Mellemreligiøse relationer

The second volume of the series "Key Concepts in Interreligious Discourses" points out the roots of the concept of ''human rights'' in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It shows how far the universal validity of ''human rights'' opposes in some crucial points with religious traditions. The volume demonstrates that new perspectives are introduced to the general discussion about human rights when related to religious traditions. Especially the interreligious viewpoint proves that a new kind of debate about human rights and its history is necessary.

A resource for working through conflict with dialogue toward the goal of peace.

When people of different cultures and religious traditions are being constantly drawn closer together, interreligious dialogue becomes not only a strategy to understand the "Others," but also an attitude to deepen one's faith. Christian faith acknowledges other religious traditions as genuine "ways" and "channels" of salvation for their adherents and that religions have a place in God's universal plan of salvation for humankind. The plausibility of this assertion can be exemplified by the concept of "inclusive pluralism," a theological model developed by the Belgian-born Jesuit theologian Jacques Dupuis. This book expounds that concept and reflects on its implication for the Catholic Church's unwavering commitment to interreligious dialogue.

Devotion to Artemis dominated the religious culture of ancient Ephesos. But she was not alone. The city of Ephesos and its environs offered a rich panoply of religious options, domestic and public. Structures, statutes, coins, inscriptions, and texts testify to the remarkable diversity of religious ideas and practices in Ephesos. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Jewish religious traditions found loyal adherents among residents and visitors. Gods, goddesses, heroes, and emperors were worshipped. The contributions in this volume demonstrate that ancient Ephesos was a vibrant and competitive religious environment.

How is Acts of the Apostles - its form and features - to be understood in light of the work's ancient Mediterranean cultural context? In the present study, Eric C. Moore offers a fresh response to this much-debated question, arguing for the utility of ancient colonization as an analytic lens for reading Acts, a story about the origins and replication of early Christianity. He explores how in narrating his account, Luke draws on a common stock of "foundation" motifs employed by ancient sources, textual and material alike, to glorify community beginnings.

In the last two decades, increasing numbers of texts have been suggested as coming from or edited during the Persian period, but these discussions do not always reflect extensively on the assumptions used in making these claims or the implications on a broader scale. Earlier generations of scholars found it sufficient to categorize material in the biblical books simply as "late" or "postexilic" without adequately trying to determine when, by whom, and why the material was incorporated into the text at a fixed point in the Persian period. By grappling with these questions, the essays in this volume evince a greater degree of precision vis-à-vis dating and historical context. The authors introduce the designations early Persian, middle Persian, and late Persian in their textual analysis, and collectively they take significant steps toward developing criteria for locating a biblical text within the Persian period. Contributors:Reinhard Achenbach, Richard J. Bautch, Joseph Blenkinsopp, David M. Carr, Georg Fischer SJ, Raik Heckl, Yigal Levin, Jill Middlemas, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Konrad Schmid, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer

In recent decades, the debate on monotheism and religious pluralism has been strongly influenced by the idea that monotheism originating in the Old Testament is the root of intolerance and violence. In this study, Daniela Scialabba investigates inclusive tendencies in Old Testament monotheism, in particular theological principles motivating and supporting the possibility of a positive relationship between non-Israelites and the God of Israel. Thus, she examines three texts thoroughly: the Book of Jonah, Psalm 33 (MT and LXX), and the novel "Joseph and Aseneth". Despite their difference concerning genre, date of origin and provenance, these texts have important ideas in common: the relationship between the God of Israel and non-Israelites as well as the concept of God as a universal creator who has pity with all his creatures.

In this work, Paul Michael Kurtz examines the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire through the prism of religion, as a structuring framework not only for writings on the past but also for the writers of that past themselves. The author investigates what biblical scholars, theologians, orientalists, philologists, and ancient historians considered "religion" and "history" to be, how they understood these conceptual categories, and why they studied them in the manner they did. Focusing on Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, his inquiry scrutinizes to what extent, in an age of allegedly neutral historical science, the very enterprise of reconstructing the ancient past was shaped by liberal Protestant structures shared by dominant historians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this work, Karel van der Toorn explores the social setting, the intellectual milieu, and the historical context of the beliefs and practices reflected in the Hebrew Bible. While fully recognizing the unique character of early Israelite religion, the author challenges the notion of its incomparability. Beliefs are anchored in culture. Rituals have societal significance. God has a history. By shifting the focus to the context, the essays gathered here yield a deeper understanding of Israelite religion and the origins of the Bible.

