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Exegesis and Hermeneutics in the Churches of the East contains the proceedings of the Bible in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Traditions unit of the Society of Biblical Literature's (SBL) 2007 meeting in San Diego, California. Biblical professors and scholars from the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox traditions (the latter including Aramaic, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Georgian, and Coptic, among others) gathered to engage in critical study of the role of the Bible in eastern Christianity, past and present. The collection of articles in Exegesis and Hermeneutics in the Churches of the East examines the latest scholarly findings in the field of the utilization and interpretation of the Bible in the Christian communities in the East during the first five centuries of Christianity. They offer critical evaluations of the early church's hermeneutical and exegetical tools and methodologies.
What role do varied understandings of the church play in the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture? In The Church’s Book, Brad East explores recent accounts of the Bible and its exegesis in modern theology and traces the differences made by divergent, and sometimes opposed, theological accounts of the church. Surveying first the work of Karl Barth, then that of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder (following an excursus on interpreting Yoder’s work in light of his abuse), East delineates the distinct understandings of Scripture embedded in the different traditions that these notable scholars represent. In doing so, he offers new insight into the current impasse between Christians in their understandings of Scripture—one determined far less by hermeneutical approaches than by ecclesiological disagreements. East’s study is especially significant amid the current prominence of the theological interpretation of Scripture, which broadly assumes that the Bible ought to be read in a way that foregrounds confessional convictions and interests. As East discusses in the introduction to his book, that approach to Scripture cannot be separated from questions of ecclesiology—in other words, how we interpret the Bible theologically is dependent upon the context in which we interpret it.
Christians have been interpreting Scripture with an aim of deepening their life with God and each other from the very beginning of the church. The past twenty years or so have witnessed an explosion of scholarly writing devoted to the theological interpretation of Scripture. Stephen Fowl, as an active participant in and contributor to the burgeoning literature, has written an ideal companion for guests at the large and somewhat chaotic party, introducing them to important people, texts, and issues. The companion explores some of the connections between the long-running and essential Christian practice of theological interpretation and the more recent body of scholarly literature. Ultimately, the companion hopes to encourage readers to join the party in their own right.
The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity investigates the various ways in which Orthodox Christian, i.e., Eastern and Oriental, communities, have received, shaped, and interpreted the Christian Bible. The handbook is divided into five parts: Text, Canon, Scripture within Tradition, Toward an Orthodox Hermeneutics, and Looking to the Future. The first part focuses on how the Orthodox Church has never codified the Septuagint or any other textual witnesses as its authoritative text. Textual fluidity and pluriformity, a characteristic of Orthodoxy, is demonstrated by the various ancient and modern Bible translations into Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian among other languages. The second part discusses how, unlike in the Protestant and Roman-Catholic faiths where the canon of the Bible is "closed" and limited to 39 and 46 books, respectively, the Orthodox canon is "open-ended," consisting of 39 canonical books and 10 or more anaginoskomena or "readable" books as additions to Septuagint. The third part shows how, unlike the classical Protestant view of sola scriptura and the Roman Catholic way of placing Scripture and Tradition on par as sources or means of divine revelation, the Orthodox view accords a central role to Scripture within Tradition, with the latter conceived not as a deposit of faith but rather as the Church's life through history. The final two parts survey "traditional" Orthodox hermeneutics consisting mainly of patristic commentaries and liturgical interpretations found in hymnography and iconography, and the ways by which Orthodox biblical scholars balance these traditional hermeneutics with modern historical-critical approaches to the Bible.
The Old Testament as Authoritative Scripture in the Early Churches of the East represents the latest scholarly research in the field of Old Testament as Scripture in Eastern Christianity. Its twelve articles focus on the use of the Old Testament in the earliest Christian communities in the East. The collection explores the authoritative role of the Old Testament in the churches of the East and its impact on the church's doctrine, liturgy, canon law, and spirituality.
Biblical scholars have often contrasted the exegesis of the early church fathers from the eastern region and “school” of Syrian Antioch against that of the school of Alexandria. The Antiochenes have often been described as strictly historical-literal exegetes in contrast to the allegorical exegesis of the Alexandrians. Patristic scholars now challenge those stereotypes, some even arguing that few differences existed between the two groups. This work agrees that both schools were concerned with a literal and spiritual reading. But, it also tries to show, through analysis of Theodore and Theodoret’s exegesis and use of the term theoria, that how they integrated the literal-theological readings often remained quite distinct from the Alexandrians. For the Antiochenes, the term theoria did not mean allegory, but instead stood for a range of perceptions—prophetic, christological, and contemporary. It is in these insights that we find the deep wisdom to help modern readers interpret Scripture theologically.
Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today.
In this interesting and insightful work, Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, the leading expert on Andrew of Caesarea and the first to translate his Apocalypse commentary into any modern language, identifies an exact date for the commentary and a probable recipient. Her groundbreaking book, the first ever written about Andrew, analyzes his historical milieu, education, style, methodology, theology, eschatology, and pervasive and lasting influence. She explains the direct correlation between Andrew of Caesarea and fluctuating status of the Book of Revelation in Eastern Christianity through the centuries.
The study of early Judaism and early Christianity has been revolutionised by new evidence from a host of sources: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament Apocrypha, the Nag Hammadi writings and related texts, and new papyrus and amulet discoveries. Now scholars have entered the “next generation” of scholarship, where these bodies of evidence are appreciated in conversation with each other and within the contexts of the wider Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman cultures from the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE. This volume features chapters from leading scholars who approach the study of early Judaism and early Christianity from this synthetic approach. The chapters engage in an inter-generational and international dialogue among the past, present and future generations of scholars, and also among European, North-American, African and South-American scholars and their various methodologies and approaches –- linguistic, historical or comparative. Among the chapters are contributions by Professors James Charlesworth (Princeton), André Gagné (Concordia) and Loren Stuckenbruck (Munich), as well as papers from researchers from North America, Europe, South America and Africa.
In The Apocalypse of Empire, Stephen J. Shoemaker argues that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural environment of apocalyptic anticipation. Shoemaker looks to the Qur'an's fervent representation of the imminent end of the world and the importance Muhammad and his earliest followers placed on imperial expansion. Offering important contemporary context for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam, he surveys the political eschatologies of early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism at the advent of Islam and argues that they often relate imperial ambition to beliefs about the end of the world. Moreover, he contends, formative Islam's embrace of this broader religious trend of Mediterranean late antiquity provides invaluable evidence for understanding the beginnings of the religion at a time when sources are generally scarce and often highly problematic. Scholarship on apocalyptic literature in early Judaism and Christianity frequently maintains that the genre is decidedly anti-imperial in its very nature. While it may be that early Jewish apocalyptic literature frequently displays this tendency, Shoemaker demonstrates that this quality is not characteristic of apocalypticism at all times and in all places. In the late antique Mediterranean as in the European Middle Ages, apocalypticism was regularly associated with ideas of imperial expansion and triumph, which expected the culmination of history to arrive through the universal dominion of a divinely chosen world empire. This imperial apocalypticism not only affords an invaluable backdrop for understanding the rise of Islam but also reveals an important transition within the history of Western doctrine during late antiquity.