32 research outputs found
Fictive-friendship and the Fourth Gospel
This article was
initially presented as a paper
at the International Meeting
of the Context Group that
was held on 02−05 August
2010 at the University of
Pretoria, South Africa.The phenomena of friendship and giftship in antiquity have been the focus of much
anthropological interest, yet those terms are still used much too broadly, wherein any one can
be friends and anything exchanged is a gift. This article argued that proper friendship requires
equality of exchange and status. When inequality of exchange is present, we will almost
always also have inequality of status. These two things together naturally and necessarily
result in the absence of frank speech. At this point, proper friendship (defined by frank speech)
and the exchange of gifts (defined by equality of value) are impossible, and we have fictive-friendship,
a term I have introduced in this article. Fictive-friendship refers to the practice,
often but not exclusively amongst elites, of using friendship language to mask relationships of
dependence (patronage and clientage). I closed my argument by looking at two examples of
fictive-friendship in the Gospel of John.http://www.hts.org.zanf201
Matthew, memory theory and the New No Quest
This article explores the effects of cognitive and social memory theory on the quest for the
historical Jesus. It is not the case that all memory is hopelessly unreliable, but it is the case
that it commonly is. Memory distortion is disturbingly common, and much worse, there is no
way to distinguish between memories of actual events and memories of invented events. The
Gospel of Matthew was used to illustrate this very difficulty. This article also draws attention
to the fact that although numerous criteria have been developed, refined and used extensively
in order to distinguish between original Jesus material and later church material, those criteria
have long been unsatisfactory, and most recently, because of the effects of thinking about
memory theory and orality, have been revealed to be bankrupt. Since memory theory shows
that people are unable to differentiate accurate memory from inaccurate and wholly invented
memory, and since the traditional quest criteria do not accomplish what they were intended
to, this article argues that scholarship about Jesus has been forced into a new no quest.http://www.hts.org.za/am201
Collective memory distortion and the quest for the historical jesus
Memory theory is being used, if not explicitly to buttress the reliability of the Gospel portraits of Jesus, to do so implicitly by shifting the search away from the ipsissima verba Jesu towards the memory of Jesus. Rather than argue about what Jesus did or did not say-the reliability wars-some scholars now sidestep the issue by arguing that memory is inherently reliable in a broad or general way. Thus, the Gospels are reliable not at the level of detail, but at the level of broad memory, impact, or gist. In this article I argue that such optimism can only come by selectively quoting the troubling work of memory theorists, and by ignoring the full implications of memory theory
The challenge of the Thessalonians and Paul’s Riposte
Social Scientific Criticism provides the reader of the New Testament with a set of
tools to access the intended meaning of a text. That is to say, it is not the words which
convey meaning, but rather the context within which the words are embedded. The
anthropological model of honor and shame is one of these tools. This model has been
developed from the modern study of agrarian and rural Mediterranean villages and from
the study of ancient and classical Hellenistic literature and philosophy. The present study
considers the context of honor and shame which lies beneath what is generally regarded
as the earliest extant Pauline letter, I Thessalonians. After preliminary exercises, such as
a survey of the literature on I Thessalonians and an establishing and clarification of the
method which drives this study, the text is analysed from the perspective of honor and
shame, limited good, and agonism. Since honor and shame did not operate in a vacuum
of social values and practices, other details are brought into the exegesis, such as praise
and blame in ancient letter writing, and Paul's place in the environment of patron-client
relations. The result is a reading of the letter which focuses on the variety of challenges
which the converts posed and on Paul's need to defend himself in a way that was
appropriate to his mission. Through such a reading, certain stylistic features of the letter
are highlighted in a way that sets this study apart from its predecessors.Arts, Faculty ofClassical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department ofGraduat
Book Review: From Jesus to His First Followers: Continuity and Discontinuity. Anthropological and Historical Perspectives
BTB readers guide: Loyalty
This article looks at the nature of ancient loyalty, stressing its external (relationship) as opposed to its internal (emotional) features, and confirms this through an analysis of loyalty within three types of Graeco-Roman patronage-client kingship, manumission, and relationships with philosophical teachers. It then looks at examples of loyalty in the First and Second Testaments, noting the extent to which the former are similar or different from the latter, and makes some observations concerning the vocabulary of biblical loyalty
Gratitude and comments to le donne
This short response to Le Donne's rebuttal attempts to return the conversation to the more relevant and troubling evidence of manufactured memory, by drawing attention to examples from the New Testament. It raises the serious question: if manufactured memories and historical memories are not qualitatively different, then how are we to distinguish between them? And, by extension, what does this say about the reliability of memory and the gospels as memory