How were ideas and experiences of transformation expressed in early Christianity and early Judaism? This volume explores the social and philosophical frameworks within which transformative ideas such as resurrection and practices of becoming a oea new beinga were shaped. It also explores the analogies and parameters by which transformation was being observed, noted and asserted. The focus on transformation helps to connect topics that tend to be studied separately, such as cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, and conversion. The textual material is wide-ranging and there are new readings of core passages. Ideas and experiences of transformations in early Christianity and early Judaism Connects topics that tend to be studied seperately (cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, conversion) With wide-ranging textual material

The richly varied collection of 15 essays in this volume showcase the afterlife of the Book of Revelation. It is a biblical book that has left its mark in many fields of intellectual endeavour: literature, film, music, philosophy, political theology, and religious ideology. It is perhaps paradoxical that this book, which promises God's punishment upon anyone expanding on its contents, has nevertheless accumulated to itself over two millennia vast amounts of commentary, exposition, and appropriation. Offered at the close of the 'Blair/Bush years', this volume also exposes and highlights the often deeply ironic resonances generated while studying the reception history of Revelation during a period when the book has both significant public currency and a potentially terrifying global impact. Contents. Decoding, Reception History, Poetry: Three Hermeneutical Approaches to the Apocalypse (Jonathan Roberts); Self-Authorization in Christina Rossetti's The Face of the Deep (Jo Carruthers); Revelation, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Alison Jack); Revelation and Film (Melanie J. Wright); The Apocalypse according to Johnny Cash (William John Lyons); The Johannine Apocalypse and the Risk of Knowledge (James E. Harding); Revelation, Violence, and War (Heikki Raisanen); The Reception of Revelation, c. 1250-1700 (Anke Holdenried); A Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist on Revelation 20.1-7 (Simon Woodman); The Book of Revelation, the Branch Davidians and Apocalyptic (Self-)destruction? (Kenneth Newport); Ecological Readings of the Apocalypse of John in Contemporary America (Michael S. Northcott); Feminist Reception of the Book of Revelation (Hanna Stenstrom); Revelation as Form and Content in the Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Jorunn Okland)

This volume seeks to spur a lively discussion on Marxist feminist analysis of biblical texts. Marxism and feminism have many mutual concerns, and the combination of the two has become common in literary criticism, cultural studies, sociology and philosophy. So it is high time for biblical studies to become interested. This collection is the first of its kind in biblical studies, bringing together a mixture of newer and more mature voices. It falls into three sections: general concerns (Milena Kirova, Tamara Prosic and David Jobling); Hebrew Bible (Gale Yee and Avaren Ipsen); New Testament (Alan Cadwallader, Jorunn Okland, Roland Boer and Jennifer Bird). Thought-provoking and daring, the collection includes: the history of Marxist feminist analysis, the work of Bertolt Brecht, the voices of prostitute collectives, and the possibilities for biblical criticism of the work of Rosemary Hennessy, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Wilhelm Reich and Julia Kristeva. All of which are brought to bear on biblical texts such as Proverbs, 1 Kings, Mark, Paul's Letters, and 1 Peter.

Constructions of Space III engages with the great variety of sacred spaces set out and given meaning in the texts of the Hebrew Bible, early Jewish literature and the New Testament. Spatial-critical, as well as anthropological, philosophical and narrative perspectives are interacted with in creative ways and brought to bear on the spaces encountered within the texts. Among the concepts and themes explored are oppositional aspects such as holiness and danger/the profane, fear and hope, utopia and dystopia, and purity and impurity. The social and mythological significance of more 'grounded' places such as Jerusalem and Egypt, temples, burial places and threshing floors is considered alongside more ethereal and symbolic spaces like those of heaven, the last judgement and the kingdom of God. What emerges is a dynamic and lively set of perspectives that illuminates relationships between texts, spaces and communities.

Constructions of Space III engages with the great variety of sacred spaces set out and given meaning in the texts of the Hebrew Bible, early Jewish literature and the New Testament. Spatial-critical, as well as anthropological, philosophical and narrative perspectives are interacted with in creative ways and brought to bear on the spaces encountered within the texts. Among the concepts and themes explored are oppositional aspects such as holiness and danger/the profane, fear and hope, utopia and dystopia, and purity and impurity. The social and mythological significance of more 'grounded' places such as Jerusalem and Egypt, temples, burial places and threshing floors is considered alongside more ethereal and symbolic spaces like those of heaven, the last judgement and the kingdom of God. What emerges is a dynamic and lively set of perspectives that illuminates relationships between texts, spaces and communities.

Jorunn Okland provides an informed and illuminating examination of what Paul can tell us about divisions between sanctuary and other space, about men and women, and about ideas of private and public. Women in Their Place is an interdisciplinary, theoretically informed reading of Paul's utterances on women in 1 Corinthians 11-14 (the section of the letter dealing with ritual gatherings), in light of ancient gender models as expressed in temples, rituals, and literary texts. It examines 1 Corinthians 11-14 within a larger context of gender models and sanctuary spaces, establishing a distinction between private, public and sacred/sanctuary space and arguing that, in much of 1 Corinthians, Paul is concerned with the marking of firm boundaries around the sanctuary space established by rituals in the ekklesia, which would effectively engender church as male space. This is volume 269 in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series.