Andrei Orlov, Associate Professor of Theology at Marquette University, has already established himself as a significant voice in the study of Second Temple Jewish traditions, especially those associated with 2 Enoch and other Slavonic Pseudepigrapha. Dark Mirrors adds further evidence to support this assessment. It is a collection of six distinct essays prefaced by an introduction and split in two ...

The perceived disjunction between Judaism’s hope for a political, liberating messiah and Christianity’s belief in an incarnate, atoning deity has throughout history provided a convenient reference point for gauging theological difference between these historically related religions. To this contrast in belief corresponds a divergence in hermeneutics: each religious community has, at least prior to our ecumenical era, accused the other ...

In this collection of essays Matthias Henze has produced an introduction to biblical interpretation in Jewish antiquity. The topics addressed are by no means new, but the attempt to organize such a wide survey of sources and interpretive models makes the volume a real contribution.

In The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, David deSilva sets out to correct the misperception that the teachings of Jesus and his half-brothers owe very little to Jewish teachings and traditions. He does so by reintroducing apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts that would have shaped the thought of Jewish teachers ...

Concentration on the relationship between Matthew and rising Formative Judaism has caused possible links between Matthew and Enochic Judaism to receive minimal attention. The occasional discussions of Matthew and Enochic traditions often center upon “the Son of Man” in The Parables of Enoch (see Leslie W. Walck’s The Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch and Matthew [Jewish and ...

The topic of Jewish daily life—and indeed, daily life studies as such—is relatively young in the discipline of ancient history. Particularly in the wake of the French Annales school, which initiated a shift in focus from major political and institutional histories to the “history of the ordinary” (p. 2), historians have increasingly concentrated on a much broader range of human ...

The twenty-five chapters of this book collect a sizeable portion of Steven Fraade’s prolific scholarly output from 1993 to the current decade. The volume is broad in scope and rich in detail, featuring scores of analyses of particular passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic corpus, and other ancient Jewish literature. There are also discussions about the philosophies Fraade employs ...

This book gathers a number of articles analyzing halakah during the Second Temple and early rabbinic periods in light of epigraphic findings. This first volume is part of a larger project to publish a series of works resulting from the so-called Jeselsohn Center conferences held at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. The English title of the conference, which was held on May ...

[ By the time I get through the Synoptic Gospels in my “Origins of Christianity” course, the students are yawning through “the same old stories.” It is thus inevitably a shocking experience when they encounter this very strange, “extra-terrestrial,” Gospel of John, at which point my students begin to identify with the disciples in the fourth Gospel: “We do not ...