Category Archives: Biblical Studies

Several years ago I compiled an index (really more of a concordance) which lined up the texts common to William Hallo and K. Lawson Younger’s Context of Scripture, and James Pritchard’s classic Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. I had intended to do some more work on it, but this simply slipped my mind until the other day when Charles Halton commented on how useful he found this index (as well as my Anchor Bible Dictionary Index, which I’m working on upgrading as well to include a comprehensive bibliography of all the titles listed in the individual articles).

So, last night and this evening I spent, as St Jerome might say, a small lamp’s oil on the project, correcting some items in the index itself, and adding two lists of the texts which are found only in the COS volumes, or only in the ANET volume.

I’ve also redone the pdf file of the index. It is completely searchable, and is better formatted for printing than the web page itself is.

One interesting thing is the number of texts that are peculiar to each work. In ANET there are 221 titles that are not found in COS. In COS there are 525 titles that are not found in ANET. Some of those titles include multiple texts in either work. For instance, COS includes only Tablet XI of Gilgamesh, while ANET includes all the various texts known at time of publication. There are numerous historical writings found in ANET which are not found in COS. So, while the number of titles peculiar to COS is larger, it’s not precisely explicative of the quality of texts peculiar to either work. Both have their strengths. But I am still much more impressed by the wealth of material selected for ANET, even if the translations are older.

If anyone finds errors or has suggestions for improvements, please let me know. I hope the index continues to be found useful.

The following comes from my notes on the chapter “The History of Religions School and the Jews” in Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism (Brill, 2009)

Johannes Weiss (1863-1914) was, like Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920), a student of Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889). Both were considered members of the History of Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule), an academic movement emphasizing the place of religion in history—an approach which occasionally produced some rather awkward results. Be that as it may, at its peak, around the turn of the century, it was an approach that garnered some of the finest minds in German scholarship: Duhm, Kautsch, Wrede, Bousset and Weiss, among others.

While Bousset was something of a devoted follower of Wellhausen and the de Wettian/Ritschlian tradition which separated Judaism from all influence on nascent Christianity, Weiss was something of a maverick, a loner at this period, finding continuity between the Jewish environment of Christ’s day and earliest Christianity, despite his own leanings (which were liberal, both confessionally and politically). In this, he followed the data presented in the New Testament itself and related sources for the period, rather than being led by an idealistic-systematic theological dialectic which would separate the two, in marked contrast to all his contemporaries. He presented this approach first in his Die Predigt Jesus vom Reiches Gottes, “The Preaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God, in 1900. He read the sources on their own terms, criticizing both Bousset’s and Wellhausen’s approaches for lacking historical objectivity.

In Weiss’ posthumously published (and partly finished by a colleague) book Das Urchristentums, soon translated into English as The History of Primitive Christianity, we find the musings of a remarkable mind, well ahead of its own age. Weiss situates Jesus in continuity with a Palestinian-Jewish background. He determines the four Gospels to be of Palestinian origin. He states that Jesus is Jewish, and his words relate to contemporary Jewish discussions. He also shows that the ethical demands of Jesus are not elements of some new moralism of universal non-national humanity, but result from a development of the religion of the Jewish prophets. Jerusalem was the center of the new faith, and the church organized itself as the synagogue had. He presents Paul as a Jew with a strong Palestinian-Pharisaic-Jewish background, with training in rabbinical interpretation, who is in part suffering by his people’s rejection of Jesus. He often directly confronts (and demolishes) the suppositions of Bousset, Wellhausen, and Baur. And while Weiss does hold some of the commonplaces of the age (the Hellenistic/Alexandrian hypothesis, that an element of Gentile freedom comes into the Jerusalem church via Stephen, a representative of the Jewish-Hellenistic enlightenment; the Judaism of Jesus’s day being lesser than the religion of the Prophets), they are still adumbrated, and not expressed in the triumphalistic and often ugly manner of Weiss’ colleagues and predecessors.

