Plots Of Epiphany

Past scholarship on the prison-escapes in the Acts of the Apostles has tended to focus on lexical similarities to Euripides' Bacchae, going so far as to argue for direct literary dependence. Moving beyond such explanations, the present study argues that miraculous prison-escape was a central event in a traditional and culturally significant story about the introduction and foundation of cults - a story discernable in the Bacchae and other ancient texts. When the mythic quality and cultural diffusion of the prison-escape narratives are taken into account, the resemblance of Lukan and Dionysian narrative episodes is seen to depend less on specific literary borrowing, and more on shared familiarity with cultural discourses involving the legitimating portrayal of new cults in the ancient world.

The Acts of the Apostles reveals a God at work. However, what do God's actions reveal about God's character? This question drives the present study, whose ultimate goal is to discover what portrayal Acts constructs of God through God's actions. Aarflot demonstrates how Jesus's ascension and the development of the gentile mission prove key to Acts' distinctive portrayal of God. The study explores what happens to the characterization of God when Jesus's character comes to resemble God through the ascension, noting in particular the effect of ambiguous language that might refer to either God or Jesus on the portrayal of God. It also considers how Acts depicts God through actions in Israel's past in relation to the narrative present. This is done by looking at how God is characterized at decisive moments of Acts' plot. The resulting observations are ultimately synthesized in a final chapter presenting the portrayal of God in Acts. The results of the study have implications for the discussion of the impact of Christology on theology, and furthers the discussion of "God" in the New Testament by delineating a constant, yet developing image of God, and solidifies previous research's observations on the centrality of God's actions to Acts' narrative.

"In this study, Eric C. Moore examines Acts of the Apostles against the backdrop of colonization in the ancient Mediterranean world. He shows how common cultural beliefs concerning the foundation of new communities shape Luke's account as well." --

How can we explain the difference between the "miraculous" Christianity expressed in the Gospels and the nearly miracle-free Christianity of Paul? In this historically informed study, senior New Testament scholar Graham Twelftree challenges the view that Paul was primarily a thinker and reimagines him as an apostle of Jesus for whom the miraculous was of profound importance. Highlighting often-overlooked material in Paul's letters, Twelftree offers a fresh consideration of what the life and work of Paul might teach us about miracles in early Christianity and sheds light on how early Christians lived out their faith.

In John 6:51–59, John describes the Eucharist of Jesus by modeling Dionysus. In particular, John 6:53, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” is one of the most difficult verses found anywhere in the Bible. To explain this, a new approach is needed when one consistently contemplates why John uses flesh (σάρξ) instead of body (σῶμα), and “This is my flesh”, instead of “This is my body.” The Dionysiac ritual of eating and tearing raw flesh shows cannibalistic elements. Unlike other negative descriptions of cannibalism in ancient literature, Dionysus is described as both an eater and a giver of raw flesh. By reevaluating the negative term of cannibalism, John positively applies this Dionysiac cannibalism to the Eucharistic words in 6:51–59. Because emphatically and slightly ironically, scholars’ arguments show that John 6 is still a “hard teaching” of Jesus, Jesus’ hard saying (6:60) is a consequence of this cannibalistic language and the ambiguous features of Dionysus.

The book of Acts is a remarkable fusion of the historical and theological, and its account of the early church has fascinated theologians and biblical scholars for centuries. Just who was the author of this work? And what kind of book did he write? How do we classify its genre? The Acts of the Apostles provides an advanced introduction to the study of Acts, covering important questions about authorship, genre, history and theology. Osvaldo Padilla explores fresh avenues of understanding by examining the text in light of the most recent research on the book of Acts itself, philosophical hermeneutics, genre theory and historiography. In addition, Padilla opens a conversation between the text of Acts and postliberal theology, seeking a fully-orbed engagement with Acts that is equally attuned to questions of interpretation, history and theology.

While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the ‘epiphany-mindedness’ of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer’s notorious anthropomorphism (in the Iliad and Odyssey but also in the Homeric Hymns). This anthropomorphism, which is keenly absorbed by Greek drama and figural art, has very little to do with the religious lifeworld experience of the ancient Greeks, as it appears in other genres. By contrast, throughout all textual genres investigated here, divinatory dreams are represented as an ordinary and real part of the ancient Greeks' lifeworld experience.