Living Letters Of The Law

"Well, clearly, and articulately written, Living Letters of the Law is among the most important books in medieval European history generally, as well as in its particular field."—Edward Peters, author of The First Crusade

Since the rise of modern biblical scholarship there has not been unanimity as to how to characterize Paul. He has been praised for having delivered Christianity from Judaism. Lately it has been argued that he remained so thoroughly a Jew that he was not a Christian at all. Others think he became a Christian because he had become a totally frustrated Pharisee by his failure to observe the law of Moses. Some consider him to have been a male chauvinist with few redeeming qualities. Others see in him a messianist with masochistic tendencies. Some think he was a conceited authoritarian who had no patience with the views of others. For a time it was popular to see him as a mystic who wished to lose himself by being in Christ. It has been said that, as one concerned with the life of the Spirit, he saw reason as the enemy of faith and required his converts to sacrifice the intellect on the altar of submission to authority. All these are, at least in part, reactions against the prevailing picture of him as the one who laid the foundation for the doctrines of righteousness by faith and the God of grace on which the Protestant Reformation was built. – Dr. Herold Weiss, Introduction to Meditations on the Letters of Paul With this beginning, the reader is invited into a Bible study with Dr. Weiss that will not be just an exegetical exercise but will, more importantly, be a personal journey into the Messiah's gospel that Paul so fervently shared throughout the known world of his time and continues to share in our day. Be forewarned that you may find yourself spending more time than you counted on as you truly meditate on the words and the spirit of Paul's letters.

In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness," she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. explains why blacks can no longer be victims of inequality.

"Mystical Resistance reveals the Kabbalistic masterpiece Sefer ha-Zohar as a rich source for understanding Jewish resistance to Christian authority. Composed against a backdrop of rising religious intolerance, the Zohar's subversive mystical narratives critique the changing relationship between Western Europe's Christian majority and its Jewish minority"--

This book examines the discriminatory marking of Jews in Renaissance Italy and the impacts this had on the Jewish communities.

In this study, Teresa Morgan offers a radically new interpretation of 'in Christ'and related expressions in the undisputed letters of Paul. Starting from a reassessment of Deissmann's Die neutestamentliche Formel "in Christo Jesu", she argues that Deissmann's philology is flawed, the Schweitzerian concept of 'participation in Christ' which is indebted to it is problematic, and many contemporary accounts of participation are better understood in other terms. Through close readings of each letter, Teresa Morgan shows how Paul uses en Christo language instrumentally, to speak of what God has done 'through' Christ, by Christ's death, and 'encheiristically', to speak of the life the faithful now live 'in Christ's hands': in Christ's power, under his authority, under his protection, and in his care. This creative use of en Christo language forms part of and connects Paul's soteriology, eschatology, and Christology, shaping his narrative of God's intervention in the world, the relationship between God, Christ, and the faithful, the lordship and work of Christ between the resurrection and the parousia, and God's ultimate triumph. This narrative is closely connected with Paul's ecclesiology and ethics, where life 'in Christ's hands' is envisaged as the this-worldly dimension of the new creation: an aspect ofeternal life already active in the present time. In Christ's hands the faithful, not least Paul himself, live a new life in communities with a distinctive structure and dynamic. In Christ's hands, they hope to remain in right-standing with God and serve God until Christ's return.

The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts, teachings that have been passed down through the millennia. Yet, as this groundbreaking new study shows, Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, emerging in response to the social prejudices that Jews faced. Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane. Kabbalistic Revolution proposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a radically empowering political discourse. While the era’s Christian preachers claimed that Jews were blind to the true meaning of scripture and had been abandoned by God, the Kabbalists countered with a doctrine that granted Jews a uniquely privileged relationship with God. Lachter demonstrates how Kabbalah envisioned this increasingly marginalized group at the center of the universe, their mystical practices serving to maintain the harmony of the divine world. For students of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalistic Revolution provides a new approach to the development of medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book’s central questions should appeal to anyone with an interest in the relationships between religious discourses, political struggles, and ethnic pride.