Bible Review, Spring 1987
Features
Eight Questions Most Frequently Asked About the Book of Esther
Few books of the Hebrew Bible have generated more controversy among both Jews and Christians than the Book of Esther. It has been praised and damned, loved and rejected, all by good, God-fearing people. As the result of my studies of this...Read more ›
The Jewishness of Jesus
The varieties of first-century Judaism present the historian with a choice of Jesus portraits
In 1906, Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian physician, musician, philosopher and biblical exegete who spent 40 years of his life in central Africa ministering to the poor and sick, published a widely influential book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer reviewed the history of scholarly efforts to...Read more ›
Parallel Histories of Early Christianity and Judaism
How contemporaneous religions influenced one another
Everyone knows that Judaism gave birth to Christianity. But the formative centuries of Christianity also tell us much about the development of Judaism. As formative Christianity demands to be studied in the setting of formative Judaism, so formative Judaism must be studied in the context of formative...Read more ›
Did the Author of Chronicles Also Write the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah?
Clutching at catchlines
The Book of Ezra/Nehemiah begins where the two books of Chronicles end—at the proclamation of Cyrus, king of Persia, allowing the Jews to return to their land after the Babylonian Exile. The conventional wisdom—for the past 150 years—has it that the two sets of books—Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles—were...Read more ›