Abstract
This collection of essays is the fourth and final entry in a series of volumes produced in honor of the Pontifical Biblical Institute's centennial, which occurred in 2009. The Preface summarizes the history of the Institute (pp. ix–xii), which assumed for much of its history that scholars entering the field of biblical studies would have had training in Classics (pp. xi–xii), especially philology and textual criticism. Thus, the orientation of this volume is towards the Greco-Roman cultural landscape in which the New Testament appeared.
Brenk's Introduction (pp. 1–10) outlines the volume's nine essays, all of which share an effort to locate various New Testament texts in their Greco-Roman social, literary, and cultural contexts. The essays thus cover a range of methods (e.g., socio-rhetorical criticism), topics (e.g., Stoicism, the imperial cult), and genres of texts (e.g., paraenesis, “household codes,” visionary texts, chreiai). The essays follow a sort of rough canonical ordering, beginning with topics from the Gospels, proceeding through the epistolary texts, and ending with apocalyptic.
Collected volumes such as this one invariably invite readers to select those entries that appeal to them most, making assessment of the volume as a whole often difficult or arbitrary. That being said, one usually tends to expect books like this to display some unevenness. Some of the essays are excellent, while others are merely good. Happily enough almost all are thoughtful and thought-provoking, although occasionally the direction in which the thoughts are provoked may stray from the topic of the essay itself. At any rate, exclusion from my discussion below is not an indication of a lack of quality, but because of space constraints I have chosen simply to sample essays on a Gospel, the epistles, and Revelation as a means of highlighting the variety of material contained in this book.
Troels Engberg-Pedersen's essay (“Logos and Pneuma in the Fourth Gospel”) argues for the Gospel of John's debt to Stoicism rather than Platonism in its use of the terms logos and pneuma. In Stoicism logos and pneuma are “two sides of the same thing,” the pneuma is used for the “material or physical” aspect and the logos for the “cognitive side” (p. 35). John 3 and 6 thus can be understood as providing epistemological and ontological perspectives on the term pneuma, while in John 1 this approach would mean that the logos became incarnate when “Jesus was baptized (by God) by having the pneuma come down upon him and staying there” (p. 34). With the use of a Platonic perspective for the incarnation of the logos “this event remains a mystery,” while the Stoic interpretation “makes immediate sense” (p. 48).
Bruce W. Winter examines whether or not observance of the imperial cult would have been an issue for Paul's converts in Corinth (“The Enigma of Imperial Cultic Activities and Paul in Corinth”). Winter argues that Christians enjoyed exemption, and that while some people would have been tempted by the later elevation of the cult through Neronian policy in 54, the ruling of Gallio (Acts 18) was “a totally unexpected windfall” (p. 70) for the Christian community, effectively granting them exemptions. Winter's study helpfully establishes some broader sense of the role of the imperial cult in Corinth and Achaea, but his reliance upon Acts over the letters may lessen its impact for some readers.
Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils discusses the so-called household codes alongside other texts in the Pauline corpus pertaining to marriage, studying their use and reception by Clement of Alexandria (“Clement of Alexandria on Woman and Marriage in the Light of the New Testament Household Codes”). The use of the household codes provides “the key to Clement's view of the status of women and the value of marriage” (p. 128), although one might perceive a tension between the seeming endorsement of Pauline egalitarian claims (Gal 3:28; Col 3:11) and the acceptance of the submission of wives to their husbands. This tension is reconciled, for Clement, in the recognition that the marital relationship is “only a temporary phase” and that the limitations women experience are “overcome only in the eschatological dimensions of his Christianity” (p. 133).
Lastly, editor David E. Aune's essay (“The Polyvalent Imagery of Rev 3:20 in the Light of Greco-Egyptian Divination Texts”) assesses the various approaches to Revelation 3:20, adding to the likely biblical references an additional layer of allusions to “Graeco-Roman conceptions of dining with deities and Graeco-Egyptian revelatory divination” (p. 182), especially the imagery of a private ritual in which a “summoned god” (p. 183) enters into an individual's home. Aune sees a wide variety of images at play, “from Jewish, Christian, Graeco-Roman and Graeco-Egyptian traditions” (p. 183).
Given the book's slender nature, the allotted space requires thinner documentation and argumentation for some claims than scholars may find sufficient in terms of persuasiveness, although clearly one must view these essays more as occasions either for further reflection, or as introductions to the topics addressed. While the volume succeeds on these grounds and could thus also conceivably serve non-specialists, its price is likely to limit its appeal. As a minor point in an international edited volume, Brill does not seem to have a standard British or American spelling preference, which suits this reviewer as appropriate, despite its likely occasioning scribal inconsistency on my part (especially when Aune's essay uses one convention for the title and another for the body).