Information Resources

New and Notable
Recent Publications of Interest

(List posted in August 2002)

In an effort to help interested readers keep abreast of new publications in the disciplines that lie at the heart of the work of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, we offer a short list of recently-published books and brief descriptions of each book. These descriptions are not reviews: No positive or negative judgments are offered with regard to the books' contents.

Shaye J. D. Cohen. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. University of California Press, 1999. This book, written by a prominent Jewish scholar, explores the notion of "Ioudaios," or "Jewishness," in late antiquity, incorporating the ethnic, national, and religious
elements that characterized Jewishness from its origins in the second century B.C.E. Professor Cohen examines the ways in which Jews, gentiles, and the state understood and answered the question "Who was a Jew?" and describes the evolution of the term in the Hellenistic and rabbinic periods. While this book does not present a great deal of new material, its value lies in the manner in which Professor Cohen has succeeded in organizing diverse materials and attempting to set them in a logical framework and a chronological sequence. This work should prove valuable not only to those who are interested in Jewish history and religion, but also to scholars of early Christianity.

Walter Brueggemann, William C. Placher, and Brian K. Blount. Struggling with Scripture. Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. This slim volume contains three essays originally presented on November 3 and 4, 2000, as part of a conference on "Biblical Authority and the Church," sponsored by the Covenant Network of Presbyterians. Professor Brueggemann approaches the topic of Biblical authority in a personal way, and he develops his thoughts about the Bible from the perspectives of "Inherency," "Interpretation," "Imagination," "Ideology," "Inspiration," and urgency, which he labels "Important" in order to maintain the symmetry of his "I" terms. In the second essay, from which the title of the book is derived, Professor Placher centers his thoughts about biblical authority and truth in the struggle to understand what the Bible means and teaches. Professor Blount calls his essay "The Last Word on Biblical Authority" to remind us that, when it comes to reading and understanding the Bible, there is no last word, because the Bible contains the living word of God.

Susan L. Einbinder. Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France. Princeton University Press, 2002. Confronted by Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, many Jews living in the Rhine Valley chose to die by their own hands rather than by the hands of Christian mobs. This choice gave rise to the medieval Jewish martyr. Susan Einbinder, Professor of Hebrew Literature at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, has written a book in which poetry is read as history, exploring the evolution of laments that disclose what everyday Jewish life was like in northern France and how medieval French Jews responded to persecution. These laments also suggest that poetry was one of the ways in which highly acculturated Jews were encouraged to resist the forms and beliefs of Christianity and Christian pressure to convert. This unusual study combines history, religion, and literature, as well as Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Marc Saperstein of George Washington University describes Einbinder's work as "on the cutting edge in Jewish studies."

Richard A. Horsley, editor. Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation.
Essays in honor of Krister Stendahl. Trinity Press International, 2000. This book contains a collection of essays written by a number of notable scholars in honor of Krister Stendahl, who was among the first to challenge the assumptions of traditional Pauline scholarship and was, therefore, in large part responsible for inaugurating a new era in Pauline studies. Contributors to this collection include Krister Stendahl, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Richard A. Horsley, Alan Segal, Antoinette Wire, N. T. Wright, Sheila Briggs, Cynthia Kittredge, Pamela Eisenbaum, Mark Nanos, Allen Callahan, Sze-kar Wan, Robert Jewett, and Neil Elliott. Their essays deal with a little-known aspect of the missionary labors of the Apostle to the Gentiles -- his political concerns. Contributors explore Paul and the politics of interpretation, the politics of the Roman Empire, the politics of Israel (relations of Jews and gentiles), and the politics of the churches (relations of men and women, slaves and free).

William Loader. Jesus' Attitude towards the Law:
A Study of the Gospels. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. William Loader is professor of New Testament and head of the School of Social Inquiry at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and lecturer in the Perth Theological Hall of the Uniting Church in Australia. He has previously written studies on the Letter to the Hebrews, the Gospel of John, and New Testament christology. In Jesus' Attitude towards the Law, Professor Loader has produced a comprehensive survey of the way in which the Law is treated in the four canonical Gospels, the hypothetical source document known among scholars as "Q," the Gospel of Thomas, and the apocryphal Gospels. The most interesting feature of this study is its sequential analysis of the theme of the Law. This approach allows Jesus' attitude toward the Law to emerge out of the Gospel narratives themselves. Loader also highlights similarities and differences in Jesus' attitude toward the Law between the different Gospel texts. Taking the approach that he does allows Loader to go behind the tradition in search of Jesus' relationship to the Judaism of his day. Jesus' Attitude towards the Law represents not only a work of original scholarship, but it may also serve as a sourcebook for the study of Jesus, of Second Temple Judaism, and of the origins of Christianity.

Ira F. Stone. Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud: An Introduction. The Jewish Publication Society, 1998. In this volume, Rabbi Stone, who has studied the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas for many years, makes that work accessible to lay readers for the first time. Although this book, of necessity, includes what its author refers to in the preface as "a healthy dose of scholarship," it is not a scholarly work. The author's intent is to help the reader to enter the world of Levinas, and to enter the world of the Talmud read according to principles derived from a reading of Levinas. In the first half of the book, Rabbi Stone introduces the reader to Levinas' philosophy and his approach to Talmud; in the second half, he guides the reader through a number of talmudic passages by applying to them both Levinas' techniques and his own insights.

Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement. A Resource Book by Facing History and Ourselves, 2002. Facing History and Ourselves, which began its work in 1976, explores the history of racism and antisemitism, of which Eugenics
-- a pseudo-scientific movement that began in the first part of the twentieth century with a goal of ridding society of "inferior racial traits" -- is a part. The eugenics program in the United States was connected
to the Nazi program that murdered millions of men, women, and children in its twisted attempt to "purify" the so-called "Aryan race." This resource book presents a decade of research that exposes and explodes the myth of superior "races," classes, and individuals. Facing History and Ourselves describes itself as "an interna-tional educational and professional development organization." Its mission is to inform students of middle- and high-school age about racism, antisemitism, and prejudice so that they may make connections between history and the moral choices that face them in their own lives.

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