In this volume, Elif Hilal Karaman examines the lives of Ephesian women in their historical and social contexts, considering in particular their roles as mothers, wives, teachers, and individuals in the private and public spheres. She presents Greco-Roman and early Christian sources relevant to Ephesus and relating to women, including more than 300 Ephesian inscriptions, and analyses them comparatively. By doing this she illuminates the impact of early Christianity upon the roles of women. The evidence presented demonstrates the extent to which early Christian authors utilized Greco-Roman cultural elements to construct a social background for the nascent Christian communities for whom they wrote. Elif Hilal Karaman's work thus advocates for the interpretation of early Christian texts in conversation with local archaeological and literary evidence in order to develop more nuanced understandings of the social and historical contexts of these important works.

JongHyun Kwon's research aims to discover whether the historical Jesus understood his death as a means of forgiveness by comparing Paul and Matthew's treatment of these themes. The strong tie between Jesus' death and forgiveness of sin in nascent Christianity is attenuated in Jesus research. Hence, the author's central question: Is this a true understanding of the historical Jesus, or a post-Easter theology? JongHyun Kwon's investigation is conducted through a comparison of the Pauline epistles and the Gospel of Matthew. The result is then compared against Jewish writings contemporary to Jesus.Through this methodology, JongHyun Kwon finds that Paul and Matthew correspond to one another on the issue of the strong affinity between Jesus' death and forgiveness. He then concludes that the historical Jesus may have understood his death as a means of forgiveness, as they describe.

The articles in this volume discuss polemically charged re-evaluations of the religious traditions and scriptures of the Western world, employed throughout the centuries in various religious contexts. These studies consider new religious outlooks not as glosses on inherited traditions, but as acts of power exercised in the struggle for identity: contestation, appropriation, interpretation and polemics against the religious "other", involving, sometimes covertly, critiques of inherited tradition. The volume outlines a typology of the variety of attested strategies, highlighting cases of borderline extremes involving subversions of mainstream forms of belief as well as elucidating more moderate avenues of interaction. Most of the studies were presented at a 2016 conference in Jerusalem honouring Guy G. Stroumsa, a renowned scholar of early Christianity and Late Antiquity, recipient of many scholarly awards, including the Leopold Lucas Prize 2018. Contributors:Nicole Belayche, Moshe Blidstein, Philippe Borgeaud, Hubert Cancik, Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier, Gilles Dorival, Giovanni Filoramo, Aryeh Kofsky, Sergey Minov, Maren R. Niehoff, Lorenzo Perrone, Serge Ruzer, John Scheid, Zur Shalev, Mark Silk, Adam Silverstein, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, Yuri Stoyanov, Guy Stroumsa, Michel Tardieu, Sharon Weisser

The figure Balaam has interested exegetes and scribes for millennia. Jonathan Miles Robker examines the different versions of the literary character Balaam as attested in biblical and epigraphic literature. By contrasting the distinct information about Balaam presented in the various sources (the plaster inscription from Della, Numbers 22-24; 31; Deuteronomy 23; Joshua 13; 24; Judges 11; Micah 6; and Nehemiah 13), the author seeks to trace the development of characterizations of Balaam from the oldest available material to the youngest in the Hebrew Bible. In this way, Jonathan Miles Robker advances discourse about the literary and tradition-historical development of the texts that became the Hebrew Bible. Beyond the text of the Hebrew Bible, he also traces the continued development of Balaam's characterization through the texts of Qumran and the New Testament. To this end, the author contributes discussions of the history of religion in Antiquity.

In this volume, scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and late antique religion demonstrate how special attention to the ritual and rhetorical functions of space can improve modern interpretations of ancient literary, liturgical, and ritual texts. Each chapter is concerned with reconstructing the dynamic interaction between space and text. Demonstrating the pliability of the idea of space, the contributions in this volume span from Second Temple debates over Eden to Byzantine Christian hymnography. In so doing, they offer a number of answers to the seemingly simple question: What difference does space make for how modern scholars interpret ancient texts? The nine contributions in this volume are divided into the three interrelated topics of the rhetorical construction of places both earthly and cosmic, the positioning of people in religious space, and the performance of ritual texts in place.

A renewed focus on the role of interpersonal relationships in the cultivation of religious sensibilities is emerging in the study of religion. Matthew Ryan Robinson addresses this question in his study of Friedrich Schleiermacher's notion of "free sociability". In Schleiermacher's ethics, the human person is formed in and consists of intimate, tightly interconnecting relationships with others. Schleiermacher describes this sociability as a natural tendency prompted by experiences of physical and existential limitation that lead one to look to others to complete one's experience. But this experience of incompleteness and orientation to "the completion of humanity" also constitute the fundamental structure of religion in Schleiermacher's theory of religion as orientation to "the universe and the relationship of humanity to it." Thus, Schleiermacher not only presents sociability as basic to human nature, but also as inherently religious - and, potentially, redemptive. What making such a claim means and the implications it raises are central considerations of this study of Schleiermacher's ethics, theory of religion and ecclesiology.