Gerdmar summarizes Weiss’ work nicely (pp 183-184):

Weiss’s characterisation of Judaism is rather different [thatn Bousset’s, Semler’s, and de Wette’s], painting a picture that is basically independent from the prevalent ‘Late Judaism’ hypothesis. Where Bousset perpetuates such positions, Weiss questions them. He upgrades the Palestinian-Jewish background of Jesus, making it his genuine background. Instead of seeing this as a disadvantage and trying to distance Jesus from it, for example, he understands Jesus’ ethics as being a development from those of the old prophets, rooted in his Jewish nation. Weiss does not describe Jewish faith in negative terms but presents Paul on the basis of his Palestinian-Jewish background; using rabbinical hermeneutics, he was “according to formation and education a real Jew in every respect”. This was seventy years before the so-called ‘new perspective on Paul’ was conceived. Weiss holds that Paul does not believe in an outright rejection of Israel—although he sees an anti-Judaism in John—and his usage of the ‘Late Judaism’ concept lacks the traditional negative notions of Bousset. Nowhere does Weiss employ stereotypes of Jews and Judaism, either in his description of New Testament Judaism or with reference to modern Jews.

Weiss’ premature death in 1914 cut short a brilliant career, quite tragically for the field, as it turns out to be. Perhaps it is that his ideas were too different from those that had become consensus for them to have persisted without his direct and cogent recapitulation. As it is, Bousset’s Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (“The Jewish Religion in the Age of the New Testament”), in its first edition of 1906, and a 1926 edition expanded by Hugo Gressman, unfortunately became the standard reference work on the subject in German universities until the middle of the century. This perpetuated the old ‘degenerate Judaism’ dialectic established by de Wette as the “historical-critical method,” systematized by Wellhausen, and given a newly darker, uglier edge by Ritschl, Bousset, and Gressman.

One has to wonder, though. What would the field look like now had Weiss lived longer and propogated his methodology and conclusions more widely? As Gerdmar noted, on the subject of Paul’s Jewish identity Weiss was seventy years ahead of his time. The discussions we’re having right now relating to the “New Perspective on Paul” might instead have been fifty years in our past. What subjects might we have progressed to with an earlier recognition that Jesus was not a gnomic Gentile philosopher, but a Jewish rabbi? How might further, undone work of Weiss have had a bearing on Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis? For surely it was also under the scrutiny of Weiss’ keen intellect. And though at this point we might see it as a gnat against a hurricane, might Weiss’ approach, if it had become the consensus, have at least mitigated if not derailed the dread horror of Germany’s fully-developed antisemitism and its inevitable result?

Let the case of Weiss be a lesson. Scholarship is always developing. Yet that development is not necessarily for the better.

[Below is the full text of Solomon Schechter’s address, “Higher Criticism—Higher Anti-Semitism”, delivered at the Judaean Banquet, given in honor of Dr. Kaufman Kohler, March 26, 1903. The text is from Seminary Address and Other Papers (Cincinnati: Ark Publishing, 1915), 35-39.]

My acquaintance with Dr. Kohler dates from the year 1901, when he did me the honor of paying me a visit at Cambridge, England. There is no scarcity in that ancient seat of learning, “full of sages and scribes,” of learned conversation. But the day with Dr. Kohler was one of the most delightful I have ever experienced in that place. The day was spent in roaming over the contents of the Genizah and in conversation. Our thoughts were turned to Judaism and the subjects which occupied our minds were all of a theological or historical nature. We probably differed in a good many points, and please God we shall differ in many more—but this did not prevent our short acquaintance from ripening at once into what might approach friendship. I felt that I was in the presence of a scholar and a seeker after truth. His is an intellect devoted entirely to what he considers the truth, and his is a heart deeply affected by every spiritual sensation which is in the air. He also delights to engage in what he considers the “Battles oo the Lord,” and Judaism has need for men of valor.

