Economic polity

Last updated on: October 27, 2011 at 5:02 am By Peter Leithart

Paul Kahn ( Putting Liberalism in Its Place ) traces the dominance of economic/market logic in modern politics to questions about the “faculties of the soul.” On the economic model of these faculties, he argues, interest is “modeled on bodily desire.” This does not mean that all interests crudely express a bodily desire, but that the interests that count share certain characteristics with bodily desire – “a primacy of the individual”; the notion that interest, like desire, is an internal... Read more

Arche and Telos

Last updated on: October 27, 2011 at 4:12 am By Peter Leithart

Jesus says, “I am the arche and telos ” (Revelation 21:6). “Beginning and end” is too colorless, too geometric. Jesus is not the two points at either end of a line segment. Better to render this more “dynamically” and “organically” (forgive the hurrah words): Origin and destination; initiative and completion; source and goal; plan and execution, planner and overseer; starting block and winner’s prize; dawn and dusk; blueprint and building; call and dismissal; etc. Jesus is not the ever-receding beginning,... Read more

Genesis again

Last updated on: October 26, 2011 at 4:10 pm By Peter Leithart

Like his earlier book on Revelation, Wes Howard-Brook’s “Come Out My People!”: God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond has its goofy moments, as when he claims that Jesus completely rejected “imperial economics,” by which he means the money economy that allows you to “trade with people with whom one is not in personal, kinship-like relationship.” He bases this on the fact that Jesus has to ask for a coin when someone asks Him about paying taxes.... Read more

Seven Feasts

Last updated on: October 26, 2011 at 2:49 pm By Peter Leithart

Some aspects of Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther’s Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now (Bible & Liberation) are silly, but there is a lot of very helpful material on the book of Revelation. For instance, the authors point out that there are seven worship scenes in the book, and neatly chart them. Seven worship moments suggests a connection with the seven feasts of Leviticus 23, and the matches are fairly good. Also, there are rough connections with the days... Read more

Ritual power

Last updated on: October 26, 2011 at 1:09 pm By Peter Leithart

Drawing on the work of James Scott, Richard Horsley ( Jesus in Context: Power, People, and Perfomance ) offers this remarkable description of first-century temple worship: “The ideology of the Temple and high priesthood, both being institutions of venerable antiquity, aimed to symbolize that these institutions ruled on behalf of the people, ensuring God’s favor and blessings. By performing rituals and symbolic ideology as grand ceremony in the awesomely constructed sacred space at the center and height of the capital... Read more

Paul and empire

Last updated on: October 26, 2011 at 11:45 am By Peter Leithart

Wise words from NT Wright, in his contribution to Horsley’s Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation : “It is . . . much easier to highlight Paul’s confrontation with some aspect of his world when the aspect in question is one that is currently so deeply out of fashion. To say that Paul opposed imperialism is about as politically dangerous as suggesting that he was in favor of sunlight, fresh air, and orange juice. What we are faced with... Read more

Jewish persecution

Last updated on: October 26, 2011 at 11:14 am By Peter Leithart

What motivated the Jewish persecution of Christians? Paul Fredriksen ( From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ ) suggests this plausible explanation: “News of an impending Messsianic kingdom, originating from Palestine, might trickle out via the ekklesia’s Gentiles to the larger urban population. It was this (by far) larger, unaffiliated group that posed a real and serious threat. Armed with such a report, they might readily seek to alienate the local Roman colonial government,... Read more

Does the Sun Rise?

Last updated on: October 26, 2011 at 11:06 am By Peter Leithart

A reader, Mark Kelly, sends along these reflections on the question I raised in a recent First Things column. The remainder of this post is from Kelly: “If you ask any modern to visualise the earth, or draw the earth, you will without exception evoke an exterior view of our planet, outside it looking in (or, to be perfectly honest, above it looking down, which is true from whichever direction you look at it if you are outside it). We... Read more

Origins of Greek

Last updated on: October 25, 2011 at 9:26 am By Peter Leithart

Peter James and his colleagues dispute the existence of a three-century dark age in ancient history. They find it implausible to think that civilization died in the 12th or 11th century, and then revived, almost intact, three centuries later. Language provides one example of the difficulties of explaining continuity over this period: “early ‘11 th -centry’ Levantine forms apparently served as the prototypes for the 8 th -century Greek alphabet. The detailed arguments have been forcefully presented by Joseph Naveh,... Read more

Begotten One

Last updated on: October 25, 2011 at 8:25 am By Peter Leithart

Defending the historicity of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt and the exodus, GE Wright pointed to the prevalence of non-Semitic Egyptian names in the early history of Israel: “Moses, an abbreviation of a longer name, is from an Egyptian verb meaning ‘to bear, beget.’ The same verbal element occurs in such Egyptian names as Thutmose and Rameses, the first syllables of which are god-names while the remainder indicates that the god is the begetter of the person named. Other Levite... Read more