In this work, Christina Harker deconstructs the prevailing treatment of the New Testament as anti-imperial by contextualizing both New Testament scholarship and the Galatian experience within imperialist discourses that survived the dissolution of conventional empires in the twentieth century. She critiques simplistic treatments of empire as post-imperial (that is, replicating patterns of imperialist ideology, albeit unwittingly). To solve the problem, a new interpretation of Galatians is proposed that reworks and complicates the portrait of the Galatians themselves, rather than Paul, within what then emerges as a diverse social world peopled by complex individuals with heterogeneous social and cultural identities. The author is thus able to show how New Testament scholars who rehabilitate the Bible and Paul as anti-empire perpetuate the same imperialist modes of interpretation they seek to repudiate.

Were there figurines in Yehud during the Achaemenid period, and in particular in Jerusalem? A positive answer to this question disproves the general consensus about the absence of figurines in Yehud, which is built on the assumption that the figurines excavated in Judah/Yehud are chronologically indicative for Iron Age II in this area (aside from a few typological exceptions). Ephraim Stern and others have taken this alleged absence of figurines as indicative of Jewish monotheism¿s rise. Izaak J. de Hulster refutes this `no figurines -> monotheism¿ paradigm by detailed study of the figurines from Yigal Shiloh¿s excavation in the `City of David¿ (especially their contexts in Stratum 9), providing ample evidence for the presence of figurines in post-587/586 Jerusalem. The author further reflects on the paradigm¿s premises in archaeology, history, the history of religion, theology, and biblical studies, and particularly in coroplastics (figurine studies).

The essays by Heikki Räisänen (1941-2015) collected in this volume deal with a broad array of topics, ranging from early Christian identities to bibliodrama and other modern-day approaches to the scriptures. The exegetical studies in the first part explore issues related to early Christian eschatology, virginal conception, and Paul's complex argumentation about the Jews and their salvation in Romans 9-11. The essays on ancient and modern interpretations of the Bible in the second part pay special attention to ethical issues, address the "dark sides" of its reception, and discuss the biblical interpretations of Marcion and Joseph Smith. The third section comprises studies on the Bible and Qur'an, while the concluding chapter provides a comprehensive description of the Bible as scripture from a comparative perspective.

In this study, Paavo N. Tucker considers the different models of formation for the Priestly literature of the Pentateuch through an analysis of the Priestly texts in Exodus and how they relate to the Holiness Code in Lev 17-26. The texts in Exodus that are traditionally assigned to the Priestly Grundschrift are not concerned with the priestly matters of Exod 25-Lev 16, but are better understood as relating to the language, theology, and concerns of Lev 17-26, and should be assigned to the same strata of H with Lev 17-26. The same applies to the Priestly narratives beginning in Gen 1. The Priestly literature in Gen 1-Lev 26 form a composition that develops the themes of creation, Sabbath, sanctuary, and covenant to their climactic expression and culmination in the legal promulgation and ethical paraenesis of H in Lev 17-26. The author shows that, rather than being a "Priestly composition" as Erhard Blum argues, it is more fitting to see this literature as an "H composition," which weaves narrative and law together in order to motivate obedience to the laws of Lev 17-26.

Pious Jews of the Second Temple period sought to conform their lives to Torah, the law God had given Israel. Their different sects disagreed, however, on how to interpret particular laws and even on the question of who had the authority to interpret them. Jesus and his earliest followers, while focusing primarily on what they believed God was doing in their own day, were repeatedly confronted with issues raised by its relation to God's prior revelation in Torah. This volume contains studies by Stephen Westerholm devoted to the meaning and place of Torah in Early Judaism as well as to New Testament understandings, particularly those of the gospels and Pauline literature. Attention is also given to the "New Perspective on Paul," to recent discussions of justification and Paul's relation to Judaism, and to aspects of the transmission of Jesus tradition among his earliest followers.