To speak more clearly: Since the so-called emancipation, the Jews of the civilized world have been lulled into a fancied security which events have not justified. It is true that through the revelation in the Dreyfus case, anti-Semitism of the vulgar sort has become odious, and no lady or gentleman dares now to use the old weapons of the times of Drumont and Stoecker. But the arch-enemy has entered upon a new phase, which Boerne might have called “the philosophic ‘Hep-Hep.’ ” And this is the more dangerous phase because it is of a spiritual kind, and thus means the “excision of the soul,” leaving us no hope for immortality. I remember when I used to come home from the Cheder, bleeding and crying from the wounds inflicted upon me by the Christian boys, my father used to say, “My child, we are in Galuth (exile), and we must submit to God’s will.” And he made me understand that this is only a passing stage in history, as we Jews belong to eternity, when God will comfort His people. Thus the pain was only physical, but my real suffering began later in life, when I emigrated from Roumania to so-called civilized countries and found there what I might call the Higher anti-Semitism, which burns the soul though it leaves the body unhurt. The genesis of this Higher anti-Semitism is partly, though not entirely—for a man like Kuenen belongs to an entirely different class—contemporaneous with the genesis of the so-called Higher criticism of the Bible. Wellhausen’s Prolegomena and History are teeming with aperçes full of venom against Judaism, and you cannot wonder that he was rewarded by one of the highest orders which the Prussian Government had to bestow. Afterwards Harnack entered the arena with his “Wesen des Christenthums,” in which he showed not so much his hatred as his ignorance of Judaism. But this Higher anti-Semitism has now reached its climax when every discovery of recent years is called to bear witness against us and to accuse us of spiritual larceny.

Continue reading “Higher Criticism—Higher Anti-Semitism”

Key to the formation of the modern academic field of Biblical Studies are the machinations of nineteenth century liberal German Protestants (as I’ve recently touched on in these posts: Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: Semler, Pasto, Who Owns the Jewish Past?, De Wette, Devolution, and Deuteronomy, and More of de Wette’s Charm), all of whom were anti-Jewish to a greater or lesser degree, though not full-blown anti-Semites. The latter requires belief in racial theory, which was yet to be developed, in part with support from the various “critical” anti-Jewish writings of these singularly driven men. And they were certainly driven: driven to support their own scholarship and liberal German Protestantism as the highest form of religion the world had yet seen. The respect granted to German scholarship in the nineteenth century by all Europeans was of the highest order, as it embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment, a recent event at that time. This permitted them a greater platform than they would enjoy in the twentieth century. Particularly skillful as a propogandaistic coup was the exclusive appropriation to their work of the terms “criticism” and “critical” — a situation that pertains to this day. The historical-critical method (the term originally invented to describe de Wette’s dialectic of the devolution of Hebraism into Judaism, superseded by Christianity, a revival of Hebraism, and so on, as I described here), a newly-minted approach to the Scriptures, became equated with criticism itself in the 1850s. This meant that other approaches were not referred to as critical, thereby severing the terminology’s usage from its roots in antiquity, particularly the Aristotelian usage, which had prevailed to that time. No longer was critcism the right application of a well-formed mind to decision-making, but something that the academy decided. The distinction is crucial. For it is certainly not the case that the historical-critical method of de Wette can be described as the conclusion of a well-formed mind. It is instead an entirely self-serving, societally and aetically contingent invention, an appropriation of the history of another race for purposes of his (and sympathizers’) own and only of useful application at that moment in time: for the unification of the German lands into a single rebuplican state, a state which would exclude all who would not convert to the above-mentioned highest expression of “the world spirit”: liberal German Protestantism as defined by theology professors (I will not sully “Theologian” with such an association) such as de Wette! This meant that it was preferred that there were no more Jews, and no more Catholics in the new Reich. In what was perceived as a noble gesture, they were welcomed to convert, otherwise they could leave—a familiar scenario for the Jews.

But here I want to focus on something else, which I find perfectly demonstrative of the irrationality lying behind the “criticism” of the day. This is the issue of dating the books of the Pentateuch, and how de Wette and Vatke could come up with such diametrically opposed opinions on the subject, all relying on exactly the same data.

Firstly, de Wette changed his mind on the dating of Deuteronomy. He at first considered it to be a product of the reign of Josiah, the “Book of the Law” described in 2 Kings 22. Later, however, he considered it to be even later, an exilic or post-exilic document written during a time when “Judaism” was in full swing, a time of rigid centralization and conformity to written strictures. This only means that he places the composition further along the course of the devolution of Hebraism into Judaism, in his terminology, which had already begun in pre-exilic times. de Wette leaves the authoring of the first four books of the Pentateuch to an earlier age than that of Deuteronomy, for they reveal (through narrative) a freer society and religion, one not encumbered by rules and regulations, when religion and its expression were rooted in personal piety, not in an external supernaturalism and legislation—the classic Romantic position.

