Sunday, August 13, 2006

SBL reviews

Some new reviews have been posted at SBL though I've note received an email update. There are several in the NT category but there are two substantive reviews of Dale C. Allison's Resurrecting Jesus that might be worth a look.

And congrats to Eddie and Sean on joining forces. Great move.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Francis Watson online

Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, outline/intro/conclusion available at Prof. Watson's home page: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/divinity/staff/francis-watson.shtml. Watson is not well-known in the states, in my experience at least. But his work is certainly worth a look, though it has to be said that it is almost always rather dense. This particular work picks up on Richard Hays's Echoes and runs with it.

As we shall see, Paul cites individual texts not in an ad hoc manner but on the basis of a radical construal of the narrative shape of the Pentateuch as a whole, highlighting and exploiting tensions between Genesis and Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Many of the apparent contradictions within Paul’s “view of the law” in fact originate within the pentateuchal texts themselves, at least as Paul reads them. Precisely in their canonical form, these texts are not at all the homogeneous and monolithic entity they are often taken to be.

Watson is particularly interesting and cautious on method, e.g., it is "inappropriate to try to reconstruct from divergent sources a single “contemporary Jewish” reading of a particular part or aspect of scripture, which would then serve as a foil for the Pauline reading."

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Great Online Articles: Caird's "Jesus and the Jewish Nation"

I'm starting a list of great online articles. (Drop nominations via comments or email.)

First up is G. B. Caird's Jesus and the Jewish Nation (available in PDF). A must read for beginners, and important for others given Caird's stature as an important point of departure for a major wing of Jesus studies; the man profoundly influenced his student N. T. Wright, to name but one. Already in Caird's writings are the sorts of ideas which argue against the Jesus Seminar on the one hand and American dispensational theology on the other; he takes a different track (more "political") than Ladd and Ridderbos (who were perhaps more theologians than historians) but with similar anti-dispensationalism, anti-liberalist results. Caird is also marvelously readable, with clear arguments and startling originality.

HT: Sean at Primal Subversion, and thanks to Rob Bradshaw (again) for his work getting things like this online. Buy books at Amazon from that man's website (simply go to the relevant area of the website--NT, Gospels, Paul, etc to find links to many books), and peruse his growing collection of online articles.