The Philosophical Styles of Hellenistic Judaism

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-180
Keyword(s):  
Hellenistic Judaism

The Pentateuch

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-200
Author(s):  
Dirk Büchner
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Language Style ◽  
Hellenistic Judaism

The impetus behind the translation of the Pentateuch likely emanated from a well-educated sector of the Jewish community, whose members were not unfamiliar with the Hebrew original. The translation’s language style adheres closely enough to Semitic syntax and idiom to suggest that the original’s words were never expected to be lost from view. Being the first undertaking of its kind, the translated Pentateuch is filled with renderings that speak of a spontaneous, creative procedure in which various strategies were attempted. The extent to which the Greek Pentateuch would have functioned as a theological guide for Hellenistic Judaism is not clear. Some parts do exhibit interpretive shifts, while others simply defy being counted as Torah in Greek. The Greek Pentateuch was known to later translators who depended in varying degrees upon its vocabulary.

scholarly journals Son-of-God traditions in the Synoptic Gospels: Ferdinand Hahn's diachronic perspective

2001 ◽  
Vol 57 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Synoptic Gospels ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Multi Stage ◽  
Stage Development ◽  
Hellenistic Judaism ◽  
Cultural World ◽  
Historical Origins

This study makes use of Ferdinand Hahn's insights (with Son of God as case study) to indicate how the naming of Jesus developed in stages. It is shown that the name Son of God was not used by Jesus. It functioned within the context of the cultic activities of early Christianity, was taken over from the surrounding religious, political and cultural world while its referential meaning shifted in the various layers. Hahn focuses on the multi-stage development of the Jesus tradition from an Aramaic "Judaism", through  a Hellenistic "Judaism" to a Gaeco-Roman stage. First the possible historical origins of the title Son of God are discussed, after which Hahn's view is taken into consideration.

scholarly journals Defining Hellenistic Jews in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Jacob Bernays and Jacob Freudenthal

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-342
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Kurtz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Diagnostic Features ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Hellenistic Judaism ◽  
Jewish Writers

Hellenic language and culture occupy a deeply ambivalent place in the mapping of Jewish history. If the entanglement of the Jewish and the Greek became especially conflicted for modern Jews in philhellenic Europe, nowhere was it more vexed than in the German-speaking lands of the long nineteenth century. Amidst the modern redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish as well as doubts about the genuine Jewishness of Hellenistic Judaism, how did scholars identify Jewish authorship behind ambiguous, fragmented, and interpolated texts – all the more with much of the Hebraic allegedly deprived by the Hellenic? This article not only argues for the contingency of diagnostic features deployed to define the Jewish amidst the Greek but also maintains the embeddedness of those features in nineteenth-century Germany. It scrutinizes the criteria deployed to establish Jewish texts and authors of the Hellenistic period: the claims and qualities assumedly suggestive of Judaism. First, the inquiry investigates which characteristics German Jewish scholars expected to see in Greek-speaking Jewish writers of antiquity, interrogating their procedures and their verdicts. Second, it examines how these expectations of antiquity corresponded to those scholars’ own modern world. The analysis centers on Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) and Jacob Freudenthal (1839–1907), two savants who helped establish the modern study of Hellenistic Judaism. Each overturned centuries of learned consensus by establishing an ancient author – Pseudo-Phocylides and Eupolemus, respectively – as Jewish, rather than Christian or pagan. This article ultimately reveals the subtle entanglements as well as the mutually conditioning forces not only of antiquity and modernity but also of the personal and academic, manifest both in the philological analysis of ancient texts and in the larger historiography of antique Judaism in the Graecophone world.

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