Contrast Vatke. He, reading the very same Deuteronomy, posits it as representing a religion of the heart, not one of the dead letter, and therefore it must precede the legal materials found in the first four books of the Pentateuch. So, Vatke places Deuteronomy first (curiously maintaining a roughly Josianic date, a legacy of de Wettes’ reputation more than critical thought) and all the other legal materials later. It was Vatke’s solution which was generally received, and which was canonized in Wellhausen.

The two are diametrically opposed in their readings. This is not critical thinking. We needn’t go into the issue of assertion in the lack of contextual evidence, or at least not just yet. When de Wette and Vatke were writing, the great archaeological discoveries of writings from the ancient Near East were yet to occur. The languages were yet to be deciphered. Once they were however, and the great Library of Ashurbanipal discovered in 1850 by Austen Henry Layard, there was no excuse for Wellhausen and others to have ignored (as they did) the full panoply of literary texts and their implications. But there is also the question as to whether it would have entered their mind at all to equate such writings of great empires with the writings of a small client kingdom, particularly in light of their view of Jews and Judaism. They either wilfully ignored the contextual evidence, or they considered the Jews to have been incapable of being part of such a widespread literacy themselves. I think it was a little of both. In addition, Wellhausen had an agenda: to establish the liberal German Protestant scholarly trend as the solely acceptable one, in the face of challenges from conservatives. In this, he was successful, subjecting the Bible to a still-ruling hegemony of criticism. But this was and is to the detriment of gaining a true understanding of the writings of the Bible, Old and New Testaments.

Because my last post on de Wette was so interesting to some, I thought I’d post some more of his ideas and comment upon them. The point here is to demonstrate that, if anything, de Wette’s proposals were not critical in the true sense, that is, demonstrative of rational discernment, but are rather the result of deep-seated prejudices which are reflected in all his work, root and branch.

de Wette proposes that Hebraismus, his label for the religion of the Patriarchs and Moses as a discrete entity separate from later manifestations of Israelite religion (which, however, includes the Prophetic strain), becomes the intellectual source of life

from which Christianity, and after the killing of it in Catholicism, true Christian Protestantism has come forth, and with Christianity and Protestantism, the scholarly spirit of the new European culture.
(Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 80; quoting de Wette, Biblische Dogmatik, 59-60)

So, we see de Wette equating here “original religion,” Hebraismus, the best of Israelite religion, with earliest Christianity, with Protestantism (the German strain, of course), and European scholarship (again, German, of course). He does not neglect to declare Catholicism “dead,” in the same way that he declares Judaism dead. He describes Judaism elsewhere as “degenerated, petrified Hebraismus”
(Gerdmar, 81; quoting de Wette, Biblische Dogmatik, 114).

Presumably, Catholicism is thus conceived by de Wette as a degenerate, petrified Christianity. In this sense, he sets up the equation of Judaism (Hebraismus’ degenerate successor) with Catholicism (Christianity’s degenerate successor), and Christianity (Hebraismus’ revival) with Protestantism (Christianity’s revival). Just as dead Judaism was followed by living Christianity, so dead Catholicism is followed by living Protestantism, which finds the flower of its expression in scholarship, namely, de Wette’s own!

We find here not only blatant apologetics, but the classical early Enlightenment attachment to historical cyclicism, a long discarded practice in historiography. There is likewise here a heavy-handed admixture of pure Romanticism: the contrast of the spontaneous, vivacious, ruleless Hebraism, Christianity, and Protestantism (liberal German Protestantism, mind you, not that conservative stuff) in opposition to rote, dead, rule-laden, Judaism and Catholicism. This “freedom is life” and “restriction is death” motif is a core concept of Romanticism, if not the core concept.

