William R G Loader FAHA

This paper explores the way in which New Testament writers responded to the experience of rejection, its grief and sometimes resultant anger, both by those who refused to respond positively to the message of the gospel and by those who ceased to continue to believe and left the faith communities. It does so initially by giving attention to the Parable of the Sower in the context of Jesus’ ministry, then as interpreted in the context of the early Christian movement and finally in its Markan context. It then considers the processing of rejection in Mark as a whole, the responses to Jesus’ rejection both in a sense of solidarity and going beyond it. The paper then discusses Paul’s passionate response to rejection from within his own people and his theological response of hope before turning to consider the issues in Matthew and Luke, and briefly in the fourth gospel. Its conclusions are that responses were diverse, both in their scope and in their potential to cause harm and to heal.

Jesus Christ was not the son of Mr and Mrs Christ. A child or maybe an unsuspecting adult might be forgiven for thinking this was so, given that Christ does sound like Jesus’ surname. The title, Mashiach, Messiah, translated Christ, did indeed become the equivalent of a name, its original meaning lost in translation or at least in the transition as the Jesus movement moved from its Jewish culture into the cultures of the wider world. More was at stake, however, than the shift from a title to a name. Changes which the transition entailed included a shift from corporate hopes based on restoring Israel’s kingdom to universal concerns with individual salvation and the hope of heaven, from good news for the poor addressed to Israel to care for the poor primarily among believers, and from Jesus the Jewish Messiah to Jesus the Logos incarnate, and in the process the issue of continuity and discontinuity with faith’s heritage, not least in the light of what became exclusive claims to salvation.

This article addressed the issue of how the author of the Gospel according to John portrayed dissent, in particular, how the author had his protagonists respond to the experience of rejection by those typically designated as ‘the Jews’. Research thus far has usually focused on the identity of the dissenters but rarely on the way dissent was handled. This article’s aim was to examine the range of responses to dissent. It employed a sequential reading of the text to identify the various responses and then brought these findings into comparison with the way dissent was handled in related documents of the time, Matthew and Hebrews. It found that responses included not only argument and blame, including threat of divine wrath but also, beyond these, ad hominem allegations that those who dissent were inherently bad or beholden to the devil or had not been predestined or chosen by God to respond. Such categories were, however, not absolute, because the author assumed that people could choose to respond positively and so move from one apparently fixed and predetermined category to another. They served a rhetorical function. A further ploy was to reduce Israel’s tradition to witness and foreshadowing within the tension of asserting both continuity and discontinuity.

This article examines the impact of the widespread pattern of unequal age at marriage which led men to conclude that not only were their wives less experienced and mature, they were also inferior by nature. It examines the ideological underpinning for the view of women’s inferiority in Plato and the Genesis creation stories, especially in their Greek translation. It then traces the way this value system found expression in the traditional allocation of gender roles, women taking responsibility for the internal affairs of the household and men for the external affairs, including public discourse. There were exceptions both within Judaism and within the early Christian movement. These and the egalitarian thoughts in Christian beginnings had the potential to subvert these norms, over time, but a long time.

Paul expresses the common Jewish view that same-sex relations typify the depravity of the non-Jewish world, primarily as a means of finding common ground with those who would be listening to his letter and to argue that sins by his own Jewish people, though different, are no less deplorable and conclude that therefore both need Christ’s redemption. Assuming God created humans male and female, he finds the roots of such behavior in distorted minds and passions resulting from distorted understandings of God.

Sexual issues played a significant role in Judaism’s engagement with its Greco-Roman world. This paper will examine that engagement from the Hellenistic Greco-Roman era to the end of the first century CE. In part, sexual issues were a key element of the demarcation between Jews and the wider community, alongside such matters as circumcision, food laws, the sabbath keeping, and idolatry. Jewish writers, such as Philo of Alexandria, made much of the alleged sexual profligacy of their Gentile contemporaries, not least in association with wild drunken parties, same-sex relations, and pederasty. Jews, including the emerging Christian movement, claimed the moral high ground. In part, however, matters of sexuality were also areas where intercultural influence was evident, such as in the shift in the Jewish tradition from polygyny to monogyny, but also in the way Jewish and Christian writers adapted the suspicion, and sometimes rejection, of the passions that were characteristic of some of the popular philosophies of their day, seeing each other as allies in their moral crusade.

This paper revisits the author’s research on the christology of Hebrews completed in the 1970s in the light of subsequent research. It concentrates, in particular, on the way key problems of interpretation have been handled. These include the extent to which the author’s atonement day typology dictates a soteriology which reduces Christ’s death to a preparatory event and depicts a heavenly offering as the salvific event or, conversely, whether the author employs atonement day typology selectively to interpret Jesus’ death as salvific. It also addresses the associated problems created by parts of the book which report Jesus’ appointment at high priesthood as occurring after his death at his exaltation and other parts which appear to imply that he was acting as a high priest already during his earthly ministry.

In seeking common ground with his readers Paul uses same sex relations to depict human depravity. In doing so he uses many of the arguments familiar from ethical discourse in the Greco-Roman world of his time, but employs them within a Jewish frame of reference. Thus the perverted mind, attitudes and actions are produced by perverted responses to God. The shame of making males passive is ultimately the shame of contravening what God created them to be. Exceptionally he relates the unnatural not to denying procreation, but to denying the created order of (only) male and female and implies the Leviticus prohibitions apply to both. Strong passion is problematic when wrongly directed. Paul’s argument is typically theological and psychological.