of the colony of Aelia Capitolina on the site of Jerusalem.

John Malalas presents Hephaestus as a king of Egypt who was deified as an inventor who made weapons and so provided his subjects with nourishment and strength in war. In the context of the Greco-Roman discussion of the progress of civilization and the identification of inventors, this may seem innocuous, even a commendation. But this discourse does not unite war and hunting, as Hephaestus’s inventions do. This combination seems to allude by inversion to the biblical ideal of harmony among people and between people and beasts, and so makes Hephaestus an agent of human delinquency. This denigration is confirmed by the magical initiation of Hephaestus’s ironsmithing. It is, however, by implication and allusion, rather than outright denunciation, that Malalas achieves his critique of the traditional gods and their deification.

The question of whether the divine commandments were observed prior to the revelation at Sinai has vast theological and hermeneutical implications. The first known systematic account that has reached us on the question of the antiquity of the commandments is found in the tenth-century Karaite scholar Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī’s Kitāb al-Anwār w-al-Marāqib. Qirqisānī discusses two theories: according to the first, the divine commandments were given already to Adam; and according to the second, God’s law was given in an accumulative process, the Torah being developed in accordance with the historical circumstances. This article analyzes the two theories and demonstrates that they are rooted in a Muslim-Jewish debate, conducted in the first half of the ninth century, about the Muslim principle of abrogation (naskh), and that the historical context of the argument on the subject probably was that of the interreligious debates that took place in Qirqisānī’s time.

What changes in the conceptualization of God, the ultimate healer, once God himself becomes the object of healing? This article examines the delicate tensions between divine and human agency in the Lurianic kabbalah, focusing on its grammar of action, and the complex relations between the subjects and the objects of this action. Rather than analyzing the relations between the kabbalists and their God through their conscious perceptions, the article explores how these relations emerge from the Lurianic discursive configurations and describes the role of medical discourse in their shaping. I claim that in order to perceive the transformation in the image of God in this early modern kabbalistic corpus, we should place at the heart of our inquiry the questions of who the patient is in the Lurianic medical clinic and how the relations between the human and the divine protagonists of the Lurianic drama are woven in this clinic.

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. With its divine epistolary authority and heavenly sevenfold “collection,” the Apocalypse attempts to exceed and denigrate Pauline authority in the Christ-movement, and it elevates a Jewish Christ-devotion based in priestly apocalyptic traditions. In the end, we can see John of Patmos both as a competitor to the Pauline tradition and as a witness to the earliest circulation of Pauline collections.