This entire dialectic of de Wette’s is, of course, arrant nonsense. The equation of liberal German Protestantism with early Christianity is unbelievably stupid, in addition to being purely offensive. If anything, as we all well know nowadays, and as is described in the writings of the New Testament itself, we should without question equate early Christianity with Judaism. The first generation of Christians were considered Jews by outsiders, whatever distinctions may have been made in Christian and Jewish circles, as seen in Claudius’ expulsion of all Jews from Rome for arguing over Chrestus/Christus (arguments dissociating this from Christian-Jewish controversy are unconvincing). A clear distinction is, however, recognized by late AD 64, with Nero’s specific targeting of Christians and not Jews as culpable for the great fire that had just swept through the city (conveniently clearing a nice swath for the construction of Nero’s Golden House and its grounds). Labelling both Judaism and Catholicism as dead is both thoroughly offensive and entirely stupid, displaying only a colossal ignorance of the spiritual life of these two traditions.

But, after all, de Wette is quite obviously not after truth, but “truthiness.” All this work of his was politically motivated to provide a religio-philosophical justification for republican plans to unite the German-speaking lands into one nation-state, with liberal German Protestantism as the state religion, and liberal German Protestant scholarship as its intellect.

Utilizing the very same early Christian and Jewish sources that de Wette used, we nowadays come to radically different conclusions regarding early Christianity’s makeup. It is likewise obvious to all observers that neither Judaism nor Catholicism is lifeless and moribund. Seeing his success in this aspect of early Christian history, one can summon no confidence in de Wette’s treatment of Israelite history. The only truly rational expectation is to find him treating the evidence selectively in order to establish his point, constructing a case so that the ultimate goal of his dialectic (which is the supremacy of liberal German Protestantism) is established. This requires that he posit the devolution of true religion, Hebraism, into Judaism, false religion. His view of history as cyclical will permit nothing else, for it must match his understanding that the living, true religion of Christianity devolved into the false, dead religion of Catholicism. Then, just as Protestantism revived true religion, so Christianity must have done so. This is exactly what de Wette has done, completing the cycle, and proving, by his extension of this historical dialectic, that liberal German Protestantism is the ultimate of all religious expressions.

And it is this dialectic, this so-called critical ordering of history, that de Wette describes as “historical-critical.” The name has stuck. So it is used and adapted by Wellhausen and later authors. But its origin lies as the label for de Wette’s forcing history into his own mold. It is neither historical, nor critical.

Next up in our tour of liberal Protestant German anti-Jewish scholarship: Julius Wellhausen.

Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780-1849) is generally considered the founding father of modern critical Biblical Studies. Specifically, he was the first to develop and apply a philosophically-based method to the Biblical texts, rather than relying upon religiously-influenced or -established commonplaces or traditions. This does not, however, mean that his own method was devoid of religious influence or even connections to political and social issues of his day. In fact, his method is entirely rooted in the worldview of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century German intellectual environment.

The German intellectual scene of de Wette’s time was in lively ferment. Much discussion was taking place regarding the unification of the various German principalities and territories into a single German national state, particularly after the end of the Holy Roman Empire (so-called) and the disturbances caused by Napoleon. To have a single, democratic, liberal, Protestant Christian German state was the thinking (German) person’s ideal. There was, however, a problem with this: the Jews. Living amongst the various German Christians was this group that held to its own culture, its own religion, and was effectively a nation amongst nations. The coming German state, however, was envisioned to be a single cultural entity, a German one at that. There would be no room in the plan for any Jewish “particularists” who will reject the German “universalist” position of the unification supporters by not completely assimilating.

Enter de Wette. Drawing especially on the works of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1802) and Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), and strongly influenced by a Romanticism that led him to view religion as a matter of aesthetics and feeling, de Wette systematized various intellectual strands into a dialectic of the development of true religion (liberal German Protestantism, of course) out of false religion (post-exilic Judaism, of course). It is this dialectic that he applied to the Holy Scriptures; this was his “method.”

