The Apocrypha in the History of Early Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Tobias Nicklas
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Apostolic Fathers

Whereas the New Testament never actually quotes from any of the Apocrypha, we can, however, find evidence that at least some of the Apocrypha were indeed of impact for several New Testament writings. The same can be said about the Apostolic Fathers, some pieces of early Christian Apocrypha and, of course, many later authors. Whereas it is clear that neither Judith nor the books of the Maccabees were used only as historical sources—and that a text like 4 Maccabees never referred to by any writer—a full and detailed overview of the use and impact of the Old Testament Apocrypha remains a desideratum.

The Promises to David and their Entrance into Christianity—Nailing down a Likely Hypothesis

1973 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis C. Duling
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Hebrew Scriptures ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of

The fundamental outlook in what follows is that there is a fairly consistent, compact, yet expanding and developing promise tradition which is founded on the promises to David (and his descendants) in the Hebrew Scriptures; that this tradition in certain ways has been rejuvenated and strengthened in the early Christian period; and that it enters Christianity in connection with the application of these promises to Jesus' resurrection apart from the title Son of David itself, a title whose acceptance and adaptation in early Christianity appears on both historical and redaction critical grounds to be relatively late. The hypothesis is not totally new. My intention will be to put some older information into what will hopefully be an illuminating perspective, to draw out some implications from the perspective itself, and to nail down the hypothesis of the use of Old Testament texts in connection with the resurrection of Jesus a little tighter. I have not undertaken here to trace out a history of tradition in the New Testament such as can now be found in C. Burger's excellent study,Jesus als Davidssohn, though the direction of the paper will support the legitimacy of his starting point in early Christian formulae.

Material Culture and Historical Analysis

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-75
Author(s):  
Laura Salah Nasrallah
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Vital Importance ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship

This chapter outlines and argues for the vital importance of material culture in our historiographies of early Christianity in four parts. The chapter begins by defining material culture and then shows that material culture has long been included in the history of scholarship of the New Testament. Next, it surveys some of the key trends in the use of material culture for the study of women, gender, and sexuality in antiquity, and, finally, it suggests ways in which feminist materialist philosophy and history leads us to think more expansively about what is meant by material culture, focusing on the “matter” within it and harnessing theories of materiality to deepen our historical analysis of the context for the first production and reception of New Testament and other early Christian texts.

The New Testament and Early Christian Literature in the History of Gender and Sexuality

2019 ◽  
pp. xxvi-15
Author(s):  
Benjamin H. Dunning
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Literature

What is the place of the New Testament and early Christianity in the history of gender and sexuality? This essay explores this question in conversation with feminist and queer theory. It considers the terminology of sex, gender, sexual difference, sex acts, and sexuality both as theoretical concepts and in relation to New Testament and Early Christian Studies. It then surveys the question of ancient androcentrism and the methodological problem posed by the so-called linguistic turn, arguing that the ongoing study of gender and sexuality in the New Testament and early Christianity will, of necessity, continue to be a prismatic, if contested, exercise in writing “the history of the present.”

The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of

The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality provides a roadmap to the relevant problems, debates, and issues that animate the study of sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual difference in early Christianity. Over several decades, scholarship in the New Testament and early Christianity has drawn attention to the ways in which ancient Mediterranean conceptions of embodiment, sexual difference, and desire were fundamentally different from modern ones. But scholars have also sometimes pointed to important lines of historical continuity or genealogical connection between the past and the present. Indeed, these textual materials have played a foundational role in the history of reflection on issues of gender and sexuality in Western thought and continue to impact cultural and religious debates today. Research into these topics has produced a rich and nuanced body of scholarly literature that has contributed substantially to our understanding of early Christian history and also proved relevant to ongoing contemporary theological discussion. Leading scholars in the field offer original contributions by way of synthesis, critical interrogation, and proposals for future research trajectories.

Toward the Renewal of New Testament Christology

1986 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leander E. Keck
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Proper Subject

The study of NT Christology will be renewed if it recovers its proper subject-matter - christology - and its proper scope, the New Testament.The scholarly literature shows that what is called NT christology is, by and large, really the history of christological materials and motifs in early Christianity, and their ancestry. This massive preoccupation with history has, to be sure, produced impressive results. In fact, today it is difficult to imagine a study of NT christology which is not influenced by this historical analysis of early Christian conceptions of Christ and their antecedents. Nevertheless, the time is at hand to take up again what was set aside - an explicitly theological approach to NT christology, one which will be in-formed by the history of ideas but which will deliberately pursue christology as a theological discipline. It is doubtful whether the study of NT christology can be renewed in any other way. This essay intends to illumine and substantiate this claim by considering briefly the nature of christology, then by reviewing the turn to history and its consequences for the study of NT christology, and finally by sketching elements of an alternative.

New Testament Scholarship through One Hundred Years of the Harvard Theological Review

2008 ◽  
Vol 101 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 311-322
Author(s):  
Helmut Koester
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Church History ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Nag Hammadi ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
New Testament Studies ◽  
Apostolic Fathers

In order to answer the question of the involvement of Harvard Theological Review in the publication of essays relating to the New Testament, I have gone through all the published indices that were issued by the journal. The first index was published in 1938 and covered the journal's first thirty years; thereafter indices were published at ten-year intervals. The figures to which I shall refer in this paper are not necessarily exact, but they offer a reasonably good indication of the commitment of Harvard Theological Review to the field of New Testament studies. I did not limit the following survey to essays that deal with the New Testament proper, narrowly defined. There are numerous articles that contribute to New Testament studies indirectly, as they deal with the literature of postexilic Israel, the so-called Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, or rabbinic Judaism. Other areas of scholarly endeavor relating to the New Testament and early Christianity are the history of ancient Christianity, New Testament apocrypha including the writings from Nag Hammadi, the Apostolic Fathers, early Christian apologists, and ancient church history in general. Finally, many of these essays, often written by New Testament scholars, deal with material from the Greco-Roman world.

The Missing Rhetorical History Between Quintilian and Augustine

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-376
Author(s):  
Mike Duncan
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Classical Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical History ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Rhetorical Force ◽  
Apostolic Church

Current histories of rhetoric neglect the early Christian period (ca. 30–430 CE) in several crucial ways–Augustine is overemphasized and made to serve as a summary of Christian thought rather than an endpoint, the texts of church fathers before 300 CE are neglected or lumped together, and the texts of the New Testament are left unexamined. An alternative outline of early Christian rhetoric is offered, explored through the angles of political self-invention, doctrinal ghostwriting, apologetics, and fractured sermonization. Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion that eventually made peace with classical rhetoric, but as a rhetorical force in its own right, and comprised of more factions early on than just the apostolic church.

scholarly journals De fremmede, Det Gamle Testamente, vi

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Lundager Jensen
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Western World ◽  
Equal Part ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of

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.

The Church of the Reigning Lord

1948 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
R. Stuart Louden
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Pauline Epistles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Four Square ◽  
The Church

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.

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