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 basis of this collection of essays is the reading of a common topic from different perspectives. Half of the book is devoted to the comparative study of religions and the courses are offered by religion professors. The other half is shaped by social science approaches and the seminars are given mainly by social science professors. We aim to compare and contrast not only positions, but also methods of learning. We examine theories of the just war in diverse cultural contexts and their disciplinary settings. Space is devoted to the study of papers prepared for this project by specialists in various disciplines, mainly but not exclusively faculty of Bard College and the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Free-standing ideas form systems when random facts coalescing in a set of abstract propositions can be shown logically to cohere. We know that that is so when ideas intersect and can be shown to accommodate new problems and generate answers to fresh questions. The system exhibits its cogency by fixing upon one thing and saying it in many ways. That emerges when the evidence of a particular conception of the social order turns out to concern itself with a generative question and to recapitulate an answer that is repeated many times over. In that way the writings that in theory form a system of the social order signal their logic by what they deem self-evident. The essays address writings of formative Judaism in the time of the Mishnah and the Talmud, the first six centuries of the Common Era, and formative Christianity in the first six centuries of the Common Era. They take up a common program of categories and consequent convictions: where Judaism and Christianity intersected. This seeks not just random points of agreement but fundamental structural congruence: the confluence of systems. That inquiry concerns shared organizing categories of religion and ethics of the two faiths. What concerns us is how Scriptures held in common produced a single construction of history and a common view of culture and society.

The late Karl-Johan Illman was a professor of Biblical and Judaic studies at Abo Akademi University in Abo/Turku, Finland. A beloved and respected figure in the Judeo-Christian dialogue and an accomplished scholar of Judaism, he is remembered in this memorial volume by leading scholars of Biblical and Judaic studies in Europe and North America.

This Synoptikon brings together the Synoptic Gospels, freshly translated, comparing them with materials selected from previous volumes in this series. The aim is to serve commentators who engage the Gospels critically and with the awareness that a consideration of their Judaic environments is crucial. Placing the texts within that setting evokes particular streams of tradition that interacted so as to produce the Gospels. These are set out in distinctive typefaces, so that readers may assess the depth of the Synoptic tradition as well as the breadth of its development.

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.

John's Revelation has led to countless diverse and divergent interpretations. Readers' cryptic notions of violent end-time scenarios, strict prophetic truths, and encouragement for the faithful have undeniably colored the book's reception through the centuries. In Visions of the Apocalypse, Bruce Chilton maps the ways in which the text has been read through the centuries and introduces these main interpretations of Revelation, such as Papias' millenarian kingdom, Augustine's vertical ascent to heaven, Origen's transcendent message, and Dionysius' belief in Revelation's hidden message. Visions of the Apocalypse provides the ways in which Revelation has been read and suggests to today's readers the strategies for understanding John's Revelation in a contemporary context.

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 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.

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

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.

Designed for those who are beginning Targum study, this book also provides material for those who have already made some progress. Beginners will have recourse first of al to the Translation, and the Notes are intended to help orient them in the message conveyed by the Targum in its two levels. Students with recourse to Aramaic will perhaps require remarks of a linguistic and textual nature; these are given in the Apparatus. Additional material for more advanced students is also offered in the Notes, to help relate the exegesis of the Targum to the intertestamental document, Rabbinica, and the New Testament.

Death does not speak the final word. Resurrection does. Christianity stands or falls with this central confession: God raised Jesus from the dead. Bruce Chilton investigates the Easter event of Jesus in Resurrection Logic. He undertakes his close reading of the New Testament texts without privileging the exact nature of the resurrection, but rather begins by situating his study of the resurrection in the context of Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Syrian conceptions of the afterlife. He then identifies Jewish monotheistic affirmations of bodily resurrection in the Second Temple period as the most immediate context for early Christian claims. Chilton surveys first-generation accounts of Jesus' resurrection and finds a pluriform - and even at times seemingly contradictory - range of testimony from Jesus' first followers. This diversity, as Chilton demonstrates, prompted early Christianity to interpret the resurrection traditions by means of prophecy and coordinated narrative. In the end, Chilton points to how the differing conceptions of the ways that God governs the world produced distinct understandings - or ""sciences"" - of the Easter event. Each understanding contained its own internal logic, which contributed to the collective witness of the early church handed down through the canonical text. In doing so, Chilton reveals the full tapestry of perspectives held together by the common-thread confession of Jesus' ongoing life and victory over death.

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 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 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.

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.