Volume 1, Issue 2

This article explores the use of Ephesians 5 and the church as the bride of Christ within a set of 18th-century speeches to the married couples in a radical pietist community known as the Moravian Brethren. I will show how the text is used to undergird a novel ideology of marriage and community structure, both of which are connected with socio-economic change.

The article is a case study demonstrating that the Bible at the end of the 19 th century could still function as a common rhetorical tool, a frame of reference, and a common court of appeal in important public debates. The case in question is the Anglophone debate over women’s rights, voice, and vote on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean around 1890. The article analyzes three different lay positions represented by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Christina Rossetti, and Heber Hart. They represent three different directions that reception of the Bible with regard to gender equality and women’s authorial voice could take in this period. The article also argues that a concept of gender equality goes several centuries further back than what is often thought, and that the early development of the concept in a pre-secularized intellectual environment needs much further scholarly attention.

This essay surveys the treatment of Satan in three significant though largely neglected novels of the 1930s, Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936), Howell Davies’ Congratulate the Devil (1939), and Anton Tamsaare’s The Misadventures of the New Satan (1939). Despite the marginalization of discourse about Satan in European Christianity of the period, each of these novels adopts its own idiosyncratic stance towards the realistic representation of a diabolical entity, drawing on a combination of biblical and folkloric models. Whilst Mann’s novel reiterates and extends the Faustian tradition of the individual succumbing to damnation, the other two novels inventively uphold the folkloric reception of the biblical Satan as a social force.

In this article, various reception-historical analyses of Henry James’s short story “The Jolly Corner” and its use of the Bible are subjected to critique. The parable of the Prodigal Son is offered as a convincing and significant intertext which is clearly signalled in the story. Reading this parable in the narrative yields useful insights into the dynamics between the characters, and suggests a psychological rather than supernatural interpretation of events.

Biblical scholars often treat idealistic expectations – for kings or eras – as “eschatological” or “messianic” expectations. Yet this sort of analysis often elides the rhetorical nature of the source texts. This article seeks to analyze the rhetoric of Obama’s first presidential campaign as a recent comparator, using Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory and recent work on hyperbole. The results of this discussion are then applied to four sample passages from the context of Hebrew Bible to argue that idealistic or “utopian” language need not necessarily imply any of the ideas associated with messianism or millenarianism. In the final analysis this will mean that scholars must be more careful in delineating the diachronic development of ideas in ancient texts.