This book presents a new examination of ethical dictum 'The Golden Rule' exploring its formulation and significance in relation to the world's major religions.The Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. This ethical dictum is a part of most of the world's religions and has been considered by numerous religious figures and philosophers over the centuries. This new collection contains specially commissioned essays which take a fresh look at this guiding principle from a comparative perspective. Participants examine the formulation and significance of the Golden Rule in the world's major religions by applying four questions to the tradition they consider: What does it say? What does it mean? How does it work? How does it matter?Freshly examining the Golden Rule in broad comparative context provides a fascinating account of its uses and meaning, and allows us to assess if, how and why it matters in human cultures and societies.

The value and significance of the "targums" translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, the language of Palestinian Jews for centuries following the Babylonian Exile lie in their approach to translation: within a typically literal rendering of a text, they incorporate extensive exegetical material, additions, and paraphrases that reveal important information about Second Temple Judaism, its interpretation of its bible, and its beliefs. This remarkable survey introduces critical knowledge and insights that have emerged over the past forty years, including targum manuscripts discovered this century and targums known in Aramaic but only recently translated into English. Prolific scholars Flesher and Chilton guide readers in understanding the development of the targums; their relationship to the Hebrew Bible; their dates, language, and place in the history of Christianity and Judaism; and their theologies and methods of interpretation. With clear presentation of current research and the issues involved, including the Targums and the New Testament, and a rich bibliography, this is the most complete and up-to-date introduction to the Targums. An outstanding, highly recommended achievement. Martin McNamara, "Emeritus Professor of Scripture, Milltown Institute, Dublin, Ireland"

In a career spanning over fifty years, the questions Jacob Neusner has asked and the critical methodologies he has developed have shaped the way scholars have come to approach the rabbinic literature as well as the diverse manifestations of Judaism from rabbinic times until the present. The essays collected here honor that legacy, illustrating an influence that is so pervasive that scholars today who engage in the critical study of Judaism and the history of religions more generally work in a laboratory that Professor Neusner created. Addressing topics in ancient and Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaic context of early Christianity, American Judaism, World Religions, and the academic study of the humanities, these essays demarcate the current state of Judaic and religious studies in the academy today.

This volume reviews the criteria, assumptions, and methods involved in critical Jesus research. Its purpose is to clarify the procedures necessary to distinguish tradition that stems from Jesus from tradition and interpretation that stem from later tradents and evangelists.
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This book seeks to identify the recurrent tensions, the blatant points of emphasis, the recurring indications of conflict and polemic. Framing the issue of the disposition of the Scriptural heritage in broad terms, the authors all stress as a single point of insistence, the answer is self-evident. Nearly every Christianity and nearly all known Judaisms appeal for validation to the Scriptures of ancient Israel, their laws and narratives, their prophecies and visions.The authors seek to identify the recurrent tensions, the blatant points of emphasis, the recurring indications of conflict and polemic. Framing the issue of the disposition of the Scriptural heritage in broad terms, they describe what characterizes the Gospels and the Mishnah, the letters of Paul and the Tosefta. In other words, if they take whole and complete the writings of first and second century people claiming to form the contemporary embodiment of Scripture's Israel and ask what they all stress as a single point of insistence, the answer is self-evident.Nearly every Christianity and nearly all known Judaisms appeal for validation to the Scriptures of ancient Israel, their laws and narratives, their prophecies and visions. To Scripture all parties appeal - but not to the same verses of Scripture. In Scripture, all participants to the common Israelite culture propose to find validation - but not to a common theological program subject to diverse interpretation. From Scripture, every community of Judaism and Christianity takes away what it will, but not with the assent of all the others.

About the Contributor(s): Delio DelRio serves as teaching pastor at First Baptist Lutz of Tampa, Florida, and as adjunct professor of New Testament for New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

The authors seek to identify the recurrent tensions, the blatant points of emphasis, the recurring indications of conflict and polemic. Framing the issue of the disposition of the Scriptural heritage in broad terms, they describe what characterizes the Gospels and the Mishnah, the letters of Paul and the Tosefta. In other words, if they take whole and complete the writings of first and second century people claiming to form the contemporary embodiment of Scripture's Israel and ask what they all stress as a single point of insistence, the answer is self-evident. Nearly every Christianity and nearly all known Judaisms appeal for validation to the Scriptures of ancient Israel, their laws and narratives, their prophecies and visions. To Scripture all parties appeal -- but not to the same verses of Scripture. In Scripture, all participants to the common Israelite culture propose to find validation -- but not to a common theological program subject to diverse interpretation. From Scripture, every community of Judaism and Christianity takes away what it will, but not with the assent of all the others.

