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Evidence for the Chronology of Jesus

Alden A. Mosshammer

in The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era

According to Luke, Jesus was about 30 years old at the time of his baptism in the 15th year of the emperor Tiberius, AD 29. Most ancient writers therefore dated the Nativity to the 41st or 42nd year ... More

According to Luke, Jesus was about 30 years old at the time of his baptism in the 15th year of the emperor Tiberius, AD 29. Most ancient writers therefore dated the Nativity to the 41st or 42nd year of Augustus, 2 or 3 BC Yet both Matthew and Luke say that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod, who died in 4 BC. Luke also says that Jesus was born at the time of a census, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Judaea was organized as a province and the first census taken in AD 6. Scholars have sought to harmonize the data by arguing that the 15th year of Tiberius was earlier than AD 29 and that there was an earlier census. The seventeenth‐century astronomer Kepler dated the Nativity to 6 BC on the basis of celestial phenomena that he thought accounted for Matthew's story of the Star of BethlehemLess

The Critic at Work: Coming of Age

F. E. Peters

in Jesus and Muhammad: Parallel Tracks, Parallel Lives

This chapter flows from the proposition that critical history attempts to apply criteria of facticity to literary texts and that redaction criticism in particular looks for traces of editorial ... More

This chapter flows from the proposition that critical history attempts to apply criteria of facticity to literary texts and that redaction criticism in particular looks for traces of editorial activity — redactional fingerprints — on the work. Two cases in point: the Gospels’ Infancy Narratives dealing with Jesus’ birth and early years and the parallel passages in Muhammad’s Life concerning the Prophet’s earliest years in Mecca. Both the supernatural elements and the tendentiousness in the texts indicate that in both instances the reader is in the presence of myth and legend rather than history.Less

Ruth

Roza Yakubovitsh

in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs

These poems present the story of Ruth in the form of a dialogue between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor of a barn that could as easily stand in the Polish countryside as on the ... More

These poems present the story of Ruth in the form of a dialogue between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor of a barn that could as easily stand in the Polish countryside as on the outskirts of ancient Bethlehem. The first poem allows Boaz indirect authority through Ruth's account of her response to him, but diminishes the authority of Naomi. The second poem is set in an Eastern European landscape, where, along with the biblical characters, the trees, the river, and the wind speak Yiddish. The poem's themes of restlessness, insomnia, indecision, and leave-taking show how the author avoids the certainty of the biblical Ruth, who successfully crosses over from her home in Moab to Naomi's in Bethlehem and from her Gentile origins to her adoptive religion and people. Instead, he focuses on Naomi, the displaced Jew, and Orpah, who returns to her Gentile home.Less

The Earliest Dormition Traditions: Their Nature and Shape

Stephen J. Shoemaker

in Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption

The first four Christian centuries are remarkably silent regarding the end of the Virgin Mary's life. Only in the later fifth century do we encounter the earliest Dormition traditions. At this point, ... More

The first four Christian centuries are remarkably silent regarding the end of the Virgin Mary's life. Only in the later fifth century do we encounter the earliest Dormition traditions. At this point, there are suddenly several diverse narrative traditions describing the end of Mary's life. They include representatives of three distinct narrative types, the Palm of the Tree of Life narratives, the Bethlehem narratives, and the Coptic narratives, as well as a handful of atypical narratives. The traditions of Ephesus and Constantinople are also briefly considered.Less

Jerome's Library

in The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship

Jerome's method as a commentator was framed explicitly in terms of reliance on earlier authorities. By making the citation and paraphrase of a range of earlier writers' works central to his ... More

Jerome's method as a commentator was framed explicitly in terms of reliance on earlier authorities. By making the citation and paraphrase of a range of earlier writers' works central to his scholarship, Jerome made possession of a considerable library essential. Books in antiquity were very costly. Their acquisition in the numbers that Jerome required would have demanded access to the kind of fortune that, in antiquity, was more often inherited than earned. Furthermore, the possession and use of books was in itself a marker of membership in the elite, from which the monk was supposed to have cut himself off. This chapter considers the contents of the library at Bethlehem in comparison to other ancient book collections. The inventory begins from Jerome's explicit references to books in his possession, takes in the evidence of source-critical studies of his works, and considers also the books that Jerome probably had on hand but did not use as sources.Less

Widening the Circle of Influence

Richard S. Newman

in Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present

Although known as “Mr. Clean” for his longtime environmental advocacy, Edmund Muskie had little knowledge of the American hazardous waste grid until 1978. ... More

