New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity 11B: Essays on Ephesus
James R. Harrison, Bradley J. Bitner, editors
This volume of the New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity series includes essays exploring aspects of the political, religious, social, and cultural life of ancient Ephesus and surrounding villages as well as essays that address exegetical issues in Acts, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy from a documentary and historical perspective. Contributors Richard S. Ascough, Bradley J. Bitner, James R. Harrison, Michael Immendorfer, Elif Hilal Karaman, R. A. Kearsley, Stephen Llewelyn, Will Robinson, Guy MacLean Rogers, and Stephan Witetschek examine a range of topics, including the goddess Artemis, the imperial cult, civic associations, women, widows, slaves, confession inscriptions, benefaction and citizenship, and virtue.
Dangerous Tales: Genesis 34 and Its Literary Descendants
Carrie A. Cifers
The biblical narrative of Israel’s only daughter Dinah is steeped in deception and violence, vengeance and destruction, and a silence that has posed interpretive problems for readers for more than two millennia. Carrie A. Cifers takes up the retellings of Genesis 34 in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, the book of Jubilees, and Joseph and Aseneth to explore how later authors tried to clarify the assumedly implicit ethical message of Dinah’s story. Through narrative ethics and socionarratology, Cifers demonstrates that biblical stories are a space of encounter where texts make claims on readers and where readers have an ethical responsibility as witnesses to the text. Dangerous Tales is a call for contemporary readers to engage biblical narratives in ways that mitigate interpretive violence and maximize each text’s ethical potential.
A Ransom for Israel: Jesus and Jewish Salvation in Matthew
Nicholas J. Schaser
In this study of the Gospel of Matthew, Nicholas J. Schaser proposes that Matthew intended to narrate the corporate salvation of ethnic Israel rather than its replacement by an ethnically diverse Christian church. Instead of presenting Jesus as a new Israel to replace the old, Matthew highlights Jesus’s salvific value in exchange for the nation of Israel when he dies as a ransom for their sins. This book presents one of the most comprehensive challenges to the prevalent interpretation that Matthew locates Israel in an ongoing exile from which Jesus offers redemption only if they follow him. Rather, the gospel, when read alongside Israel’s Scriptures, presents Israel at risk of an eschatological exile from God’s kingdom, and Jesus removes his people’s exile-inducing sins by being cast out in their place. Schaser’s compelling reading has the potential to open new dialogue between Jews and Christians.