This book presents a new examination of ethical dictum 'The Golden Rule' exploring its formulation and significance in relation to the world's major religions. The Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. This ethical dictum is a part of most of the world's religions and has been considered by numerous religious figures and philosophers over the centuries. This new collection contains specially commissioned essays which take a fresh look at this guiding principle from a comparative perspective. Participants examine the formulation and significance of the Golden Rule in the world's major religions by applying four questions to the tradition they consider: What does it say? What does it mean? How does it work? How does it matter?Freshly examining the Golden Rule in broad comparative context provides a fascinating account of its uses and meaning, and allows us to assess if, how and why it matters in human cultures and societies.

This work sketches the many portraits of the Pharisees that emerge from ancient sources. Based upon the Gospels, the writings of Paul, Josephus, the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and archeology, the volume profiles the Pharisees and explores the relationship between the Pharisees and the Judaic religious system foreshadowed by the library of Qumran. A great virtue of this study is that no attempt is made to homogenize the distinct pictures or reconstruct a singular account of the Pharisees; instead, by carefully considering the sources, the chapters allow different pictures of the Pharisees to stand side by side.

The Trading Places Sourcebook provides the critical passages from primary sources within Christian and Judaic traditions. Professors Chilton and Neusner also provide helpful commentaries to set the context for and significance of these sources. This sourcebook is meant to accompany Trading Places, which turns on its head the usual scholarly consensus that early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism run parallel. These two great traditions, argue Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner, intersected and ultimately traded places during the first four centuries of the Common Era. In this, the authors offer a bold new way of interpreting Western religious history.

"The Missions of James, Peter, and Paul" investigates the nature, diversity, and relationship of three early and important expressions of Judaic Christianity. It is the conviction of the contributors that the Judaic origins of the Christian movement have not been sufficiently understood in both ecclesiastical and academic circles. Comparison with contemporary Judaism is foundational and leads to the question that guides discussion: How did James relate to such prominent figures as Peter and Paul? Given James' own eminence, those relationships must have been hallmarks of his own stance and status, and they open the prospect that we might delineate James' theological perspective more precisely than otherwise possible by means of this contrast with Peter and Paul. That is the reason for the division of the present volume into two parts. "The Missions of James, Peter, and Paul" is presented in two parts: James and Peter, and James Paul. Several studies investigate the literary and archaeological evidence that clarifies the world in which James, Peter, and Paul lived, while other studies probe exegetical and theological aspects of the discussion.

How can Jesus be said to be "missing"? What is "missing" is not by any means reference to Jesus: what is missing is rather an entire dimension of his identity. The "missing" Jesus is Jesus within Judaism. This publication has also been published in hardback please click here for details.

The authors have asked of the documents of the Dead Sea Library found at Qumran a simple question: how does each participate in a single Judaic religious system? They propose a reading of the Scrolls from the hypothesis that all of them, in one way or another, rest upon one, authoritative, Judaism. Their analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls describes how diverse writings hold together to make a single coherent statement, to stand for a religious system possessed of integrity and wisdom.
This account of the world view of Judaism covers principal questions addressed to any Judaic religious system: the doctrine of God, the Torah, and matters of history, wisdom, and mysticism. When it comes to the way of life, they include the evidence of the material culture of the community as well as practical matters of religious conduct.
How the community's world view comes to realization is suggested by its treatment of the calendar, by its provision of laws that concern women, by questions of cultic and secular purity, by its piety and forms of worship and views of Temple, sacrifice, and the like.
Finally, with the community's definition of 'Israel' and of itself in relationship to 'Israel', inclusive of Israelites excluded from this 'Israel', an account is gained of the theory of who and what is Israel that animates the particular Judaism represented in these writings.

