Anthropology And The Old Testament

"Overholt shows the usefulness of cultural anthropology to enhance our understanding of ancient Israelite society and to shed light on some puzzling features of Old Testament stories, especially in the Elijah and Elisha cycles."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This volume presents the findings of an international research symposium, held at St Andrews University, Scotland, in July 2003. Contributors include both biblical scholars and anthropologists. The essays presented variously explore and review interdisciplinary links, innovations and developments between anthropology and biblical studies in reference to interpretation of both the OT and NT and pseudepigraphal works. Explored are methodological issues, the use of anthropological concepts in biblical studies (identity; purity boundaries; virtuoso religion; spiritual experience; sacred space) and more ‘field orientated’ work of bible translators in different cultures.

This volume considers the New Testament in the light of anthropological study, in particular the current trend towards theological anthropology. The book begins with three essays that survey the context in which the New Testament was written, covering the Old Testament, early Jewish writings and the literature of the Greco –Roman world. Chapters then explore the anthropological ideas found in the texts of the New Testament and in the thought of it writers, notably that of Paul. The volume concludes with pieces from Brian S. Roser and Ephraim Radner who bring the whole exploration together by reflecting on the theological implications of the New Testament's anthropological ideas. Taken together, the chapters in this volume address the question that humans have been asking since at least the earliest days of recorded history: what does it mean to be human? The presence of this question in modern theology, and its current prevalence in popular culture, makes this volume both a timely and relevant interdisciplinary addition to the scholarly conversation around the New Testament.

Most of the articles were presented and discussed at the seminar Early Christianity between Judaism and Hellenism at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies in Piliscsaba and Budapest, Hungary, in August 2006. The anthropological quest is still one of the classical approaches in historical-critical as well as in other methodological approaches to the New Testament. The complexity of anthropological ideas in the New Testament is seldom presented neither explicitly nor in clearly defined terms, but rather in stories about human beings or their (inter-)actions and/or parenetic teaching that is based on some, often unstated, presuppositions of what humans are like. The different essays in Anthropology in the New Testament and its Ancient Context are taking care of this complex situation and address a selection of important problems from the variety of ideas on anthropology in Early Christianity as well as in its Jewish and its Hellenistic context. The book does not aim to show a coherent New Testament anthropology as it is to write a coherent New Testament theology, but rather tries to present new insights into the complexity of ancient anthropological discourses. With that aim the collection includes presentations on the human body and its purity a key feature in many ancient cultures and their anthropological systems, questions of purity and impurity, on the key anthropological terms sarks and soma in Paul, how a Greco-Roman reader would understand Paul's anthropological reasoning. Paul's anthropology is also set in relation to Philo's view of humanity. Platonic, tripartite anthropology is also part of an article analyzing the common elements in the teaching concerning the human soul among Sethian, Valentinian and Platonic writers. Conversion, another kind of adaptation of a Hellenistic philosophical concept to early Christianity, different early Christian ideas of the resurrected body, and so-called sepulchral anthropology are further subjects addressed in the book which finally deals with selected anthropological imagery in the Gospel of John and with anthropological perspectives in Hebrews. The book contains contributions by Ida Froehlich, Tom Holmen, Lorenzo Scornaienchi, Martin Meiser, George van Kooten, Paivi Vahakangas, Miguel Herrero de Jauregui, Outi Lehtipuu, Imre Peres, Margareta Gruber and Walter Ubelacker. The essays offer some new angles, new methodological approaches and important insights relevant to anthropological views in the New Testament.

Encapsulating as it does research that has been undertaken on the sociological, anthropological and political aspects of the history of ancient Israel, this important book is designed to follow in the tradition of works in the series sponsored by The Society for Old Testament Study which began with the publication of The People and the Book in 1925. The World of Ancient Israel is especially concerned to explore in greater depth than comparable studies the areas and degrees of overlap between approaches to the subject of Old Testament research adopted by scholars and students of theology and the social sciences. Increasing numbers of scholars have recognised the valuable insights that can be gained from a cross-disciplinary approach, and it is becoming clear that the early biblical traditions about the formation of the Israelite state must be examined in the light of comparative anthropology if useful historical conclusions are to be drawn from them.