In the Name of Jesus: A Conversation with Critics

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-169
Author(s):  
Graham Twelftree
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Demon Possession ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Demonic

AbstractInteracting with critics, significant aspects of the project are set out: there was a range of approaches to exorcism from magicians to charismatic magicians, through to charismatics. Jesus is to be placed between the charismatic magicians and the later charismatics. For the Fourth Gospel, exorcisms were unable to reflect adequately on Jesus. Yet demon possession is maintained not for the few deranged but for the many, showing the demonic is fought not with the hand of a healer but with accepting Jesus, his truth and honoring God as one's Father. In the early second century there appears to be no interest in exorcism. Around the middle of the second century there was a renewed interest in exorcism, beginning in Rome. Often influenced by the Fourth Gospel, other material is evidence that the demonic was confronted other than by exorcism, indicating the ministry of Jesus was not always determinative for early Christians.

Quintus Fabius Maximus and the Dyme affair (Syll3684)

1995 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Kallet-Marx
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Supervision ◽  
The Many ◽  
Vexed Question ◽  
The City ◽  
Formal Status

The most striking example of Roman intervention in the affairs of mainland Greece between the Achaean and Mithridatic Wars is provided by an inscription now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This stone bears the text of a letter to the city of Dyme in Achaea from a Roman proconsul named Q. Fabius Maximus, which describes his trial and sentencing of certain men of Dyme whom he had judged responsible for a recent disturbance in that city. One crux to be resolved is chronological: A date of c. 115 b.c. has long been generally accepted, but recently evidence from another, still unpublished inscription has been thought to point to the year 144. Further, the letter of Fabius Maximus has long been held to exemplify the close supervision that most scholars, regardless of their position on the vexed question of Greece's formal status after 146, assume was exercised over Greece by Roman commanders in Macedonia from the time of the Achaean War. The document has also often been cited to bolster the claim that Rome pursued in second-century Greece a conscious policy of suppressing democracy or the political aspirations of the lower class. This is not, of course, the place for reassessment of these old, complex controversies. My purpose here is rather to show that interpretation of the letter of Fabius Maximus has not always been sufficiently mindful of the many obscurities of the text and, consequently, of the events that lie behind it; too often the great lacunae in our knowledge have been filled with assumptions that beg the questions that are under debate.

Exorcism and the Defeat of Beliar in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham H. Twelftree
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Adverse Impact ◽  
Orthodox Christianity ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Demonic

AbstractIn the light of a growing consensus that the Testaments is a Christian work, perhaps from Syria and, arguably, from the middle of the second century, it has potential to shed light on the understanding of exorcism in proto-orthodox Christianity of the period. As Beliar’s adverse impact on people is seen to be expressed in terms of inner struggles and broken relationships, rather than physical affliction, his defeat is proposed primarily in terms of acts of the mind and behaviour. The few references to exorcism show its use as part of the defeat of Beliar, though also primarily as a metaphor for the ministry of Jesus and his followers. This locates the Testaments over against those documents that show no interest in the demonic or exorcism, and between those texts that promote exorcism and those that take the demonic to be defeated in other ways.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Adrych ◽  
Robert Bracey ◽  
Dominic Dalglish ◽  
Stefanie Lenk ◽  
Rachel Wood
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Ancient Religion ◽  
The Many ◽  
Material Record

This chapter focuses on two marble tauroctony statue groups that are now in the British Museum’s collection. Both are thought to be originally from Rome and date roughly to between the end of the first and the second century AD. In this opening chapter, we look at several of the many interpretations that have been offered for the tauroctony and discuss the image’s development in the Roman world. At the heart of all such interpretations lies the problem of how to reconstruct an ancient reality based on scant remains. These carefully constructed compositions, painstakingly restored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, simultaneously present us with the characteristic representation of Mithras in the Roman Empire, yet also show the difficulties in reconstructing ancient religion from a fragmented material record.

Was Heracleon a Valentinian? A New Look at Old Sources

2006 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kaler ◽  
Marie-Pierre Bussières
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
New Look

Heracleon was a great second-century Christian thinker, and the author of the first known commentary on a New Testament text, the Gospel of John. Although we do not have Heracleon's commentary itself, Origen integrated a great deal of it into his own commentary on the fourth gospel.

The Farewell Discourses and the History of Johannine Christianity.

1981 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Painter
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Johannine Community ◽  
Internal Division

The question of ‘traces’ of history in the Fourth Gospel is not new. In 1968 Louis Martyn published hisHistory and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. His thesis, reduced to utter simplicity, was that the Gospel is a drama presented at two levels, one concerning Jesus and the other concerning the community of the evangelist in which the Jesus tradition had been shaped. Thus the Fourth Gospel is seen as a Jewish Christian composition shaped in the dialogue/conflict with the synagogue. More recently Raymond Brown has given us his own penetrating reconstruction of the history of the Johannine community. This is presented in four phases: from its beginning until the exclusion from the synagogue; the situation at the time the Gospel was written; internal division (Epistles); and the final disappearance of both groups in the second century, absorbed, either by the emerging great church or by Docetism, Gnosticism and Montanism.

John and other Gospels

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold W. Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Good News ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Gospel Of Thomas ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Early Christians found many ways to proclaim their ‘good news’, prominently including the kind of popular biography represented by the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The relationship of the Fourth Gospel to those texts has long intrigued readers. The patristic claim that John supplemented the Synoptics gave way in the twentieth century to the opinion that John was independent. Opinion has recently shifted. While the compositional process complicates the picture, the Fourth Evangelist probably did draw on the Synoptics. He did so creatively, shaping his account to make distinctive theological and Christological points. He also drew from a broad tradition of Jesus’ teaching, evident in such texts as the Gospel of Thomas. Yet the Gospel also works creatively with elements of Synoptic teaching. The Fourth Gospel subsequently attained a wide acceptance and numerous echoes in the second century, including the unknown Gospel on Papyrus Egerton 2.

The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel

2005 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent Nongbri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Justin Martyr ◽  
John's Gospel

The thesis of this paper is simple: we as critical readers of the New Testament often use John Rylands Greek Papyrus 3.457, also known as P52, ininappropriate ways, and we should stop doing so. A recent example will illustrate the problem. In what is on the whole a superb commentary on John's gospel, D. Moody Smith writes the following about the date of John:For a time, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century, the possibility that John was not written, or at least not published, until [the] mid-second century was a viable one. At that time Justin Martyr espoused a logos Christology, without citing the Fourth Gospel explicitly. Such an omission by Justin would seem strange if the Gospel of John had already been written and was in circulation. Then the discovery and publication in the1930s of two papyrus fragments made such a late dating difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. The first and most important is the fragment of John chapter 18 … [P52], dated by paleographers to the second quarter of the second century (125–150); the other is a fragment of a hithertounknown gospel called Egerton Papyrus 2 from the same period, which obviously reflects knowledge of the Gospel of John…. For the Gospel of Johnto have been written and circulated in Egypt, where these fragments were found, a date nolater than the first decade of the second century must be presumed.

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