There have been many studies of the doctrinal and liturgical differences and similarities between formative Judaism and early Christianity. Many of these studies examine the impact of Hellenistic culture on the development of Judaism and the consequences that such a Hellenized Judaism had for the development of Christianity. Very few books, however, have isolated particular spiritual practices as lenses through which to examine and compare these two religions. In their book, Chilton and Neusner ask simply, What are experiences both distinctive to the spiritual life of Torah and Christ, respectively, and also accessible to our common humanity? Their response is to examine the experiences of birth in the faith, death by the faith, and bearing witness to the faith. Each writer explores the ways in which classical statements of Christ and Torah represent critical moments in a person's life of faith, and offer a comparison of the spiritual piety that each religion teaches and nurtures. Chilton and Neusner are the co-authors of The Body of Faith (Trinity) and God in the World (Trinity). Chilton is the author of Jesus Prayer and Jesus Eucharist (Trinity). Neusner is the author or editor of over 700 books including The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism. For: Clergy; seminarians; graduate students; those interested in formative Judaism and Christianity and in Jewish-Christian relations

Within the environment of the Judaism of his day, Jesus practiced a unique understanding of purity grounded in his eschatological vision of how God was acting to gather his people. But Jesus practice was not only a matter of getting people to see God in the same way as he did. He also acted directly to put his own view of purity into effect, declaring clean what earlier had been considered unclean. This was already a concern in the ministry of John the baptizer, and it is apparent now that Jesus too was moved by the prospect of the purification of all Israel. The politics of Herod Antipas within Imperial Rome had made John s program appear seditious, and Jesus needed to be aware of this. In addition, John had conceived of God as preparing a pure people by means of immersion, but Jesus saw the people of his Galilee already pure and ready for the disclosure of a kingdom they could already celebrate. This is what caused Jesus to stop baptizing people as he had once done as John s disciple and to begin a dedicated ministry of healing based on his awareness of the Spirit within him, an awareness that emerges as a major concern of this book. A final portion of the book studies how baptism within the earliest church emerged as a celebration of the Spirit of God. "An innovative perception of how a rite of purity might be understood when set over against its manifold historical contexts: religious, sociological, historical, political, and anthropological." Scot McKnight, North Park University Bruce Chilton, New Testament and Judaic scholar, is Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Studying The Historical Jesus is a new series, edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, that explores key questions concerning the historical Jesus within recent scholarly discussion. Written by authors who have already made important contributions to the study of Jesus, the volumes in this series present sound scholarship in accessible, creative, and interesting ways.

Here is the second of three volumes (the first, Revelation: The Torah and the Bible, was published in 1995) whose purpose is to compare and contrast the paramount theological categories of Judaism and Christianity. The volumes provide the faithful of both Judaism and Christianity with informative, factual accounts of how Judaism and Christianity addressed the same issues and set forth their own distinctive program and set of propositions.While religions speak to individuals in the privacy of their hearts, they also define themselves through social entities such as "church," "holy people," "nation of Islam," "kingdom of God." In this book, Professors Neusner and Chilton bring reader to a consideration of "Israel" in Judaism and Christianity. When Jews call themselves "Israel," their initial claim is that they constitute the "Israel" to whom God gave the Torah. All of those who inherit these Hebrew scriptures, specifically Christians, also claim to form an "Israel" because they receive these scriptures.Individual chapters in part one deal with Israel in the theology of Judaism, Israel as a kingdom of priests and holy nation, Israel as family, and Israel as (Christian) Rome. Part two examines Jesus and the absence of Israel; the Israel of James, the community of "Q" and Peter; and the church (ekklesia) in the Synoptic Gospels, Paul, Hebrews, and Revelation.The volumes in this series are excellent resources for all who wish to deepen their understanding of Judaism and Christianity and the relationship between these two great traditions.Jacob Neusner, leading scholar of the formative age and writings of Judaism, is Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa.Bruce D. Chilton, New Testament and Judaic scholar, is Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

The monograph analyses eucharistic texts on the basis of the social practices which generated them. Six stages of ideology are identified. Jesus himself practised fellowship at meals as celebrations of Israel's purity (stage 1), and later insisted that a pure meal was a better sacrifice than an offering in the Temple (stage 2). The circle of Peter made such meals into covenantal celebrations; Jesus became a new Moses (stage 3). In order to militate against the full participation of non-Jews, the circle of James invented the full identifications with Passover (stage 4). Paul resisted any such limitations (stage 5). The Synoptic tradition accepted the Jacobean chronology, but joined Paul in developing the Hellenistic theme of Jesus as heroic martyr, and in explaining eucharist as a means of effecting solidarity with Jesus (stage 5). The Johannine ideologies transformed the idiom of eucharist by making Jesus into the paschal lamb which is consumed (stage 6). A conclusion relates the practices identified to the sources behind the Gospels; and shows how practice is key to the meanings of eucharistic texts.