Dr Levine's email

Dear C&J students,
Even though I am still missing a couple of participant emails, I am sending you below a list of discussion points for tomorrow's assignment. These are what we need our blog for--I can't remember the name of the student charged with opening our blog, but I hope it gets done asap. Meanwhile print out this email and bring to class-this time the list will serve as talking points in class.
Thanks,
MML

Week 1  Wylen, Introduction, 1-15 (historical method; (optional) cf. Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth (1999) 18-41 “Gospel Truth and Historical Innocence,”

1.Define Anachronism.

2. What is the distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism?

3.Contrast the role of time in historiography versus its role in myth/belief/ tradition/religion?

4.Comment/Respond to the following quote:

“To do history both honorably and well, then, requires the moral discipline of allowing the gap of twenty centuries to open between us and our ancient subjects. What matters to us, what is meaningful to us, will coincide at best only rarely with what mattered to them. They lived in a different world. Some aspects of this world can be felt as well in ours: We, too, can understand the social consequences of oppression and poverty, the spiritual effects of prayer. But some aspects will remain obdurately the other, forever outside our experience and our categories of meaning precisely because the ancient past is ancient. It is not our world at all, but a place where leprosy and death defile, where ashes and water make clean, and where one approaches the altar of God with purifications, blood offerings and awe…..
The ‘backward’ thrust of history also poses intellectual dangers. Again like the reader of the twice-read novel or the viewer of the seen film, we cannot help knowing more than we should. Beyond the moral discipline of allowing for otherness, then, we need to cultivate well the intellectual discipline of viewing the past as if we knew less than we know….
To understand our ancient people from the evidence they left behind, we must affect a willed naivete. We must pretend to an innocence of the future that echoes their own. Only then can we hope to realistically re-create them in their own historical circumstances. Only by accepting—indeed respecting and protecting—the otherness of the past, can we hope to glimpse the human faces of those we seek.” (Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, 40-41)


5.Explain what Wylen means when he writes (p.8) “One can never know Jesus’ Judaism only from reading the Hebrew Scriptures.”

6.Give dates by century for the following:
(a)            final time discussed in OT writings. i.e. ‘biblical period’
(b)            final time in which biblical books were actually written
(c)            final time in which existing books were added to the OT.
7. What is meant by Jewish “oral law”?  Explain using the example of the so-called ‘lex talionis’?

8.What Jewish religious writings would have comprised the “book shelf” of Jesus?
9. What is the chronological relationship between the New Testament  and the Mishnah?
10.What are two basic assumptions of historiography (the study/writing of history) vis a vis change and cause ?

11. Define epistemology? Why do methods matter?

12.On what basis does the historian’s claim to knowledge rest?

13. Describe the historical methodology of “interrogating the sources.”

14.What are the limits of history? What questions can history NOT pronounce on?

15.Define the term supercessionism in terms of the relationship (posited in Paul and many others) between Judaism and Christianity.

16.Explain the terms CE/BCE and BC/AD. Why does the academic study of religion prefer the former set of abbreviations?