Although known as “Mr. Clean” for his longtime environmental advocacy, Edmund Muskie had little knowledge of the American hazardous waste grid until 1978. A congressional sponsor of the landmark Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the senator from Maine epitomized environmental politics. In fact, a few months before the Love Canal crisis unfolded, Muskie proposed yet another federal environmental law: a “comprehensive scheme to assure full protection of our national resources” in the wake of oil drilling disasters, tanker spills and toxic train derailments. Yet Muskie soon realized that his plan omitted something important: hazardous waste dumps. Love Canal had illuminated the toxic perils many Americans faced in their own neighborhoods. With an EPA study showing that tens of thousands of old toxic sites had yet to be contained, it was clear that the everyday landscape of homes, playgrounds, and schools needed environmental protection too. “In our society,” Muskie told an interviewer in the late 1970s, ...we are discovering almost every day, in almost every day’s newspaper, new hazards that have been released into the atmosphere over the period of our industrial revolution. [They] suddenly crop up in Love Canal, up in New York State … to create enormous hazards to public health, property values, to people. So we are constantly dealing with problems that [we] were not anticipating, which suddenly create almost insoluble problems for people and communities … [A]ll of these poisons and toxic materials were buried in landfill sites here, there, and elsewhere and sadly begin leaking in underground water, or into lakes and rivers, streams[,] only to rise up to hit people in the face with disease, with cancer, declining property values so on.... For Muskie, Love Canal was revelatory. It showed that federal law lagged behind the mounting problem of hazardous waste. After hearing Love Canal residents’ testimony, he believed that the time had come for a national statute governing toxic waste remediation—what he would refer to as a “clean land” law. Less

Dheisheh as a Social and Political Space

Nina Gren

in Occupied Lives: Maintaining Integrity in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in the West Bank

This chapter discusses Dheisheh as a political and social space within the specific context of the Bethlehem area. The reader will here find some basic facts about the camp and its establishment by ... More

This chapter discusses Dheisheh as a political and social space within the specific context of the Bethlehem area. The reader will here find some basic facts about the camp and its establishment by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) in the early 1950s. In this context of displacement, village origins remain important to some extent. The chapter explains how and why Dheishehans had earlier been deeply involved in political activism, and why they distanced themselves from it during the al-Aqsa Intifada. The argument is that the political mobilization of Palestinian camp refugees had first of all depended on their experiences of loss and flight in 1948, as well as continuous army violations. Their disengagement at the time of fieldwork was due to encounters of extensive violence during the militarized al-Aqsa Intifada, along with deep distrust and disbelief in the Palestinian political elite and their way of advancing the national project.Less

Boundaries and Baraka: christians, muslims, and a palestinian saint

Lance D. Laird

in Muslims and Others in Sacred Space

This chapter is based on ethnographic study of the 1996 pilgrimage of Muslims and Christians to the Greek monastery of Mar Jiryis (St. George) in the Muslim village of al-Khadr (alt. Khidr, Muslim ... More

This chapter is based on ethnographic study of the 1996 pilgrimage of Muslims and Christians to the Greek monastery of Mar Jiryis (St. George) in the Muslim village of al-Khadr (alt. Khidr, Muslim wali), just south of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank. It examines the conflict and conflation of stories of the saints, common practices and their interpretations, and the contextual religious expressions of baraka, healing, and interfaith relations. The discourses and practices of the pilgrimage intersect with local boundaries and boundary-crossings in the construction of Palestinian national identity.Less

Joan Didion’s: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

David Ulin

in Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage

This essay reviews the book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion. First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Didion in which she mainly describes her ... More

This essay reviews the book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion. First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Didion in which she mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s, including the one in Haight-Ashbury in the weeks and months leading up to the Summer of Love. The book takes its title from the poem “The Second Coming,” by W. B. Yeats. One of the essays is “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a story of murder involving the San Bernardino couple Gordon and Lucille Miller. Here Didion exposes the underside of the great Golden State myth: that it is a land of reinvention, in which we escape the past to find ourselves.Less

Arabic in Jordan and Palestine

Camelia Suleiman

in The Politics of Arabic in Israel: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

This chapter discusses the interface between Palestinian and Jordanian nationalism and the effect of globalisation on both. This binary, while encouraged by the Jordanian regime, particularly after ... More

This chapter discusses the interface between Palestinian and Jordanian nationalism and the effect of globalisation on both. This binary, while encouraged by the Jordanian regime, particularly after the events of 1970, has an echo in the production of knowledge about Jordanian versus Palestinian nationalism and also about Jordanian versus Palestinian Arabic. In addition, another dimension of this scholarship is the ease with which Western scholars can move across borders, which is not the case for the indigenous scholars, even when they are affiliated with European or American universities. This has direct implications on the scope of the research and on the questions that can or cannot be asked. As for research on Palestinian Arabic in the West Bank and Gaza by Palestinian scholars, this seems to be confined to anthologies and dictionaries of Palestinian Arabic. An exception is the research done on Bethlehem in the 1990s. This may be directly related to the increasing difficulty of moving from one location to another for Palestinians.Less

