Sublime

Though the exilic period was short, it was crucial. It represented a crisis for all the major Israelite institutions that had developed, particularly the monarchy, which no longer had a land to rule, and the…

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For the Shammaite Pharisees, the coming kingdom of YHWH would be a matter of national liberation and the defeat of the pagans. For Jesus, the kingdom was on offer to those who would repent of just that aspiration. It was inevitable that the two would clash. When they did, what was at stake was far more than an argument about the details of how Tora

If Paul could not leave the sheer wonder of this alone, if he risked everything to proclaim it to strangers likely to find it disgusting, or lunatic, or both, then that was because he had been brought by his vision of the risen Jesus to gaze directly into what it meant for him, and for all the world. That Christ – whose participation in the divine

By any standards this is a radical vision—certainly for the early Christian community itself, which at that time was still loyal to the basic principles of Judaism and looked on Paul as a dangerous schismatic. For them, the key element of their belief was that the Messiah had come—and by Messiah they meant what Jews understood by the term— namely,

It is true that the characters in the Merchant make greater claims to sympathy and humanity than those in its influential predecessor, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (ca. 1589), in which not only the title character, but Christian and Muslim protagonists as well, are cynical distillations of villainy. But these claims are just one symptom of a

First, what are we talking about in discussing first-century Jewish hopes? It has commonly been assumed, at least since Weiss and Schweitzer, that Jesus and many of his contemporaries expected the imminent end of the present space-time order altogether, the winding up of history and the ushering in of a new age in radical discontinuity with the pre

Persian Zoroastrianism – life after death, resurrection, the Day of Judgment, the great cosmic struggle between good and evil – had been absorbed into the faith of most Jews, and that of the influential sect of the Pharisees

Elias Bickerman, a noted scholar, has pointed out that Mattathias did not demand the right of freedom of religion, nor did he fight for individual conscience. This was “a conflict between earthly power and the law of the state of God”—opposition to a King’s order that was at variance with the commandments of God.

there’s no reason to let Paul win the day and reject James. Both views—that faith is a way of life and a gift from God (Paul) and that faith includes believing some truths and must be supplemented by our effort (James)—may be true when interpreted truly.