Piety/Godliness in Early Christianity and the Roman World

By the beginning of the 1st century ce, piety/godliness (Greek: εὐσέβεια; Latin: pietas) came to entail the dutiful fulfilment of one’s obligations to one’s household, homeland, and gods. It could also describe one’s respectful attitude toward and treatment of the dead, guests, hosts, and supplicants as well as describe keeping an oath. Numerous studies on the use of piety in the New Testament have been concerned about identifying the cultural backgrounds that influenced the biblical authors’ deployment of the term and whether such use retains its Greek and Roman meanings, derives from Hellenistic Judaism, or reflects a “Christianization” of the term to encapsulate the complete Christian life, including both proper belief and practice. Outside of the field of biblical studies, philologists in classics have studied the evolution and use of the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates in ancient Greek literature, where the term had significant purchase in philosophical literature. The Latin virtue of pietas gains significant prominence in political discourse near the dusk of the Roman Republic and at the dawn of the Roman Empire with the publication of Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustus’s restoration of priesthoods and temples. Although the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates occur in Acts and 2 Peter, the majority of attention to the significance of this term in early Christian literature has centered around its meaning and function in the canonical Letters to Timothy and Titus, also known as the Pastoral Epistles. In particular, scholars have been concerned about whether the use of the term in the Pastorals reflects the respective author’s accommodation to Greek society (and thus a further development away from the earliest/more authentic/Pauline articulations of the Christian faith) or rather reflects enculturation within Hellenistic Jewish thought. Neither the historical Jesus nor Paul in his undisputed letters describe the ideal Christian life in terms of piety—thus it remains a fascinating topic to consider the social and political implications of early Christians utilizing this terminology which held significant cultural capital and prestige in its Greek and Roman cultural contexts.

Jacob Gordin: The Religious Crisis in Jewish Thought

This article offers an English translation of an essay published in 1946 by Jacob Gordin (1896–1947), a Russian-Jewish philosopher of religion, who is considered the founding figure of the postwar Paris School of Jewish Thought (École de pensée juive de Paris). In “The Religious Crisis in Jewish Thought”, Gordin presented a sweeping meta-narrative of the history of Jewish thought, formulated as a history of repeated “religious crises”, both existential and intellectual. In Gordin’s condensed narrative, these crises could be detected in the life and philosophy of the most canonical Jewish thinkers inside and outside the tradition: from Abraham the biblical patriarch to Hermann Cohen, through a diverse list including the rabbinical sage Elisha Ben-Abuyah, Philo, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza. In an introduction to Gordin’s text, I provide a brief biography, locate Gordin in existentialist discourse of the early postwar years, and discuss the affinities between Gordin’s “The Religious Crisis” and Levinas’s and Sartre’s early reflections on the Jewish question.

Hope for the Future of New Testament Theology

This paper presents the author’s hope for changes in New Testament (NT) theology particularly as currently experienced in American Christian culture. Those changes are based on exegetical work that seeks to place the NT texts into their Jewish first-century thought world. The first part of the paper presents examples of theological concepts that have crept into NT exegesis, translations, and Christian thinking, concepts that appear to be foreign to or contrary to that original-audience thought world. The second part of the article seeks to present a reading of Rom 3:21–26 that better represents Paul’s thinking than what is found in some English translations that read the text through the lenses of some of the foreign concepts mentioned in Part 1. The resulting vision for the future of NT theology is twofold: for NT theologies to self-critically rid themselves of the infiltration of foreign concepts, and for the field to better ground its work in exegesis and translations that better respect the Jewish thought world of the texts.

So Near, So Far: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch

The purpose of my article is to shed light on the relationship of proximity and distance that linked two major figures of 20th-century French philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch. This article presents a comparative study of their respective views on Metaphysics and Ethics. It also deals with their contribution to the reflection on the fact of “Being Jewish”, the theme that was at the center of the preoccupations of these two artisans of the renewal of Jewish thought in France after the Shoah. I conduct a comparative analysis between the key concepts of their philosophy: Levinas’ “There is” and “Otherness” and Jankélévitch’s “I-know-not-what” and “Ipseity”. I point out the difference between Levinas’ ethics of Otherness and Jankélévitch’s morality of paradox. In the section on “Being Jewish”, I highlight the crucial distinction they both made between racism and anti-Semitism and the very different meaning they gave to it.

Exegesis and Politics Between East and West: Nachman Krochmal, Moses Mendelssohn, and Modern Jewish Thought

Recent scholarship on modern Jewish thought has sought to overcome the field’s Germanocentrism by recovering diverse visions of Jewish life across eastern and western Europe. While studies typically emphasize either striking differences or surprising affinities between these settings, I use the neglected eastern European philosopher Nachman Krochmal to highlight a strategy of creative appropriation and redirection—an eastern European strategy of breaking with German-Jewish philosophy precisely by deploying that tradition’s own resources. One of modern Jewish philosophy’s early episodes, I argue, is a politically charged engagement with biblical exegesis involving Krochmal and the German-Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn. Implicitly drawing on yet revising the treatment of biblical interpretation in Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings, Krochmal seeks to retrieve what he sees as a vital element of Jewish politics: possessing neither a shared land nor military strength, he insists, Jews have long sustained their diasporic collective through hermeneutical endeavors such as rabbinic midrash, and they should continue to do so by launching a transnational project of historically sensitive exegesis. The resulting image of a transnational Jewish collective whose fate is separate from that of non-Jewish polities breaks with Mendelssohn’s political vision, pointing to an east-west dynamic of creative repurposing—an instance of an eastern European thinker drawing on a German-Jewish predecessor to develop a sharply contrasting philosophical vision.