Religious, philosophical, and theological views on the self vary widely. For some the self is seen as the center of human personhood, the ultimate bearer of personal identity and the core mystery of human existence. For others the self is a grammatical error and the sense of self an existential and epistemic delusion. In Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, the term 'self' is often used as a noun that refers not to the performance of an activity or to a material body per se but rather to a (gendered) organism that represents the presence of something distinct from its materiality. This volume documents a critical and constructive debate between critics and defenders of the self or of the no-self that explores the intercultural dimensions of this important topic. Contributors:Fidel Arnecillo, Jr., Yuval Avnur, Marlene Block, Sinkwan Cheng, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Iben Damgaard, Duncan Gale, Jonardon Ganeri, Stephanie Gehring, W. Ezekiel Goggin, Leah Kalmanson, Trevor Kimball, Kate Kirkpatrick, Gereon Kopf, Dietrich Korsch, Deena Lin, Alexander McKinley, Eleonora Mingarelli, Joseph S. O'Leary, Robert Overy-Brown, Raymond Perrier, Joseph Prabhu, Friederike Rass, Marcelo Souza

Why did the early followers of Jesus call themselves "Christians"? What was their social and religious capital? Why did Christianity attract both poor widows and wealthy women? What did pagans think of early Christians? Integrating the major apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in the study of Christianity and the ancient world, Jan N. Bremmer illustrates their prominence of women and their, sometimes surprising, usage of magic as well as establishing a new chronology and place of composition for these Acts. He also shows that the early Christian tours of hell derive from both Jewish and Greek models, although they become increasingly Christianised. The author concludes by decoding the intriguing visions in the Passion of Perpetua by placing them in the contemporary world, thereby compelling us to sympathize with the hopes and fears of young Christian martyrs. It is the close attention to both pagan and Christian traditions that make these papers, which have all been updated and some of them revised, an exciting read for scholars and advanced students alike.

In this work, Andrei A. Orlov examines Jewish apocalyptic traditions about the angel Yahoel, tracing their conceptual impact on the development of later rabbinic and Hekhalot beliefs concerning the supreme angel Metatron. The author argues that the figure Yahoel, who became associated in Jewish apocalypticism with the distinctive aural ideology of the divine Name, provides an important conceptual key not only for elucidating the evolution of the Metatron tradition, but also for understanding the origins of the distinctive aural ideology prominent in early Jewish mystical accounts. Andrei A. Orlov suggests that the aural mould of Jewish apocalypticism exercised a decisive and formative influence on the development of early Jewish mysticism.

The authors of this volume, over thirty authoritative practitioners and scholars, illuminate the context for religion in public education nationally and globally. Their principal focus is on Religious Education in England, with its distinctive matrix of Christianity, plurality of beliefs and secularity. The volume's complementary attention to RE provision in eight other countries and within Europe is revealing of each and a source for comparative comment on the `English approach'. Religion is understood universally as referring to the deepest meanings which we have generated to live with, both individually and collectively. The peculiarity of England with a constitutional monarchy and established church is identified as an enabling feature for understanding, inclusivity and openness rather than separation and mutual ignorance, but that RE is threatened by government inattention. Contributors:Jeff Astley, Vishalache Balakrishnan, Dennis Bates, Alan Brine, Alan Brown, Sarah Lane Cawte, Rasamandala Das, Malcom M Deboo, René Ferguson, Brian Gates, John Gay, Angela Gluck, Julie Grove, Anna Halafoff, Nasima Hassan, Sivane Hirsch, James Holt, John Keast, Sahin & Yildiz Kizilabdullah, Emile Lester, Asher Maoz, Bruce Maxwell, Harshad Sanghrajka, Bernd Schröder, Ranvir Singh, Mike Stygal, Phra Nicholas Thanissaro, Richy Thompson, Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady, Stephen Vickers, Peter Ward, Paul Weller, Barbara Wintersgill, Marc Wisnosky

Brian B. Schmidt presents five case studies in which architectural spaces, artifacts, epigraphs, images and biblical manuscripts corroborate the existence of a robust daimonic realm in late pre-exilic Israel, along with an embryonic pandemonium. The material and epigraphic data from Kuntillet Ajrud, Ketef Hinnom, and Khirbet el-Qom, along with the manuscript evidence from Deut 32 and 1 Sam 28, indicate that pandemonium members wreaked havoc on the living and the dead. The same data also preserve a countervailing realm of apotropaism over which YHWH and Asherah, portrayed as the quintessential protective deities Bes and Beset, governed. In addition to Asherah's role in this realm as YHWH's mediatrix, various other material media including amulets, inscribed blessings, decorated jars served to convey apotropaism's empowerment to humanity.

