Over time I have come the view that blogging is "the friend of information but the enemy of thought." I maintain the space for archival purposes and continue to use it like an old commonplace book, as the occasion calls.
Monday, 28 June 2010 at 4:00 PM And I’m deliberately not taking my laptop. There may be some minor activity on Twitter, but probably not much here until August.
One highlight I’m anticipating is a two day bike ride with my brother, from our childhood home to the Oregon coast. Might look something like this:
Monday, 28 June 2010 at 3:25 PM It has been a while since I read an issue of JTI all the way through. Somehow I did in the case of the Spring 2010 issue, and copied more than one article for my files. If you only have time for one, though, it should probably be Bogdan Bucur’s “Sinai, Zion, and Tabor: An Entry into the Christian Bible.”
Moses receiving the Law on Sinai, from Jesus. Winchester Bible, 12th century.
Bucur, who pays an evident debt to Jon Levenson’s wonderful Sinai and Zion (1985), concentrates on the refraction of Sinai and Zion through Mt. Tabor, particularly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Here’s what he says about Sinai and Tabor:
It is now clear that, for an important segment of patristic exegesis, the Transfiguration is not only a vision that the disciples have of Christ, but, so to speak, a vision of a vision—a vision granted to Moses and Elijah, witnessed to by the disciples—and that Moses and Elijah appear on Tabor, beholding Jesus, because they have gazed upon him before on Sinai. In fact, the exegetical connection between Sinai and Tabor is also reflected in the readings assigned for the Feast of Transfiguration: the texts selected to explicate Christ’s appearance on Tabor are Exod 24 (the anthropomorphic appearance of the Lord to the 70 elders on Sinai), Exod 33 (“the promise”), and 3 Rgns/1 Kgs 19 (Elijah at Horeb).
— B. G. Bucur, JTI 4/1 (2010): 38.
The article is accompanied by some wonderful illustrations, presented online by Eisenbrauns. I hope future issues of JTI make more use of this feature.
JTI, Jesus, Moses, Sinai, Tabor in Scripture & Theology, wirkungsgeschichte Wednesday, 16 June 2010 at 1:54 PM “This pressure exercised by Deuteronomy, mediated through liturgy, has been received by Paul with a threefold construal of the book as ethical authority, theological authority, and a lens for the interpretation of Israel’s history. The constraint of being bound to Deuteronomy is matched by the potential for new vision such boundedness supplies. If Paul knows by revelation that the crucified Jesus has been raised as Lord and Christ, he instinctively understands the import of such an intervention through the lens of Deuteronomy’s prophetic judgment on Israel’s history. If Paul’s commission as a Jewish apostle to the nations comes to him wholly from without, he turns to Deuteronomy 29–32 (and, e.g., Isaiah 40–55) to make sense of the role of the Gentiles in the people of God. If Paul can acknowledge the radical newness of the revelation of God in Christ, he is emphatic that this God is none other than the one God confessed twice daily in the Shema‘ – a confession Paul had been binding to his very body for many years. If the redemption from the law’s curse brought about a reconsideration of the law under a particular aspect, Paul remained convinced of the sheer propriety of God’s demand for right living, for Jew as well as Gentile, as expressed in Deuteronomy. It is an interesting thought experiment to ponder how different Pauline theology would be had Paul chosen the route of Marcion and simply cut himself free from his ancestral heritage.”
— David Lincicum, Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter with Deuteronomy (WUNT II/284; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), p 198
Deuteronomy, Lincicum, Paul in wirkungsgeschichte Friday, 11 June 2010 at 1:24 PM “If our interest were simply in a conventional “background” to Paul’s citations of Deuteronomy, to investigate only those citations of Deuteronomy actually paralleled in Paul’s letters would suffice. The intent of these chapters, however, is to approach this question from the advancing horizon of Deuteronomy itself, ascertained through its effective history. I hope that part of the accomplishment of these chapters is to document that Deuteronomy carries with it a particular force, a shape composed of both mass (in the givenness of its content) and energy (in the traditions of its interpretation). If something like this is true of texts in general, even more so does it characterize the text of Scripture which presents itself and is accepted as divinely authoritative by a broad range of Second Temple Jewish authors, Paul included. Not only, though, does Deuteronomy retain a broadly defined shape as it is interpreted through the centuries, it also prepares the hermeneutical space which it subsequently comes to inhabit. By its role in liturgy, its literary reception, and its own address directed to posterity, Deuteronomy has already primed Paul and his Jewish contemporaries to engage with it. This is not, however, to say that specific interpretations are delivered concretely and incorrigibly in advance, nor that any particular author’s interpretation can be discerned merely by registering contemporary interpretative practice. As these chapters so amply demonstrate, the singular hermeneutical force of Deuteronomy comes to be actualized and expressed in a variety of different contexts and ways.”
— David Lincicum, Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter with Deuteronomy (WUNT II/284; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), pp 61–62
The chapters that follow examine the footprint of Deuteronomy:
The project was done under Markus Bockmuehl at Oxford, and it is well worth reading.