Early Black Atlantic Christianity in the Middle Colonies

John W. Catron

in Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World

This chapter examines why the German-Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, became an important center of Atlantic African culture. While a small place, the existence in Bethlehem of rare, ... More

This chapter examines why the German-Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, became an important center of Atlantic African culture. While a small place, the existence in Bethlehem of rare, first-hand memoirs, diaries, and other documents written by black Christians permits us to explore individual life stories of numerous American and African-born individuals to aid in understanding the complex blend of motivations, strategies, and religious impulses in the African-American embrace of Christianity. Moravian Bethlehem represents in microcosm the coming together of black Atlantic people from many points of origin who found in this particular version of Christianity a common reference for cultural re-formation and for new spiritual and social identities. As such, Bethlehem was an important and influential point in a multi-sided series of Atlantic connections, and even exchanges, between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain’s Mid-Atlantic colonies. The Moravian’s eastern Pennsylvania settlement was far from Africa and Antigua, making the slave experience there markedly different than in the latter two locales. As different as it was it was connected to black Protestants throughout the Atlantic world by evangelical networks that it had a part in constructing and that in the process created yet another variant of an already diverse black Atlantic culture.Less

The Nativity of Christ

Linden Bicket

in George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

This chapter explores Brown’s depiction of the babe of Bethlehem in his winter ‘homilies’, or festive journalism. The chapter examines Brown’s fusion of the folkloric and magical rituals of late ... More

This chapter explores Brown’s depiction of the babe of Bethlehem in his winter ‘homilies’, or festive journalism. The chapter examines Brown’s fusion of the folkloric and magical rituals of late medieval popular religion with the modern short story form. It outlines Brown’s knowledge of nativity poetry, fine art, and drama, and studies the ways in which he inserts these earlier traditions into his nativity poetry and prose. It focuses especially on the Eucharistic implications of Brown’s nativity poetry.Less

A Philadelphia Nocturne

Mike Tanier

in Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity

In this chapter, the author shares his journey, traversing different paths that take us from Broad Street to Locust Street, from Pattison Avenue to City Line Avenue, all the way to Bethlehem. His ... More

In this chapter, the author shares his journey, traversing different paths that take us from Broad Street to Locust Street, from Pattison Avenue to City Line Avenue, all the way to Bethlehem. His story reveals a kaleidoscopic nocturne, “the story of Philadelphia after sunset, of the fan life that on-field cameras cannot capture.” It is the portrait of a massive, eclectic community and some of its many sporting passions. The author compares the attitudes of Philly sports fans during the day and at night, claiming that he has walked among these fans for forty years, witnessed their soft side, the night face they rarely show the world. The author concludes by describing the city of Philadelphia from evening to dawn.Less

Plot and Theme in the Book of Ruth

J. Andrew Dearman

in Reading Hebrew Bible Narratives

This chapter explores plot and theme in the book of Ruth as an example of narrative analysis. The book is identified as a short story with a dilemma facing the family of Elimelech from the town of ... More

This chapter explores plot and theme in the book of Ruth as an example of narrative analysis. The book is identified as a short story with a dilemma facing the family of Elimelech from the town of Bethlehem and the tribe of Judah. The family history of Elimelech and the role of the Moabite Ruth in it are examined first as a self-contained narrative and then in the context of Israel’s national history. The family dilemma is resolved with the birth of an heir for the family of Elimelech and the contribution of the family to the tribe of Judah to Israel’s national storyline is further revealed in the kingship of David, a descendant of Elimelech and Ruth.Less

Liturgy in Byzantine Jerusalem

Daniel Galadza

in Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem

In order to better understand the liturgical tradition of Jerusalem that was lost as a result of Byzantinization, this chapter presents the situation of the liturgy in Jerusalem between the fourth ... More

In order to better understand the liturgical tradition of Jerusalem that was lost as a result of Byzantinization, this chapter presents the situation of the liturgy in Jerusalem between the fourth and the seventh centuries, describing the main churches of Jerusalem’s stational liturgy, in particular the Church of the Anastasis or Holy Sepulchre. Liturgical witnesses such as Cyril of Jerusalem and Egeria and texts used in Jerusalem’s liturgy such as lectionaries and hymnals are examined, with a particular focus on the structure of the eucharistic liturgy. After an overview of monastic liturgy in Jerusalem and Palestine, liturgical texts from Constantinople are presented in order that we understand the differences between Jerusalem and Constantinople in late antiquity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the criteria for selecting liturgical manuscripts that reflect Byzantinization in Jerusalem.Less