In this study, Jonathan S. Milgram demonstrates that the transformation of inheritance law from the biblical to the tannaitic period is best explained against the backdrop of the legal and social contexts in which the tannaitic laws were formulated. Employing text and source critical methods, he argues that, in the absence of the hermeneutic underpinnings for tannaitic innovations, the laws were not the result of the rabbinic imagination and its penchant for inventive interpretation of Scripture. Turning to the rich repositories in biblical, ancient near eastern, Second Temple, Greek, Elephantine, Judean desert, and Roman sources, the author searches for conceptual parallels and antecedents as well as formulae and terminology adopted and adapted by the tannaim. Since the tannaitic traditions reflect the social and economic contexts of the tannaitic period - the nuclear family on privatized landholdings in urban centers - the author also considers the degree to which tannaitic inheritance laws may have emerged out of these contexts.

Covenant and election are two theological concepts that dominate the landscape of the Hebrew Bible. If they became the main structuring concepts of the Hebrew Bible, they were not so from the beginning. Their centrality was the result of their utilization by exilic and post-exilic scribes and tradents to focus Israel's traditions into a coherent structure as fitted the revelation of one God. The essays in this collection examine covenant and election across the biblical literature, from the priestly document through Deuteronomy to Jeremiah and the book of Chronicles. They show how the ideas were shaped and refined under the conditions of national disaster and rebuilding.

Hope is a fundamental but controversial human phenomenon. For some it is Pandora's most mischievous evil, for others it is a divine gift and one of the highest human virtues. It is difficult to pin down but its traces seem to be present everywhere in human life and practice. Christianity as a comprehensive practice of hope cannot be imagined without it: Christians are not believers in dogmas but practitioners of hope. In other religious traditions the topic of hope is virtually absent or even critically rejected and opposed. Half a century ago hope was at the center of attention in philosophy and theology. However, in recent years the discussion has shifted to positive psychology and psychotherapy, utopian studies and cultural anthropology, politics and economics. This has opened up interesting new vistas. Contributors: William J. Abraham, Daniel Ambord, Nancy Bedford, Michael Ulrich Braunschweig, Aaron D. Cobb, John Cottingham, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Yaniv Feller, M. Jamie Ferreira, Duncan Gale, Kirsten Gerdes, Deidre Green, Arne Grøn, Michael Lamb, Richard Livingston, Yi Shen Ma, Alan Mittleman, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Jürgen Moltmann, Bruce Paolozzi, Raymond E. Perrier, Friederike Rass, Hartmut von Sass. Bernard N. Schumacher, Ola Sigurdson, Tyler Viale, Claudia Welz

Ethnic values changed as Imperial Rome expanded, challenging ethnocentric values in Rome itself, as well as in Greece and Judea. Rhetorically, Roman, Greek, and Judean writers who eulogized their cities all claimed they would receive foreigners. Further, Greco-Roman narratives of urban tensions between rich and poor, proud and humble, promoted reconciliation and fellowship between social classes. Luke wrote Acts in this ethnic, economic, political context, narrating Jesus as a founder who changed laws to encourage receiving foreigners, which promoted civic, missionary growth and legitimated interests of the poor and humble. David L. Balch relates Roman art to early Christianity and introduces famous, pre-Roman Corinthian artists. He shows women visually represented as priests, compares Dionysian and Corinthian charismatic speech and argues that larger assemblies of the earliest, Pauline believers "sat" (1 Cor 14.30) in taverns. Also, the author demonstrates that the image of a pregnant woman in Revelation 12 subverts imperial claims to the divine origin of the emperor, before finally suggesting that visual representations by Roman domestic artists of "a category of women who upset expected forms of conduct" (Bergmann) encouraged early Christian women like Thecla, Perpetua and Felicitas to move beyond gender stereotypes of being victims. Balch concludes with two book reviews, one of Nicolas Wiater's book on the Greek biographer and historian Dionysius, who was a model for both Josephus and Luke-Acts, the second of a book by Frederick Brenk on Hellenistic philosophy and mystery religion in relation to earliest Christianity.

This volume presents a group of articles that deal with connections between ancient Babylonian, Iranian and Jewish communities in Mesopotamia under Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Sasanian rule. The studies, written by leading scholars in the fields of Assyriology, Iranian studies and Jewish studies, examine various modes of cultural connections between these societies, such as historical, social, legal, and exegetical intersections. The various Mesopotamian connections, often neglected in the study of ancient Judaism, are the focus of this truly interdisciplinary collection. Contributors:Jonathan Ben-Dov, Yaakov Elman, Irving Finkel, James Nathan Ford, Eckart Frahm, Uri Gabbay, Yishai Kiel, Reuven Kiperwasser, Maria Macuch, Shai Secunda, Dan D. Y. Shapira, Prods Oktor Skjærvø, Caroline Waerzeggers, Nathan Wasserman, Abraham Winitzer, Ran Zadok