N. T. Wright offers a systematic and highly influential metanarrative to account for Paul’s theology of Israel. However, Wright overlooks or underemphasizes important dimensions of Paul’s thinking, leading to problematic distortions. Thus, Wright claims that God rejected the historic people of Israel due to their failure to missionize the gentile nations, an idea not easily found in the Hebrew Bible texts Paul utilizes or in Paul’s own statements concerning his fellow Jews. Wright relies heavily on the diatribe of Rom 2 to build a Pauline theology of Israel, but he downplays the many positive things Paul says elsewhere about Israel’s status. Particularly troubling is Wright’s use of Rom 5 to argue that Paul characterizes Torah as divinely intended to draw sin onto Israel, with the expected consequence that human sin would reach its zenith within Israel, a view that moves Wright toward the very supersessionism against which Paul cautioned his gentile followers. These exegetical decisions, which form a tightly structured messiah-oriented understanding of Israel’s election, ignore what the Hebrew Bible and Paul affirm: while God accomplishes certain larger aims through Israel, God’s election of Israel is ultimately grounded in God’s inalienable love for Israel and Israel’s ancestors.

Attending to ongoing debates about the “meaning of life” in Ecclesiastes, this article determines how Qoheleth addressed meaningfulness by drawing on a threefold scheme of definitions for life’s meaning. These definitions are derived from psychological research and used to argue that all three conceptions appear within the book of Ecclesiastes. Qoheleth was primarily concerned with life’s “coherence,” which depends on predictable and reliable patterns in life that render it sensible, yet he also addressed life’s “purpose” and “significance.” While primarily determining how these three forms of meaning, along with their attendant ideas, are handled within Ecclesiastes itself, this article also demonstrates how resources from psychological research help to resolve debates among biblical interpreters, who agree far more than it at first appears once clearer definitions of “meaning” are employed.

This article investigates the early development of gendered Christian symbolism by focusing on discrepancies between two sections of the Shepherd of Hermas. Using close textual analysis and contemporary feminist theological frameworks, I identify the seemingly subtle, yet crucial and conspicuous, transformations of gender symbolism in the revision of Vision 3 into Similitude 9. These transformations include replacing the feminine Church with the Shepherd, the Tower, and the Son of God; dividing seven women (Faith and her genealogical descendants) into twelve virgins and their twelve vicious counterparts; and erasing “waters” and “the deep” from the Church’s foundation, while emphasizing tall rocks and level ground. Scholars typically have considered these revisions to be products of deeper and more systematic theological reflection, or mere elaborations and expansions in a “literary unity” drawn from oral composition. I argue instead that the revisions are rooted in embedded cultural patterns that consistently exclude maternal figures and their associated imagery. This re-evaluation of the revision process in Hermas complements other approaches to studying women in early Christian history, supplying a critical account of the evolving conceptual and symbolic structures that supported declines in the ecclesiastical status and symbolic significance of women.

This article seeks to break the scholarly deadlock regarding attitudes toward war and bloodshed held by early Christian thinkers. I argue that, whereas previous studies have attempted to fit early Christian stances into one or another “unitary-ethic” framework, the historical-textual data can be best accounted for by positing that many early Christian writers held to a “dual-ethic” orientation. In the latter, certain actions would be viewed as forbidden for Christians but as legitimate for non-Christians in the Roman Empire. Moreover, this dual-ethic stance can be further illuminated by viewing it in connection with the portrayal in the Hebrew Bible of the relation between Levites and the other Israelite tribes. This framing enables us to gain a clearer understanding not only of writers like Origen and Tertullian, who upheld Christian nonviolence while simultaneously praising Roman imperial military activities, but also of writers such as Augustine, whose theological-ethical framework indicates a strong assumption of a dual-ethic stance in his patristic predecessors.

In a famous story in b. Šabb. 116a–b, Imma Shalom and her brother, Rabban Gamaliel, present to a philosopher a dispute concerning the inheritance of the daughter. The judge, having being bribed by Imma Shalom, rules in her favor, against the ruling of the Torah of Moses, arguing that the latter has been abrogated and replaced by the “Torah of the Gospel,” which states that “the son and the daughter inherit equally.” After being bribed by Rabban Gamaliel, the philosopher recants, citing Matt 5:17, where Jesus reaffirms the validity of the Mosaic Law.

This article argues that the “Torah of the Gospel” actually refers to The Syro-Roman Lawbook, and that the story is constructed as a response to a radical and new legal supersessionist argument brought forth in this book which is directly linked to the Roman law of equal inheritance. This is the first clear evidence we have that, alongside the New Testament, the Babylonian rabbis also read and engaged directly with Christian books of their time written in Syriac. This has major ramifications on the way we perceive the textual culture of the Babylonian rabbis and their intellectual interactions with East Syrians.

This study examines how Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456 AH/1064 CE) articulated his nominalist critique of Platonic realism in the context of a larger rejection of ontological dualism in philosophy. It draws on evidence in Al-Fiṣal fī l-Milal wa-l-Ahwāʿ wa-l-Niḥal (The Book of Opinions on Religions, Heresies, and Sects) and his Marātib al-ʿUlūm (Categories of the Sciences). In response to those who “claim to follow philosophy (falsafa),” and in dialogue with earlier theologians and philosophers such as al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1012–1013) and al-Kindī (d. 258/873), Ibn Ḥazm redefined the universal soul (al-nafs al-kulliyya) and universal intellect (al-ʿaql al-kullī) as linguistic references to the total of all particular souls and particular intellects, which he defined as corporeal accidents inhering in the body. Ibn Ḥazm’s identification of souls and intellects as corporeal was part of his larger conception of the world as discrete and finite in both space and time. The world, in other words, is measurable in numbers and therefore limited by the volume of its visible and invisible air-like corporeality to the exclusion of philosophical notions of a perfect void or prime matter. In his additional critique of contemporary Muslim epistemology and the theologians’ reliance on dialectical argumentation, Ibn Ḥazm held that a true scholar of Islam should turn to logic-oriented deductive methods and scriptural evidence together in order to ascertain the possibilities and, more importantly, the limits of human knowledge about both the corporeal created world and the ontological unknown (ghayb) of the divine realm.