Bible Review, June 1997
Features
The Christian Apocrypha
Preserved in art
Gazing in adoration at the newborn Jesus, three shepherds join Joseph and Mary in the manger in an early-15th-century painting of The Nativity, attributed to the Netherlandish artist Robert Campin. Outside the rustic shed appear two women, the midwives who attended Jesus’ birth. Midwives! What are they...Read more ›
The Biblical Minimalists
Expunging ancient Israel’s past
An increasingly modish—virulent?—strain of biblical scholarship concludes that the Bible is useless for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel. If this history can be reconstructed at all, it must be based solely on archaeological evidence as interpreted by anthropological models. A recent extension—criticism, really—of this thinking argues...Read more ›
Gospels in the Classroom
Where the Bible’s just a good book
Every other spring for the last dozen years I have taught an undergraduate course: English 361 The Bible as Literature: New Testament Spring Semester. 3 hrs In teaching this course, I have discovered that the best thing that could happen to the New Testament has happened to...Read more ›
Son of God
From Pharaoh to Israel’s kings to Jesus
I am your son,” the pharaoh says to the Egyptian sun god Re in an Old Kingdom pyramid text (c. 2300 B.C.).1 From an early period, Egyptian pharaohs were regarded as divine, the offspring of gods. Did this influence Hebrew understanding of kingship? And did...Read more ›