Women on the Move in the New Testament

This article discusses the relation between gender and migration in the New Testament. Six cases of women on the move are presented: Mary, the mother of Jesus; the women in the Jesus movement; three women from the first generation of Christ-believers, Prisca, Lydia and Phoebe; and the unnamed slave woman from Acts 16:16. It is argued that these cases reveal a variety of causes for migration and also depict women who are quite different when it comes to social location and power. The article also discusses the importance of migrant networks in the first century, including religious networks such as the Jewish diaspora. It is argued that women played a key role in the migrant networks presented in New Testament texts.

The Meaning of Freedom and the Kingdom of God: A Struggle against the Fetishization of Our Present World

In their respective contexts of Roman empire and global neoliberal capitalism, the Jesus movement and the Zapatistas announce that another world is possible and that this world has irrupted in the struggle for that other possible world. This article argues that the practical and theoretical work of the Zapatistas offers to theologians a way to articulate the meaning of the kingdom of God as a world of hope and struggle that is actualized in and informed by struggles to resist fetishization.

Unexplored implications of the diversity of early belief in Jesus

The Christian canonical and authoritative texts are the result of complex and layered trajectories and should be understood to reflect - for the most part, debates within the Jesus movement—not struggles with external religious communities. Unexplored implications of the diversity of early belief in Jesus emerge out of deconstructing these debates. Contrary to traditional views and despite a complexity and a variety of contexts, Judaism, Gnosticism, and Paganism were not participants in this struggle. They were the subjects of a debate, (mostly) among Gentile believers, about what belief in Jesus should be.

Children in the New Testament World

At the turn of the 20th century, Clarence Herbert Woolston penned the words to the now famous children’s song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (published in Gospel Message 1-2-3 Combined, edited by J. Lincoln Hall, Adam Geibel, and C. Austin Miles [Philadelphia: Hall-Mack Company, 1915], p. 355). Woolston’s song is reflective both of the American Sunday School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and the growing trend in popular biblical studies to read Jesus as a friend of children. However, a few early monographs not excepting, children did not receive sustained attention in New Testament scholarship until the 21st century. This is distinct from studies and application of the metaphorical use of “children” and “child” as rhetorical or metaphorical images in New Testament texts, especially the Epistles, which is considered in a separate entry (“Child Metaphors in the New Testament,” forthcoming). With the advent of the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies and child theology in the 1980s and 1990s, the stage was set to study more closely both Jesus’s relationship with children as portrayed in the New Testament texts and the child characters, Jesus included, therein. In terms of sheer demographics, children are estimated to have made up roughly two-thirds of ancient agrarian societies, such as the 1st-century Mediterranean. As such, when the feminist principle of reclaiming characters from the “shadows” of the text is employed, the imprint of children can be seen across the New Testament. This widespread presence of children in 1st-century Judea and Galilee has also been confirmed by social science and archaeological investigations. Moreover, such investigations have revealed that the character and nature of childhood, or more properly, childhoods in these contexts, was radically different than many of the 21st-century assumptions. Most notably, the assumptions that the Jesus movement was solely positive for children, or that such positivity was unique, have been called into question. To this end, the study of children in the New Testament seeks to bring to light both the presence and lives of child characters in these texts and the children among their original audiences while avoiding anachronistic and supercessionist assumptions. What has resulted is a more nuanced reading both of the experience and character of childhoods in the 1st-century world and, as a result, of the New Testament texts.

Catching John in Four Nets? Competition, Qumran, Sacramentalism and Messianism

In his recent study on John the Baptist Joel Marcus suggests that John founded a sect that was in competition with the early Jesus movement. Marcus also suggests that John himself was a former member of the 'Qumran community'. His baptism is considered as a kind of sacrament in which the Holy Spirit was imparted. How secure are these proposals? In this discussion, we conclude that in the oldest literary witnesses – Q, Mark and Matthew – the relationship between John and Jesus is seen in terms of mutual agreement (despite Jesus’s obvious superiority) and there are no recognizable traces of serious competition with John’s disciples, even less a ‘Baptist sect’. The evidence used by Marcus to suggest that John was once a member of the ‘Qumran community’ connects John with broader patterns of thought in Second Temple Judaism, not simply sectarians at one location. That John imparted the Holy Spirit in a sacramental rite can only be supported by radically altering biblical readings. However, Marcus has suggested that in light of all this that John thought of himself not only as Elijah but as a kind of Messiah, with the role of his successor, the Coming One, being to destroy the chaff. In doing this, Marcus redesigns John as a kind of alternative Christ of Faith. However, the underlying ‘competition model’ needs to be rejected and replaced with one that sees Jesus as claiming to be a successor to John, his highly esteemed teacher.

Reading 3 John Within a Jewish Framework: An Overdue Reconsideration of the Text

<div> <div> <div> <p>This article challenges the interpretive decision made by many scholars to group 3 John with the rest of the Johannine Epistles (and sometimes John’s Gospel). This interpretative method fails to treat 3 John, as well as the rest of the Epistles, on their own terms. It also often places these texts within a hypothetical ‘Johannine Community’ and its various phases of development. However, if 3 John is read on its own, the text itself points us to interpret it within a Jewish framework. The seemingly lack of interest in Jews and Judaism, rather than being a sign of a later date when this group was no longer rooted in any Jewish community and no longer cared about such issues, is a sign that the epistle dates from a period before this community of Christ-believers began to markedly differentiate themselves from other Jews. These points, as well as the author’s use of τὸν ἐθνικός when describing the missionary work by some of those within the community, may also suggest that the conflict between the Elder and Diotrephes was related to disagreements over the nature of missionary work within the early Jesus movement. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Reading 3 John Within a Jewish Framework: An Overdue Reconsideration of the Text

<div> <div> <div> <p>This article challenges the interpretive decision made by many scholars to group 3 John with the rest of the Johannine Epistles (and sometimes John’s Gospel). This interpretative method fails to treat 3 John, as well as the rest of the Epistles, on their own terms. It also often places these texts within a hypothetical ‘Johannine Community’ and its various phases of development. However, if 3 John is read on its own, the text itself points us to interpret it within a Jewish framework. The seemingly lack of interest in Jews and Judaism, rather than being a sign of a later date when this group was no longer rooted in any Jewish community and no longer cared about such issues, is a sign that the epistle dates from a period before this community of Christ-believers began to markedly differentiate themselves from other Jews. These points, as well as the author’s use of τὸν ἐθνικός when describing the missionary work by some of those within the community, may also suggest that the conflict between the Elder and Diotrephes was related to disagreements over the nature of missionary work within the early Jesus movement. </p> </div> </div> </div>