Bible Review

Indeed, Marx assumed that religion did not exist before the rise of the class system, and he expected it to disappear after the resolution of the class struggle as part of the evolving social process. At this point the Marxian analysis of religion seems especially weak.

The most pertinent of George Mendenhall’s works to the present topic is his article on “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,” The Biblical Archaeologist 25 (1962), pp. 66–87; reprinted in The Biblical Archaeologist Reader 3, ed. Edward F. Campbell, Jr., and David Noel Freedman (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1970), pp. 100–120.

Inevitably, it will be thought of as a successor to or replacement of his earlier introduction, Light to the Nations (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), but the distance between the two books is great. A lot has happened in Gottwald’s thinking in the past quarter century.

The proper quotation marks are present in the parallel passage in Luke 19:46.

Obviously Jesus was not a formally trained lawyer or teacher of Torah.

Also, when “gentile” has similarly pejorative connotations, it is translated “heathen” in The Book (Matthew 5:47, 6:7).

“Our Messiah,” “their [the Jews’] Messiah” at Luke 23:2–3 and John 12:11.

Matthew 11:16, 12:39–45, 16:4; Luke 11:32, 17:25 and Acts 2:40.

The Book similarly alters the synoptic parallels to Mark 13:29–30. In The Book Matthew 24:34 becomes “Then at last this age will come to its close,” and Luke 21:32 becomes “I solemnly declare to you that when these things happen, the end of this age has come.”