The development proceeds as follows. First there was Hebraismus, the religion of the patriarchs and of Israel in pre-exilic times, which went through several stages:
1.) pre-Mosaic polytheistic Hebraismus
2.) Mosaic Hebraismus
3.) degenerated polytheistic-Mosaic Hebraismus
4.) the ideal Hebraismus of the Prophets and Poets
In this series, 1 and 3 are bad, while 2 and 4 are good. Then comes the Exile, and de Wette makes this the end of Hebraismus (overall a better thing than not) and the beginning of Judaism (an entirely degraded form of Hebraismus, of no value):

[W]e must consider the nation after the Exile as another, with a different thinking and religion. We call them in this period Jews, before that Hebrews; we call what pertains to the postexilic cultural formation Judaism, and what pertains to the pre-exilic cultural formation Hebraismus.
de Wette, Biblische Dogmatik, 48; quoted in Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 81.

The Jews acquired “Oriental philosophy” (a bad thing) during the Exile through association with Zoroastrians especially, becoming tainted with such ideas as demonology, messianism, resurrection, and so on. Religious expression turns away from faith and life to study and introspection, a thing completely unacceptable to a Romantic like de Wette. Jesus is seen as the great Romantic, reviving the spirit of Moses:

The way Jesus presented things was pure of anything didactic, methodical and systematic; it was not teaching but merely reviving, directed at common sense and unspoilt feeling. de Wette, Biblische Dogmatik, 213; Gerdmar, 84.

Within this same idealistic Romanticism, de Wette claims Jesus to present no dogma and rejecting a faith based on authority. The Pharisees, standins for rabbinic/contemporary Jews in de Wette’s views, represent the opposite of Jesus and the spirit of Hebraismus: holding to mythological tales, their outward obedience to dead laws, their expectation of a political messiah and world domination, and their religious particularism that is exclusive rather than universalistic. It is this mindset that drives de Wette’s distinctions in dating the documents of the Old Testament.

de Wette was the first to suggest that Deuteronomy was the “Book of the Law” that was discovered in the Temple in the time of King Josiah of Judah, as depicted in 2 Kings 22. de Wette ties this “discovery”, which he actually posits as a composition of the text at this time, with the imposition of a degraded Hebraismus on the people: the beginnings of Judaism. Thus, it is not any elaborate philological argument, nor any source critical discovery, nor any kind of argument based upon any logic at all that drives de Wette’s determination of the date of Deuteronomy as late. It is his liberal German Protestantant Romantic nationalist dialectic regarding how degraded Judaism was which determines it. This is in no way objective or acceptable argumentation. Indeed, there is no argumentation. There is only assertion of Romantic ideals, liberal Protestant ideals, and radical German nationalist ideals, while drawing upon other earlier anti-Jewish writings. His theological fulminations on Jewish degradation led, contrary to his short-sighted will, to an anti-emancipation movement that was disastrous for Jews, one which finally found full expression in the Holocaust.

de Wette’s is not rational thought. I reject de Wette’s ideas, every foundation of them, and everything that has proceeded to be built upon his misguided, corrupt, and bigoted mentality.

What things might we discover in leaving such bitter and childish thoughts as those of de Wette and his ilk behind? It’ll be interesting to find out.

The basic argument of this work is straightforward: Jewish history, as represented in western Biblical scholarship, is a Christian invention. Or rather, it is what I will call a Christian sacralizing history. I will explain what I mean by the term “Christian” below. By “sacralizing history” I mean any representation of the past that serves as the foundational narrative for identity in the present. By Christian sacralizing history I mean a history that serves as the foundational narrative for Christians in the present. Thus, I argue that what is taught as Jewish history in most western university courses, is in fact a Christian past that serves the needs of a Christian present. I presume of course, and I will argue throughout this work, that Christians possess the power to represent the Jewish past as Christian sacralizing history. This Christian sacralizing history has a number of distinctive features, among which is the assertion of a rupture that separates and contrasts, respectively, an Abrahamic covenant with a Mosaic Law, Hebrews with Jews, and ancient Israel with later Judaism. The point of rupture is variously postulated as the Babylonian Exile, the Hellenistic period, or the time of Jesus, depending on the views of the particular writer. In each case, however, the rupture is the point at which the Abrahamic-Hebraic-Israel ends, and the Mosaic-Jewish-Judaism begins.

