“Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today
there are Jews but not one single Hittite even though the Hittites had a great
flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people?”
(Walker Percy in “The Message in the Bottle”). Looking back through
history with its rip tides of challenges, crises, and creative responses, we can today
witness an oftentimes confusing flow in the story line of what it means to be heir to
the biblical legacy. The Bible itself bears that out in its dynamic of challenge,
adaptation, change throughout its formation. Those who carried the various lines forward
were not merely repeaters of tradition but more accurately its shapers as new situations
arose.
We see in the present issue of BTB a set of such adaptations and creative responses built
on a received complex of symbols and imagined realities that helped shape meaning,
order, and practice at various times in diverse settings.
Robert K. Gnuse in “A Hellenistic First Testament: The Views of
Minimalist Scholars” examines the views of six significant
“minimalist” scholars (Giovanni Garbini, Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas L.
Thompson, Russel Gmirkin, Lukasz Niesiolowski-Spano, Philippe Wajdenbaum), and various
other authors who theorize that the primary biblical history was generated in the
Hellenistic Era, after 300 BCE. He concludes, after detailing how the biblical stories
both influenced and were influenced by Hellenistic authors, that “ultimately, the
point I wish to make is that the scholarship of these authors must be taken seriously in
the future and not facilely dismissed…. They may represent the future of critical
studies in the First Testament.”
Peter Zaas writing a forward to a set of three explorations into the use of
the Shema tradition (Deut 6:4) in papers delivered for a section
entitled Shema in the Synoptic Gospels at the Boston meeting of the
National Association of Professors of Hebrew in November 2017, explains that
“What began in close up-panned out to a broad view by scholars in diverse
fields.”
Roberta Sabbath (“Iterations of One: The Shema as
Political Trope in the Synoptic Gospels and Qur'an”) demonstrates how
“the specific time and geographies of the development of these foundational
sacred works places them in conflict with indigenous ideologies both religious and
political as their confessional and political identities unfold.”
Kenneth L. Hanson in “The Shema, the Historical
Jesus, and ‘Messianic Judaism’” studies messianic Judaism as a
theological “reformation” inasmuch as “a fresh look by messianic
Jews at the Jesus of history might well pave the pave for an expression of their faith
that would in no way be in tension with the essence of Jewish monotheism.”
Zev Garber, in “Teaching the Shema (Torah and
Testament): Text, Translation, Tradition,” describes a range of traditional
practices that derive from close readings and juxtapositions of Torah texts, exemplified
for instance in the thrice command of the prayer shawl fringes that a traditionalist
religious Jew wears in life and is closed with in death: See, Remember, Do.
Dulcinea Boesenberg discusses Stephen's speech before the Jewish
council in Acts 7:2–53 in “Retelling Moses's Killing of the
Egyptian: Acts 7 in Its Jewish Context.” She argues that Luke's retelling
of Moses's killing of the Egyptian is best read within the Judaism of his time.
It this way Luke creates two streams within Israel, those who remain faithful to Moses,
and those who stray. Luke identifies the Way (those who have listened to Jesus, the
prophet like Moses) with the former stream and the Jews who do not follow Jesus with the
latter. Luke thus freely reshapes the scriptural narrative while simultaneously
retaining particular narrative details.
