scholarly journals The prophet like Moses (Dt 18:15–22): Some trajectories in the history of interpretation

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph W. Stenschke

This article traces some of the trajectories of the Deuteronomic announcement of a ‘prophet like Moses’. After examining its meaning in the immediate context, the article first traces references to this figure in early Jewish sources. It then examines how Jesus is portrayed as the prophet of Deuteronomy 18 in the Gospels. What is meant when people ask whether Jesus could be the prophet? Would he himself identify with this figure through word and deed? What implications would such an identification have had for his contemporaries? Why does this designation only appear rarely outside of the Gospels? A further trajectory is the quotation of Deuteronomy 18:15,19 in Acts 3:22–23. What is meant by Peter’s identification of Jesus as the prophet like Moses? What does Peter link with the acceptance and rejection of this prophet? How has Luke altered the text of Deuteronomy in the application of this prediction to Jesus? The article closes with a summary and suggests implications for the understanding of early Christian rhetoric, of Israel’s response and of prophets in today’s church and society.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article is placed within the discipline of biblical studies and Jewish studies (for the reception history in early Judaism). An in-depth study of the reception of the Deuteronomic prophet like Moses in Acts 3, where the prediction is explicitly quoted and declared to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ, reveals how this reference functions for the Christology of Acts, its proclamation of the Gospel and its understanding of Israel. Those revering Moses must now listen to Jesus. To reject Jesus means to forfeit one’s membership in the people of God. This challenges studies which do not pay sufficient attention to this claim.

Author(s):  
Thomas Tops

Summary The present study analyses recent criticisms against the use of modern-historical methodologies in Biblical Studies. These methodologies abstract from the historical horizon of the researcher. In order to relate properly to the historicality of the researcher, historical objectivism needs to be transformed into historical hermeneutics. Recent developments in the historical methodology of biblical scholars are unable to reckon with the historicality of the researcher due to the partial or incorrect implementation of Gadamer’s views on reception history. I analyse the views of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gadamer on historicality and contend that the study of reception history is a necessary condition for conducting historical study from within the limits of our historicality. Reception history should not be a distinct methodological step to study the “Nachleben” of biblical texts, but needs to clarify how the understanding of these texts is already effected by their history of interpretation. The awareness of the presuppositions that have guided previous interpretations of biblical texts enables us to be confronted by their alterity. This confrontation calls for a synthesis between reception-historical and historical-critical methodology that introduces a new paradigm for conducting historical study in Biblical Studies in dialogue with other theological disciplines.


Author(s):  
Ian Boxall

The chapter describes the discipline of reception history as the study of the ongoing use, interpretation, and impact of a biblical text. If the history of interpretation has often focused on the ways biblical texts are understood in commentaries and theological writings, reception history also considers how a book was received in spirituality and worship, in music, drama, literature, visual art, and textual criticism. Criteria for selecting and organizing materials useful for reception history are discussed, and there is a review of recent attempts to provide broad overviews of Revelation’s reception history, along with specific examples of the value of the discipline for interpreting Revelation.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Heron

The second chapter seeks to deepen and extend Agamben’s analysis by describing the terms of a specifically Christian technology of power. Its point of departure is Erik Peterson’s suggestion that the form of political action specific to Christianity coincides with the Church’s appropriation of the practice that in the ancient Greek polis was termed leitourgia; a suggestion which in turn stimulates a reappraisal of Foucault’s influential notion of pastoral power. “Pastoral power,” the chapter argues, on the basis of a detailed reconstruction of the semantic history of the term (laos) that in the Greek biblical tradition designates the “people” as the referent of pastoral intervention, is more precisely conceived as “liturgical power.” Only by emphasising its liturgical dimension, it contends, can we fully grasp the stakes of the process that Foucault himself suggestively described as the “institutionalisation of the pastorate” and which coincides with the establishment of a fundamental division in the single people of God.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Horrell