Integral to this narrative of rupture is the representation of the Mosaic, Jewish “Judaism” as a religion or society of “contradictory combinations,” the most characteristic of which are universalism versus particularism, prophecy versus law, and freedom versus constraint. Moreover, these contradictory combinations are set within a broader typology where the Abrahamic-Hebraic Israel — along with Hellenism and Christianity — stands to Judaism as the universal, prophetic, and free to the particular, legal and constraining. This in turn is placed within a scheme of progress where the contradictory elements in Judaism grow in intensity until they are resolved through, and in, Jesus and early Christianity. The now separate universal, prophetic and free elements serve as the foundational essence of Christianity, while the particularistic, legalistic constraining elements become the foundational essence of the post-Jesus Judaism. This schema, which many might recognize as characteristic only of 19th century scholarship, is alive and well in current scholarship.

James Pasto. Who Owns the Jewish Past? Judaism, Judaisms, and the Writing of Jewish History. PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, 1999. Page 1, first two paragraphs of the Introduction.

I saw this dissertation mentioned in several of the footnotes of Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann, and the notes were intriguing enough that I purchased it from UMI. I am not disappointed, in reading the Introduction. It dovetails perfectly with the Gerdmar work. One of the benefits of Pasto (two volumes totally almost 700 pages) is a full chapter on Wellhausen, which will undoubtedly be fascinating. In fact, Gerdmar recommends Pasto’s coverage of Wellhausen:

Other scholars could have been included, such as Julius Wellhausen and Emil Schürer, but for the sake of limiting what is already a large book, for Wellhausen I refer [the reader] to James Pasto’s substantial study from 1999, in which Wellhausen is closely related to de Wette. (p. 14)

Pasto’s chapter on Wellhausen comprises 110 pages, much more coverage than Gerdmar could’ve included, and undoubtedly in delicious detail (I refuse to cheat and take a peek, because I know that I’ll end up reading the whole chapter then and there). I look forward to reading it.

In this dissertation by Pasto, the Gerdmar Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism book, Carla Sulzbach’s 1996 dissertation David Zvi Hoffmann’s Die Wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese (“The main arguments against the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis”) (available here), and several articles, for example those by James McNutt [“Adolf Schlatter and the Jews,” German Studies Review 26.2 (May 2003), 353-370] and Maurice Casey [“Some Anti-Semitic Assumptions in the ‘Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,” Novum Testamentum 41.3 (Jul 1999), 280-291], all combine to paint a particular picture of the generally tendentious nature of the approch of modern Biblical criticism toward the Hebrew Bible (even/especially in its Christian incarnation as the Old Testament) and the history of Israel. It’s going to be an interesting summer for me, reading-wise. I’ll be sure to keep posting on the subject.

Theophrastus (υγεια σου!) has posted a note about Philip Comfort’s new New Testament Text and Translation Commentary (Tyndale, 2008). Amazon has some ecstatic reviews of the book. Theophrastus gives us a better description and summary of it, though, than either Tyndale [the book no longer appears on their website] or Amazon. There’s also a short review by Bill Warren on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

All of these reviews mention Bruce Metzger’s A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. I’ve always enjoyed the Metzger commentary, but always wanted it to be more extensive. It sounds as though Comfort has realized this with his exhaustive coverage of the variants and extended coverage of translational renderings. It sounds excellent.

Just at the end of May, Prof. Claude Mariottini noted that some new files had appeared for the online presentation of A New English Translation of the Septuagint (Oxford, 2007). Links to the electronic edition are here. The files are Adobe PDF files, so one will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them. These files, as opposed to those that were posted there previously, are the final version of the files, those that were used for printing the hard copy edition. It’s nice to have those match now! I noticed only very few differences in my use of the older version of the files. You won’t be able to copy from or print the files, but you’ll be able to read them online, which is a good thing.

A new extra bonus in the electronic edition of the NETS is the article “An Excursus on Bisectioning Ieremias,” discussing the theories accounting for the origins of the differences evident between the two halves of OG Ieremias, chapters 1-28, and chapters 29-52. This article was excluded from the printed volume for considerations of size. But here it is!

As a Biblically-affected Californian would, and indeed does, say: Awesomeness upon awsomeness!