A precise fit with the performance of ancient Jewish letters is difficult to determine, so that some of our observations will remain tentative. Nonetheless, what can be said with a degree of certainty is that the performer became the ...

Author: Marvin Lloyd Miller

Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

ISBN: 9783647550930

Category: Religion

Page: 318

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This ambitious and engaging book sets itself the task of combining a wide range of approaches to cast new light on the form and function of several ancient Jewish letters in a variety of languages. The focus of The Performance of Ancient Jewish Lettersis on applying a new emerging field of performance theory to texts and arguing that letters and other documents were not just read in silence, as is normal today, but were "performed," especially when they were addressed to a community. A distinctive feature of this book consists of being one of the first to apply the approach of performance criticism to ancient Jewish letters. Previous treatments of ancient letters have not given enough consideration to their oral context; however, this book prompts the reader to "listen" sympathetically with the audience. The Performance focuses close attention on the ways in which the engagement of the audience during the performance of a text might be read from traces present in the text itself. This book invites the audience to hear a fresh reading of a family letter from Hermopolis, concerning ugly tunics and castor oil; festal letters, about issues surrounding the celebration of Passover, Purim and Hanukkah; a diaspora letter on how to live in a foreign land; and also an official letter concerning the building of the Jerusalem temple. These letters will help us understand a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely, MMT. Marvin L. Miller argues for the centrality of performance in the life of Jews of the Second Temple period, an area of study that has been traditionally neglected. The Performanceadvances the fields of orality and epistolography and supplements other scholars' works in those fields.

Miller, Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters, 48, 129. Franz Schnider and Werner Stenger, Studium zum neutestamentlichen Briefformular, NTTS I (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 34–41. See also the reference of M. F. Whitters to “festal letters” ...

Author: Aaron Ricker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9780567694010

Category: Religion

Page: 224

View: 947

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Aaron Ricker locates the purpose of Romans in its function as a tool of community identity definition. Ricker employs a comparative analysis of the ways in which community identity definition is performed in first-century association culture, including several ancient network letters comparable to Romans. Ricker's examination of the community advice found in Rom 12-15 reveals in this new context an ancient example of the ways in which an inscribed addressee community can be invited in a letter to see and comport itself as a “proper” association network community. The ideal community addressed in the letter to the Romans is defined as properly unified and orderly, as well accommodating to – and clearly distinct from – cultures “outside.” Finally, it is defined as linked to a proper network with recognised leadership (i.e., the inscribed Paul of the letter and his network). Paul's letter to the Romans is in many ways a baffling and extraordinary document. In terms of its community-defining functions and strategies, however, Ricker shows its purpose to be perfectly clear and understandable.

Giles and Doan, “Performance Criticism of the Hebrew Bible,” 278. 367. ... Marvin Lloyd Miller sees ancient Jewish letters as appropriate for performance criticism, as he seeks to overcome misconceptions resulting from reading back onto ...

Author: Sarah Agnew

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

ISBN: 9781725257863

Category: Religion

Page: 318

View: 885

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Embodied Performance presents a methodology by which performer-interpreters can bring their intuitive interpretations to the scholarly conversations about biblical compositions. It may not be comfortable, for scholarship is out of practice in listening to emotion and intuition. It may not be the only way to bring the fullness of human meaning making into scholarly discussions. It is a beginning, as Sarah Agnew, storyteller and scholar, places herself as the subject and object under examination, observing her practice as a biblical storyteller making meaning through embodied performance, and develops a coherent method rigorously tested with an Embodied Performance Analysis of Romans. Follow Sarah's story as she searches within Biblical Performance Criticism for such a method, before determining the need to strike out in a new direction from within an already innovative field. All biblical scholars are complex human beings, making meaning through their embodiment, their emotions, their embeddedness in community. Embodied Performance Analysis offers a way to attend to and incorporate the full range of human meaning making in our engagement with biblical compositions, for richer discussion closer to the intent of the compositions themselves.

47 Cf. L. Doering, Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography (WUNT 298; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 194–214,424 and 503; most recently M. L. Miller, Performances of ancient ...

Author: Jörg Frey

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

ISBN: 9783161560156

Category: Religion

Page: 929

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Back cover: How did the Qumran discoveries change New Testament scholarship? What are the main insights to be gained from the Qumran corpus with regard to the Jesus tradition, Paul's language and theology, the dualistic language and worldview of the Fourth Gospel, or the formation of the biblical Canon? The articles of this volume present the fruits of 25 years of scholarship on Qumran and the New Testament.

inasmuch as those matters might reflect on Jewish cultic and spiritual practice more broadly. In his 1991 essay on “Oral Tradition and ... 64 Miller, Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters, 247–66. 65 66 See the comments by Bärry Hartog ...

