Jesus, Paul, Luke-Acts, and 1 Clement

Studies in Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Orientation

David L. Balch

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781532659584
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Critica e interpretazione biblica

In this book, the author draws on two original sources, on a Greek biographer, historian, and rhetorician, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as well as on Pompeian domestic art and architecture. Generally, NT scholars read texts, but Greeks and ancient Romans loved beauty. The walls and floors of their houses were decorated with thousands of colorful frescoes and mosaics, art that two millennia later is still on display in Pompeii. Christians lived and worshipped in those typical houses; relating the art to NT texts generates many intriguing new questions! What stories/myths did Greeks and Romans see every day? What were their sports, and how violent were they? Many NT scholars know as much or more Latin than they do Greek, and they therefore cite the Latin historian Livy rather than the Greek Dionysius, who wrote a century before the first Christian historian, Luke. Dionysius' rhetoric expressed values shared across cultures, by Greeks, Romans, and Jews (e.g., by the historian--and rhetorician--Josephus), some values that Luke also shares. Dionysius makes clear that cities and ethnic groups had to praise how they treated emigrant foreigners, questions handled differently by Josephus and by Luke. This enables new interpretations of Jesus' inaugural speech in Luke 4 and of Peter's second Pentecost speech in Acts 10.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Jesus and the Samaritan/Judean Border
• Chapter 2: Philodemus of Gadara, On Wealth and On Household Management
• Chapter 3: Paul’s Mission to Rome’s Enemies the Gauls
• Chapter 4: Violence in Pompeian/Roman Domestic Art as a Visual Context for Pauline and Deutero-Pauline Letters
• Chapter 5: Greek Tragedy, Pompeian Amphitheater Art, and Christian Martyrs in Nero’s Gardens
• Chapter 6: Two Mothers: Veturia and Mary;Two Sons: Coriolanus and Jesus
• Chapter 7: Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46b–55) and the Price of Corn in Mexico
• Chapter 8: Founders of Rome, of Athens, and of the Church
• Chapter 9: Luke–Acts: Political Biography /History under Rome
• Chapter 10: Romans 1:24–27, Science, and Homosexuality
• Chapter 11: The Canon: Adaptable and Stable, Oral and Written