A Canonical History of the Old Testament Apocrypha

Author(s):  
Lee Martin McDonald

From ancient times, those Jewish religious writings now regularly identified as “Apocrypha” have had a varied history of meaning and function in the churches and in their scope and presence in Bibles. The term itself has ranges in meaning from hidden and sacred to spurious and rejected. McDonald focuses on history of the recognition of the emergence and change of the meaning of the Apocrypha as well as how these religious texts functioned in the communities that welcomed them as Scripture, or as valued and readable texts for church (“ecclesiastical”) use, but not as sacred Scripture. Their history of use and rejection is best reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, Josephus, the Early Church Fathers, ancient canon lists, major manuscripts, translations, and church council decisions.

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyuk J. Kwon

This contribution explores the presence of Psalm 118 (117 LXX) in Luke-Acts. The Wirkungsgeschichte of Psalm 118 will be traced by means of a twofold approach: from a traditional-historical and a hermeneutical angle with regard to the reception history of Psalm 118. Firstly, in terms of a traditional-historical, otherwise known as a diachronic, approach, the background of Psalm 118 and evidence of the use and application of Psalm 118 in the tradition (namely in the ancient Jewish materials, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Targums, and Rabbinics, and the New Testament books of Mark, Matthew, Luke, Acts, John, Romans, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, 1 Peter, Hebrews, Revelation, as well as in terms of Church Fathers 1 Clement and Barnabas and the Apocryphon Thomas) will be discussed. Secondly, on the hermeneutical level, otherwise known as the synchronic approach, the function and interpretation of the quotations of Psalm 118 in its new context of Luke-Acts will be examined. In terms of the latter approach, attention will be paid to investigating a possible underlying �New Exodus Motif�.


Author(s):  
Erik Gray

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.


Author(s):  
Hans J. Lundager Jensen

On the basis of examples of attitudes towards foreigners in the Old Testament, the internal tension between a tendency to eliminate the differences between Israel and foreigners and an insistence on maintaining the fundamental distance between Israel and foreigners, even in eschatological perspective, is presented. The a priori assumption of the Israelitic understanding of themselves is not a differentiation between nature and culture (between non-human and the human), but between the human in general and the specifically Israelitic. This difference cannot be transgressed without the break-down of the Israelitic system. Identity is understood here as establishing differences. But the dialectic between the Old Testament beginnings which are negated by the history of Israel, continues in the New Testament which negates the history of Israel and yet which allows the Old Testament to remain as an equal part of the canon. The practical universalism (modernism) of the Western world and the eradication of ethnic differences is thereby partly anticipated as a problematic in the Christian canon and partly given an important corrective.


1948 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
R. Stuart Louden

We can trace a revival of theology in the Reformed Churches in the last quarter of a century. The new theological interest merits being called a revival of theology, for there has been a fresh and more thorough attention given to certain realities, either ignored or treated with scant notice for a considerable time previously.First among such realities now receiving more of the attention which their relevance and authority deserve, is the Bible, the record of the Word of God. There is an invigorating and convincing quality about theology which is Biblical throughout, being based on the witness of the Scriptures as a whole. The valuable results of careful Biblical scholarship had had an adverse effect on theology in so far as theologians had completely separated the Old Testament from the New in their treatment of Biblical doctrine, or in expanding Christian doctrine, had spoken of the theological teaching of the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, the Johannine writings, and so on, as if there were no such thing as one common New Testament witness. It is being seen anew that the Holy Scriptures contain a complete history of God's saving action. The presence of the complete Bible open at the heart of the Church, recalls each succeeding Christian generation to that one history of God's saving action, to which the Church is the living witness. The New Testament is one, for its Lord is one, and Christian theology must stand four-square on the foundation of its whole teaching.


Author(s):  
Steven A. Barnes

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the role played by the Gulag in the Soviet polity. It provides a close study of the camps and exiles in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan along with a general reconsideration of the scope, meaning, and function of the Gulag in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. Focusing on Karaganda offers a number of benefits to an examination of the history of the Gulag. First, a concentrated look at a single locality allows for a study of the massive phenomenon of the Gulag without giving up the chronological breadth that is important to understanding shifts in its operations through the period (approximately 1930–57) when it was at its height. Second, exploring the Gulag at the local level reveals the operation of the system at the very point of contact between Soviet authority and its detained subjects. The chapter then describes the sources upon which the book is based, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.


2021 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Gilles Dorival

The role of the Septuagint in the building of the Christian identity during the first Christian centuries is more important than it is generally said. The word ‘testament’ or ‘covenant’, for example, comes from the Septuagint, via the New Testament. The Greek and Latin liturgies are filled with references to the Septuagint. The same is true in the case of the Christian spirituality: for instance, the concept of the Christian life as a migration comes from the Septuagint. The Christian hermeneutics is indebted to the Greek Bible: even if knowledge of the allegorical method comes from the Greek philosophers (and Philo), support could be found for it in the verses of the Greek Bible. Finally, the theological vocabulary of the Christians was founded upon the Greek Bible. For instance, in the case of the doctrine of the Trinity, the word ‘person’ comes from the Septuagint. Furthermore, some passages of the Greek translation gave rise to theological interpretations which are not possible on the grounds of the Hebrew text. In Gen 1:2, the Septuagint reads ‘the earth was invisible and unorganized’ and this came to be quoted both in support of the creation of matter ex nihilo. In Exod 17:16, where the Hebrew has a difficult hapax legomenon, the Greek speaks about the ‘hidden hand’ with which the Lord makes war against Amalek; this ‘hidden hand’ played a role in the Christian doctrine of the Logos, which is hidden in the Old Testament.


Antioxidants ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 704
Author(s):  
María Herranz-López ◽  
Enrique Barrajón-Catalán

Natural products have a long history of use for skincare and the improvement of the appearance and function of aged and/or damaged skin [...]


1997 ◽  
Vol 53 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Buchner

This article seeks to explore what the inspired text of the Old Testament was as it existed for the New Testament authors, particularly for the author of the book of Hebrews. A quick look at the facts makes. it clear that there was, at the time, more than one 'inspired' text, among these were the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text 'to name but two'. The latter eventually gained ascendancy which is why it forms the basis of our translated Old Testament today. Yet we have to ask: what do we make of that other text that was the inspired Bible to the early Church, especially to the writer of the book of Hebrews, who ignored the Masoretic text? This article will take a brief look at some suggestions for a doctrine of inspiration that keeps up with the facts of Scripture. Allied to this, the article is something of a bibliographical study of recent developments in textual research following the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-431
Author(s):  
Lidia Napiórkowska

Abstract This article presents a new perspective on the meaning and function of the Syriac construction hwayt qāṭēl used with a non-past reference. Beginning with the traditional method of cross-linguistic comparison, the author contextualizes the construction in question within a pragmatic- cognitive framework of general linguistics, an approach that has so far been largely overlooked in Syriac studies. The language used here for comparison is the literary Christian of Urmi, a modern dialect of Aramaic, whose verbal system presents itself as a valid typological parallel for Syriac. Thus, through analysing the renditions of hwayt qāṭēl in Christian Urmi Neo-Aramaic within the corpus of the New Testament, the semantics and function of the Syriac hwayt qāṭēl receive precise characteristics, followed by an attempt to explain the use of the past tense form hwayt (perfect) for the present-future reference. An additional brief treatment of other command-related forms in Syriac, such as the imperative and imperative-derived constructions, contributes further, more detailed observations on the Syriac verbal system.


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