{"id":2545,"date":"2007-08-21T00:30:44","date_gmt":"2007-08-21T00:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2007\/08\/knowing-the-currents-1.html"},"modified":"2007-08-21T00:30:44","modified_gmt":"2007-08-21T00:30:44","slug":"knowing-the-currents-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/08\/knowing-the-currents-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Knowing the Currents 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you were to attend the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and either wander through the bookstalls or spend an hour or so with the book that lists sessions, times, and locations, one thing would surely strike you. As Tony LaRussa once told famed baseball writer George Will, “There’s a lot goes on.” So I want to start an approximate ten part series on knowing the currents that flow in the river called Biblical Studies.
\nThere is no rhyme nor reason to the order of these currents. If I mention one book on the whole scene, it is Joel Green, Hearing the New Testament<\/a><\/em>. The book is pitched at students but anyone who wants to figure a particular current out can make sense of each chapter.
\nToday we look at the Jewish context of earliest Christianity<\/em>. (This is a biased way of looking at it that applies to most of my readers — Christians wanting to know the historical context of Jesus and earliest Christianity. One can study this just as Jewish history, or as religion in the ancient Mediterranean.)
\nThe publication and availability of these sources has created an explosion of Jewish studies both by Jewish scholars — like Geza Vermes, Jacob Neusner, Daniel Boyarin, Shaye Cohen, Ross Kraemer, Louis Feldman, Alan Segal … it is unfair to stop but I have to — and Christian scholars, like Martin Hengel, EP Sanders, Bruce Chilton, Craig Evans, Michael Wise … it is unfair to stop but I have to again. I start with the sources themselves and then give some basic books.
\nFirst, here are the basic original sources. It all begins with the Hebrew Bible<\/em>, often called Tanakh and also called the Old Testament by Christians. The Hebrew Bible has a different order of books than the Christian Old Testament, ending as it does with Chronicles. Second, there is what we now call the Old Testament Apocrypha <\/em>— found in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles. In addition, there is the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha<\/em>, a massive 2-volume collection (ed. by James Charlesworth) of documents on a variety of topics, but perhaps most especially for many a collection of Jewish apocalyptic texts.
\nThen we proceed to Aramaic Targums <\/em>of Hebrew Bible books. These attempted to translate the Hebrew Bible, in more or less an paraphrastic way — the way a slow-down pastor might do when he or she is clarifying everything in the text — into Aramaic, the language of the people. Then we have the Dead Sea Scrolls<\/em>, a collection of books most likely derived from the Essene sect that lived at Qumran though possibly simply a deposit of the books of a variety of Jewish sects.
\nAfter the New Testament, and beginning some two centuries later and continuing for about four centuries, we have the classic sources of the rabbis: the Mishnah<\/em>, the Tosefta<\/em>, the Jerusalem Talmud<\/em> and the Babylonian Talmud<\/em>.
\nThird, [added in light of a comment below] we have two major writers whose writings have influenced NT study dramatically: Philo <\/em>of Alexandria and Josephus<\/em>.
\nAlongside literary deposits, there are archaeological studies and inscriptions of the time and letters that have been found.
\nHebrew Bible: Jewish Publication Society
\nOT Apocrypha: New English Bible or New Revised Standard Version
\nOT Pseudepigrapha: James Charlesworth’s 2 volume edition
\nTargums: Michael Glazier Books
\nDead Sea Scrolls: trans. by Geza Vermes or M. Wise\/M. Abegg\/E. Cook.
\nDead Sea Scrolls Bible: M. Abegg and others — what the Bible looked like at Qumran
\nMishnah: J. Neusner
\nTosefta: J. Neusner
\nJerusalem Talmud: J. Neusner
\nBabylonian Talmud: J. Neuser or I. Epstein.
\nPhilo: Loeb Classical Library
\nJosephus: Loeb Classical Library
\nSecond, on books that put lots of this together, I recommend:
\nE. Schuerer, G. Vermes, M. Goodman, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ<\/a><\/em>. (4 vols.)
\nE.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief<\/a><\/em>.
\nShaye Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you were to attend the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and either wander through the bookstalls or spend an hour or so with the book that lists sessions, times, and locations, one thing would surely strike you. As Tony LaRussa once told famed baseball writer George Will, “There’s a lot goes…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblical-studies"],"yoast_head":"\nKnowing the Currents 1 - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2007\/08\/knowing-the-currents-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Knowing the Currents 1 - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you were to attend the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and either wander through the bookstalls or spend an hour or so with the book that lists sessions, times, and locations, one thing would surely strike you. 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