For Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar best known for formulating “the documentary hypothesis,” prophecy served as a marker of religious authenticity. He portrays Ezekiel as denigrated, deceitful, and weak – the linchpin in the story of the transformation of ancient Israel from tribal vitality to priestly fossilization. Yet the carefully constructed scholarly story Wellhausen tells about ancient Israel is structured through fanciful Romantic dichotomies; he maligns scribal culture while evoking a nostalgia for an imaginary oral culture. Wellhausen was deeply influenced by the orientalist fantasies of writers like Goethe and Herder; furthermore, their melancholia about European writing culture continues to influence biblical scholarship’s (mis)understanding of prophecy. Moving away from Wellhausen, I ask how we could read Ezekiel’s weakness, specifically through his face-turning prophecies – not as “diminished” gestures of once-powerful mantic acts, but as creative, rhizomatic acts which expand the possibilities of the prophetic genre?

This chapter focuses on an often-forgotten aspect in the story of Christianity and international law, namely, Judaism, Jews, and the Jew. More specifically, it discusses how Christian antisemitic sentiments – often serving as a precursor to further exclusion of the socially different “Other” – found their way into the doctrines and histories of international law. Antisemitism is a living legacy within Christianity and within the discipline of international law. The text explores this theme by revisiting one of the most famous “fathers” of international legal thought, Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861)

Chapter 2 discusses the history of the critical study of the New Testament, with a focus on the era of German Romanticism.By tracing the development of the concepts of Geist and Volk, one can see how notions of oral tradition, cohesive Christian “communities,” and the gospel writers as literate spokespersons for these communities was inculcated in the field. A discussion of literary theory and the “death of the author” further demonstrates the category mistakes those who study the so-called origins of Christianity have made by uncritically treating the subject of ancient authorship.