Volume 6, Issue 1

The article uses Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the cinematic Paul pattern to reflect on San Paolo , Pasolini’s script for an unrealized Paul film, and on Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018). Typical Paul films, including television and church-use productions, present Paul in terms of a repeated pattern including 1) a spectacularly conceived Acts, 2) his martyrdom, 3) hagiography, and 4) biopic film structure. Despite focusing on Luke’s writing of Acts, rather than the content of Acts, Paul, Apostle of Christ follows the cinematic pattern quite closely. Even though it follows Acts more closely, San Paolo deviates from the cinematic pattern extensively, primarily because it transposes Paul to modernity where Paul struggles weakly and apocalyptically, rather than spectacularly or hagiographically, against dominant institutions. Unlike most films about early Christianity, San Paolo is not about the triumph of Christianity. Sunset Boulevard makes a nice foil for Paul’s cinematic history and these two films specifically because of its story of a forgotten film star who fantasizes about a glorious cinematic return and because of its use of a dead, scriptwriter narrator to tell its story. Paul, too, still awaits cinematic celebrity. In San Paolo and Paul, Apostle of Christ , scripts, scriptwriters, and dead narrators dominate the tales.

In his work Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History, Brennan Breed argues that texts are nomads which – existing without original form and without original context – have no homeland to claim as their own. Their entire history has been marked by unpredictable movement and variation. He therefore proposes that the study of reception history should primarily be an exploration of the potentiality of textual meanings. The suggestion that meaning progresses without relationship to hermeneutical antecedents, however, runs contrary to Gadamer’s assertion that the contemporary effect (Wirkung) of a text always exists in unity with its historical effects. Following Gadamer, the reception historian may still explore hermeneutical potentiality – but does so with a sense of historical consciousness. In this light, the nature of a biblical text may be more suitably characterized by the metaphor of an emigrant rather than that of a nomad. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usefulness of these divergent metaphors in our attempt to define both the nature of biblical texts and the task of the reception historian. Our test case will be the early interpretation history of the Lord’s Prayer. Given that the original form and context of this prayer are irretrievable, Breed’s theory is applicable in many respects. Yet it will also be seen that in the early reception history of the Lord’s Prayer there are also patterns of synchronic continuity. Amidst diverse agendas of theology and praxis, we find that interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer were consistently rooted in an inherited conceptualization of Jesus Christ – what we will call a canonical remembrance of his life and proclamation.

Do the numbers of years in Genesis add up? Biblical scholars have learned to attend to the art of biblical narrative. Is there also an art of biblical numbers? If so, could its rediscovery lead to a better understanding of the contours of the biblical text, and its complex meanings, as well as its reception history prior to the Enlightenment? This article’s provisional answer to these questions is yes. It looks at two key numbers associated with the Joseph Story: a span of twenty-two years, which a variety of readers calculate as the time that Joseph lived away from his family in Egypt; and a double span of seventeen years, which the Bible suggests is the length of time that Joseph lived under his father’s protection in Canaan, and that Jacob in turn lived under his son’s care in Egypt. The study finds that, since Spinoza, modern assessments of these numbers have been constrained by a strongly linear view of time, as may be seen in the work of Robert Alter, among many others. It criticizes linear time as reductive insofar as it flattens the numbers of Genesis into chronologies and timelines. It also draws attention to an aspect of figural time, which it describes as symmetrically folded time, to help characterize the non-linear, isotropic way that numbers seem to behave in the Bible and in the Bible’s pre-modern reception. The findings about figural time in the Joseph Story raise significant questions about the compatibility of narrative, literary-critical, and theological approaches to the time-denominated numbers of Genesis.

This article traces a long-lived tradition of understanding the Eden narrative and its aftermath as a story about the birth of painful emotions, what one might translate into English as shame, fear, and, above all, sadness. The consensus reading of Genesis in the Anglo-American tradition does not reflect an underlying emotional emphasis in the fateful oracle to Eve and Adam in Gen 3:16–17. Translations and commentaries overwhelmingly interpret God’s words as physiological and material, sentencing the woman to painful childbirth and the man to onerous labor in the fields. Yet, as demonstrated by a number of scholars, God’s oracle to the pair in the Hebrew text deals with pain more broadly, with a focus on emotional pain, especially sadness, sorrow, or grief. This emotional suffering is shared by man and woman, and is the catalyst for the first murder. Hellenistic Jewish and later Christian readers embraced and elaborated on this very early emotional aspect of the Eden myth. The Septuagint translates the oracle in unmistakably emotional terms, adopting vocabulary typical of popular moral philosophy, and clarifies the thematic connection between Genesis 3 and 4 by highlighting the emotional repercussions of the emotional change wrought by the primal transgression. Authors like Philo and Josephus interpreted the Eden narrative in fundamentally emotional ways, and pseudepigrapha were particularly engaged in drawing out and elaborating on the emotions of the Eden myth. Most of all the Greek Life of Adam and Eve and 4 Ezra transform the story into meditations on emotional suffering, the former retelling the myth, the latter repurposing it into an apocalyptic vision of joy and sorrow at the end times. Both texts furthermore identify sadness ( lupē or tristitia , in Greek and Latin version of Gen 3:16–17) as dually significant, both as punishment and as a saving, divinizing quality, one which can also effect communion between human and divine. This way of reading Eden’s emotions dominated Christian reception of the Eden myth, from the Gospel of John on. Ptolemy, Didymus, Ambrose, Augustine, and others understood the Eden myth as primarily about the origin and meaning of emotional suffering. This style of reception remained a widespread reading until the turn of the twentieth century, when, for a variety of reasons, Christians began to read the oracle in the physiological and materialist terms (pain in childbirth and agricultural labor) that are now dominant.

The saying of Jesus in Matt 10:34 that he has “not come to bring peace, but a sword,” seems at odds with the general tenor of his life and teachings. Some proponents of a revolutionary Jesus have seized upon this saying as evidence that he was sympathetic to, and perhaps even supportive of, violent revolution. This article surveys patristic commentary on this verse from the first few centuries to see how this “hard saying” was understood and handled. Although a small number of writers expressed unease about the imagery and the perceived contradiction with other texts of scripture, the general trend was to construe the “sword” metaphorically, usually by appealing to a variety of passages containing the same word. No patristic writer understood the saying as an endorsement of violence, even those whose socio-political context might have justified it. Finally, although some of the hermeneutical strategies of the Fathers may not be embraced by modern exegesis, they often produced readings that were culturally and religiously sensitive as well as rhetorically insightful.