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Preface
- University of South Carolina Press
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Preface The core chapters of this book are expansions of the 2010 Hall Lectures at the University of South Carolina and associated institutions. The Nadine Beacham and Charlton F. Hall Sr. Lectureship in New Testament Studies and Early Christianity , sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University, was established by alumnus and Columbia businessman Charlton F. Hall Jr. in memory of his father and mother. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have delivered these lectures and for the opportunity to have become acquainted with the donor, Charleton Hall. I am also specially grateful to Professor Donald Jones for arranging the Lectures and for his and the university’s warm hospitality. The overall theme of the 2010 Hall Lectures was “Jesus and Empire.” The particular lectures were titled: I. “Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine” II. “Jesus’ Healing and Exorcism” III. “Jesus and the New World (Dis)Order” Insofar as new research in several related areas is challenging the standard assumptions of historical Jesus studies and the standard approach has come to a procedural dead end, it is necessary to explore new possibilities that take the recent research into account. Violence and Jesus’s response to it are issues that were debated long before serious attention was given to political economic dynamics in the Roman imperial world. Recent books on Jesus, however, have almost avoided the subject. More critical and candid recent treatment of Roman military practices by Roman historians , on the other hand, suggests that imperial violence may have been more of a factor in the context in which Jesus worked than previously recognized. Jesus’s conflict with the scribal “retainers,” including the Pharisees, continued to play an active role in the politics of Roman Palestine under the rule of Herod the Great and the high priestly aristocracy, contrary to the recently influential hypothesis that they had withdrawn from politics to emphasize piety. Recent books on the historical Jesus have almost avoided the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees that is so prominent in the Gospel sources. viii PrefaCe Since crucifixion played a key role in the politics of Roman Palestine, it seemed not only appropriate but also important to discuss the Romans’ crucifixion of Jesus , which is often not dealt with in books on the historical Jesus. The crucifixion of Jesus in the historical context is considered in connection with Jesus’s mission of renewal of the people in opposition to the rulers. Readers will find the assumptions, approach, analysis, and discourse in this volume to be different in many ways from what has been standard in investigation of the historical Jesus. For this I should deliver an apology, in the double sense that I apologize to readers for being “out of step” and presenting “revisionist” history and that I offer an explanation of what I am doing. Coming from undergraduate study of history into New Testament studies and other subfields of theology in divinity school (in the 1960s) required some “reorientation .” Here was a field of ostensibly historical study in which the sources were read and studied piecemeal, verse by verse, with a good deal of “word study.” Peoples , the state, movements, historical actors, and events were (and are) dissolved into “-isms,” such as “Judaism,” “Hellenism,” and “apocalypticism.” Diversity and dynamics were dissolved into theological constructs and schemes. Focused on a quest for doctrines, such as “christologies” or “soteriologies,” New Testament scholars neglected the overall narratives of the Gospels and their contingent historical contexts as irrelevant for the ideas they were abstracting from texts. My generation of New Testament scholars began casting about for alternative approaches during the 1970s and 1980s, often reverting to approaches learned in our undergraduate majors. New approaches began emerging in the field, such as a more sophisticated literary criticism and various kinds of social scientific analysis. But this usually meant reading the Gospels as if they were modern novellas or borrowing structural-functional anthropological or sociological models that had been abandoned in those fields a decade or so earlier. With the give-and-take of critical discussion, however, several “criticisms” gradually gained in sophistication as New Testament studies diversified (and splintered). During the past few decades, moreover , research proceeded into areas that had not even been imagined before, such as oral performance and scribal practice. The emergence of diverse “criticisms” and specializations in New Testament studies, however, has meant that specialists do not stay abreast of developments in other specialties. The...