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

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