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

ISBN: 9789004537804

Category: Religion

Page: 542

View: 435

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This book is a collection of cutting-edge essays on the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of ancient Mediterranean media culture, featuring interdisciplinary feedback from scholars in New Testament studies and Classics.

Studies in the Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography Paola Ceccarelli, Lutz Doering, Thorsten Fögen, ... Miller, Marvin L. (2015), Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters: From Elephantine to MMT, Göttingen.

Author: Paola Ceccarelli

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780192526236

Category: Literary Collections

Page: 384

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The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place. This volume explores the interrelation of letters and communities in the ancient world, examining how epistolary communication aided in the construction and cultivation of group-identities and communities, whether social, political, religious, ethnic, or philosophical. A theoretically informed Introduction establishes the interface of epistolary discourse and group formation as a vital but hitherto neglected area of research, and is followed by thirteen case studies offering multi-disciplinary perspectives from four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity. The first part opens the volume with two chapters on the theory and practice of epistolary communication that focus on ancient epistolary theory and the unavoidable presence of a letter-carrier who introduces a communal aspect into any correspondence, while the second comprises five chapters that explore configurations of power and epistolary communication in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic age. Five chapters on letters and communities in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity follow in the third, part before the volume concludes with an envoi examining the trans-historical, or indeed timeless, philosophical community Seneca the Younger construes in his Letters to Lucilius.

An Oral and Performance Commentary David Seal. requesting God's abundant mercy, peace, and love, Jude's goal in the prayer was to express his feelings of care and concern for the recipients. Sending a letter in the ancient world was not ...

Author: David Seal

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

ISBN: 9781666730296

Category: Religion

Page: 116

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Jude is a short letter making it easy to read entirely in one sitting. Yet the letter is rarely read, and it is not a popular text for teaching and preaching. Jude is a warning to an early Christian community about a group of itinerant teachers bearing a message that Jude considers incompatible with the apostolic gospel. The teaching and practice of these people puts them into a class of individuals who, according to Scripture, incur God’s wrath and judgment. Jude stresses that there is guaranteed judgment on those who live outside the normalized instruction and teach others to do the same. The importance of a lifestyle that adheres with biblical teaching is just as crucial today as it was in the early church. This commentary highlights the oral and performative nature of the first-century Mediterranean world. Jude was situated in this oral context, and it decisively shaped the form and delivery of the epistle while also enhancing its content. One cannot separate the content of a message from how a message comes to expression. This commentary aims to show the relationship between expression and content, demonstrating that there is not only value in what Jude says but in how he says it.

24 In the words of the Hodayot's authors, the purposes of all speech are to “make known” (עידוהל), ... For a detailed explanation, see Marvin Lloyd Miller, Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters: From Elephantine to MMT, ...

Author: Shem Miller

Publisher: BRILL

ISBN: 9789004408203

Category: Religion

Page: 341

View: 726

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In Dead Sea Media, Shem Miller offers an innovative media criticism of the Dead Sea Scrolls that examines the roles of orality and memory in the social setting and scribal practices of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Saldarini, “Letter of Jeremiah,” 931; Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah, 260, argues for the early second century. ... Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters: From Elephantine to MMT (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2015), for the history of ...

Author: Lawrence M. Wills

Publisher: Yale University Press

ISBN: 9780300248791

Category: Religion

Page: 329

View: 368

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An ambitious introduction to the Apocrypha that encourages readers to reimagine what "canon" really means Challenging the way Christian and non-Christian readers think about the Apocrypha, this is an ambitious introduction to the deuterocanonical texts of the Christian Old Testaments. Lawrence Wills introduces these texts in their original Jewish environment while addressing the very different roles they had in various Christian canons. Though often relegated to a lesser role, a sort of "Bible-Lite," these texts deserve renewed attention, and this book shows how they hold more interest for both ancient and contemporary communities than previously thought.

See Marvin Miller, Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters: From Elephantine to MMT (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 111,134, 210. In which case it would speak to the translator's negotiation of his translational norms, ...

Author: Jean Maurais

Publisher: BRILL

ISBN: 9789004516588

Category: Religion

Page: 338

View: 828

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In this monograph, Jean Maurais applies recent developments in Translation Studies to the study of Septuagint translations in order to develop a framework appropriate to the characterization of Old Greek Deuteronomy as a translation and as a literary artifact.