Recommended HJ/MJ books?

[Ben C. Smith]

Two books by Helen Bond.

Thanks.

[Ben C. Smith]

For a very great many, the New Testament Romans is the flagship of the Pauline corpus. Some have hailed Romans as the most important theological work in the entire NT. However, Romans suffers from a troubling textual history.

The Textual History of the Letter to the Romans, by Harry Gamble Jr. (1977), as far as I know, still seems to represent the definitive and most comprehensive work on the subject --- in terms of the body of evidence presented.

Thanks, Robert. I have read it. I got it through Interlibrary Loan. It is indeed a great book.

I bought a good used copy via Amazon for less than $12, including shipping.

A steal. Thanks for the information.

[Ben C. Smith]

I reckon Dieter Roth (2015) 'The Text of Marcion’s Gospel'. (Leiden: Brill, 2015) would be a good read given that is Roth's 3rd work on Marcion in 7 yrs, and would be his most significant. Though it is even more expensive!

Good one. The expense for a single book may be a deterrent, but thanks.

BeDuhn (2013) 'The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon' (Polebridge Press) would be good, too.

That is on the list already. Indeed, the fact that I could not get this one by Interlibrary Loan was what prompted me to set aside book money in the first place.

Ben.

[perseusomega9]

While it's not his text of Marcion's gospel, Roth's dissertation is online https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/ ... sequence=1

[Ben C. Smith]

While it's not his text of Marcion's gospel, Roth's dissertation is online https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/ ... sequence=1

Got it.

[John2]

Ben,

I wasn't aware of "mythicism" until I stumbled upon Neil Godfrey's blog several years ago. Since then I've acquainted myself with Doherty and dipped into Wells and have been watching Carrier carry the torch, and my mythicism research has been mostly online so I can't recommend anything you have probably already read. And while I respect Doherty's awareness of Christian literature and found his interpretations interesting, I don't find it persuasive.

Just to give you some background about me, I'm not that interested in Jesus. I wasn't raised with any religion but became an Orthodox wannabe in a Reform Jewish town. I studied Jewish history, used an Orthodox siddur (with translations) and prayed with tefillin and a tallit and went along with the idea of the Oral Torah. In time I started to question the latter as I learned more about the Sadducees and Karaites. I read the Dead Sea Scrolls and literature about them long before I opened an NT, and used to take a similar position on them as Stephan Huller (in our exchanges on this forum) that they are vague and left them to gather dust on my shelf.

I first heard about Eisenman when I saw an ad in the paper for James, the Brother of Jesus. "James ... the brother of Jesus?" I had asked myself. I didn't know anything about James and very little about Jesus, and for me this book opened up a new way of looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls and non-rabbinic Judaism that has colored my take on Christian origins ever since. As far as Jesus goes though, it's hard for me to say who (or if) he was when we play by the rules of using Paul's genuine letters and other early writings (which is something I don't mind doing).

My default assumption has always been that Jesus (if he existed) was a first century CE religious Jew of some sort. I don't see how it can be anything more than that. All attempts, ancient and modern, to make something more of him seem to me like what happened in the Chabad Lubavitch movement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chabad_messianism

An excerpt from this says:

"...many Jews hoped that he [Rabbi Schneerson] would be the Messiah. This idea gained great vocal attention during the last years of Schneerson life ... Since his death, there are those who have persisted in the belief that Schneerson could still be the Messiah, sometimes extremely vocally. Some messianists refuse to admit that Schneerson died, instead proclaiming that he is still alive."

But when it comes to books about Jesus (and I suppose it takes an "HJ" approach, though it doesn't deal with mythicism), one of my favorites is Nehemia Gordon's "Hebrew Yeshua vs. the Greek Jesus." Gordon is a Karaite (formerly Orthodox) Jew I met in an online forum over a decade ago and he has an interesting approach to Christian origins that makes me reconsider Shem Tov's Hebrew Matthew (something else I had shrugged off and left on the shelf).

http://www.hebrewyeshua.com/hebrew_yeshua_book.html

[MrMacSon]

Having flicked through parts of Lau's book that are available online at Google Books, and having had a look at the 1st Chapter of Roth's PhD dissertation (and a few other parts), I'd highly recommend Roth (especially that 1st 'literature review' chapter). Roth thoroughly reviews everything! written until he wrote his PhD, in context, including Tyson's 2006 'Marcion and Luke-Acts: a defining struggle' (University of South Carolina Press).

Given the literature since Roth's 2009 PhD, I reckon reading Roth's 2015 'The Text of Marcion’s Gospel' (Leiden: Brill, 2015) would be worthwhile, as well as one or two other books post 2008-9; and any other key journal articles since 2008-9.

[MrMacSon]

There's a recent-Marcion bibliography in this post - http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 180#p38180

Please post other recommended recent works to the thread and I'll add them to the post.

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

Ben,

I wasn't aware of "mythicism" until I stumbled upon ...

Thanks for the insights. It would be nice to have a thread that is dedicated to such stories, turning points of the thinking ...

[Ben C. Smith]

I wasn't aware of "mythicism" until I stumbled upon Neil Godfrey's blog several years ago. Since then I've acquainted myself with Doherty and dipped into Wells and have been watching Carrier carry the torch, and my mythicism research has been mostly online so I can't recommend anything you have probably already read. And while I respect Doherty's awareness of Christian literature and found his interpretations interesting, I don't find it persuasive.

Just to give you some background about me, I'm not that interested in Jesus. I wasn't raised with any religion but became an Orthodox wannabe in a Reform Jewish town. I studied Jewish history, used an Orthodox siddur (with translations) and prayed with tefillin and a tallit and went along with the idea of the Oral Torah. In time I started to question the latter as I learned more about the Sadducees and Karaites. I read the Dead Sea Scrolls and literature about them long before I opened an NT, and used to take a similar position on them as Stephan Huller (in our exchanges on this forum) that they are vague and left them to gather dust on my shelf.

I first heard about Eisenman when I saw an ad in the paper for James, the Brother of Jesus. "James ... the brother of Jesus?" I had asked myself. I didn't know anything about James and very little about Jesus, and for me this book opened up a new way of looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls and non-rabbinic Judaism that has colored my take on Christian origins ever since. As far as Jesus goes though, it's hard for me to say who (or if) he was when we play by the rules of using Paul's genuine letters and other early writings (which is something I don't mind doing).

My default assumption has always been that Jesus (if he existed) was a first century CE religious Jew of some sort. I don't see how it can be anything more than that. All attempts, ancient and modern, to make something more of him seem to me like what happened in the Chabad Lubavitch movement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chabad_messianism

An excerpt from this says:

"...many Jews hoped that he [Rabbi Schneerson] would be the Messiah. This idea gained great vocal attention during the last years of Schneerson life ... Since his death, there are those who have persisted in the belief that Schneerson could still be the Messiah, sometimes extremely vocally. Some messianists refuse to admit that Schneerson died, instead proclaiming that he is still alive."

But when it comes to books about Jesus (and I suppose it takes an "HJ" approach, though it doesn't deal with mythicism), one of my favorites is Nehemia Gordon's "Hebrew Yeshua vs. the Greek Jesus." Gordon is a Karaite (formally Orthodox) Jew I met in an online forum over a decade ago and he has an interesting approach to Christian origins that makes me reconsider Shem Tov's Hebrew Matthew (something else I had shrugged off and left on the shelf).

http://www.hebrewyeshua.com/hebrew_yeshua_book.html

Thanks for this. I happen to have a copy of that Hebrew Matthew on hand.

Ben.