This article takes its point of departure from the effort to reflect critically on how my racial/ethnic identity shapes what I (and the academic tradition of which I am a part) see and ask (and do not see or ask) in our interpretative work. Selections from commentaries are used to illustrate the history of interpretation of Gal. 3.28, and the findings are interrogated in the light of questions and issues deriving from the field of ‘whiteness’ studies. For a start, such studies may provoke us to think about how far Christianness – and unspoken assumptions about its superiority – shapes what is said about this text (e.g., in the frequent contrast drawn between Jewish exclusivism and Christian inclusivism). Furthermore, we may ask about the particular location of this interpretative tradition not only in religious terms, but also in racial ones. The changing contours of interpretation help to show how it is, in part at least, shaped by its contexts of production in the white, Christian West: it may thus be ‘particularized’ in both religious and racial terms. Just as whiteness studies has criticized the tendency of the ‘white’ perspective to remain ‘unlabelled’, unspecific, implicitly ‘human’ and universal, so too we may critique the tendency of this tradition of biblical studies to avoid labelling and recognizing its own specificity. Doing so, moreover, may help us not only to acknowledge our own particularity, but also to recognize why we need the insights of differently located and embodied interpreters to reach towards richer insight. Recognizing and labelling the particularity of our own perspective is thus one step towards equalizing the value of the various (labelled and unlabelled) perspectives in biblical studies.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Melissa L. Archer

This essay reviews Rev. 1.1–6.17 of Craig Koester’s Revelation commentary (Anchor Yale Bible, 2014). The essay was originally presented as part of a three-person panel review on the commentary presented to the Society for Pentecostal Studies Biblical Studies section at the 2014 Society for Biblical Literature meeting. Koester’s commentary represents a major contribution to Apocalypse studies. Along with a critical review of the commentary proper, Koester’s inclusion of hymns in his introductory chapter is discussed as an important acknowledgement of the role of worship in the Apocalypse. Comment is made on Koester’s history of interpretation sections that introduce each major section of the text of Revelation under consideration. This review seeks to demonstrate the relevance of Koester’s work for Pentecostal readers who have often read and interpreted Revelation from a dispensational perspective.


1966 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-425
Author(s):  
James Brown

‘In general, theological ethics has handled this command of God [the fourth Mosaic commandment] … with a casualness and feebleness which certainly do not match its importance in Holy Scripture or its decisive material significance’ (Church Dogmatics, 111.4, P. 50). Thus Karl Barth in the English translation of his Kirchliche Dogmatik (hereafter referred to as CD.). His own treatment is neither fragmentary nor perfunctory. There are references to ‘Sabbath’ in the indexes of six of twelve volumes of the Dogmatics so far published. The particular discussion of the Fourth Commandment occurs in his treatment of Special Ethics in CD. 111.4, where ‘the one command of God’ the Creator is set forth ‘in this particular application’ of ‘The Holy Day’ (p. 50). But for Barth the scriptural references to Sabbath rest have relevance to the doctrines of God, and Revelation; to the relation of God's Eternity to man's temporal being; to the biblical conception of Creation as the setting for the Covenant history of the Old Testament and the New Testament fulfilment of the divine purpose in redemption in Christ, to be completed and perfected in the ‘rest that remaineth to the people of God’ (Heb. 4.9). The treatment of the topic throughout the Dogmatics constitutes a corpus of exegesis and doctrine of which even a summary statement such as is here attempted might well be a useful contribution towards modern efforts at rethinking the Christian use of the Lord's Day.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 260-267
Author(s):  
Z. Rustemova ◽  

The article devotes theespesialities of Showinq of Abay, Ibyray`s traditions in Kazakh children literature for beqinninq of ХХ century. So, author have been qivinq his opinion to problems of thematic, ideas, qarmony, structurinq and Same in verses of poets-democtrats. In the history of culture, as you know, which people have developed and developed over the centuries, has its own national Outlook, a peculiar philosophy, folklore heritage, in a word, its own spiritual world. It is proved that at different times one of the richest zhurttardyns comes to the Treasury of national spirituality of the people. In recent years, the amount of spiritual wealth has been achieved further, both in different ways and in terms of aesthetic effect. One of the most striking examples of this concept is the Kazakh written children's literature. Today it is one of the richest in Kazakh literature, the history of which has a deep, philosophical and aesthetic meaning, always rich in thought and content.The study of the subject of literature, on the basis of which comprehensive education of children should be an in-depth study and practical use of various types of folklore for children, samples of written literature.


1994 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. F. Craffert

Redefining Paul’s conflict in Galatia: The letter to the Galatians through the lense of the social sciences Traditional attempts at identifying Paul’s oppponents in the letter to the Galatians are methodologically stamped by a history-of-ideas approach; this is accompanied by at least two interpretive traditions (one focusing on the Reformation question of righteousness by works or by faith, and the second by the inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God). After a social- scientific methodology is introduced, three facets of Paul’s social realities are discussed: communication in a predominantly oral culture, Judaism as a first-century religious phenomenon, and the household institution. It is suggested that these provide us with an opportunity for redefining the conflict as a conflict on Paul’s honour and authority.


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