Jewish appropriationism...?

Due to a flight cancellation (again... ) I had to spend 3 hours at the Oslo airport last night. Hence I went to the bookstore (what else can you do at an airport...) to have a look at the books. I found one I hadn't seen before by
David Biale, Cultures of the Jews. Vol. One: Mediterranean Origins (Schocken Books, New York). It contains, inter alia, an article by Erich S Gruen on Hellenistic Judaism (77-132), and one by Eric M. Meyers on Jewish Culture in Greco-Roman Palestine (pp. 135-179).

I read the article by Gruen, and especially noted the final words of that articlep. 124: “Jews thoroughly embraced the Diaspora communities in which they could lead full and rewarding lives - without compromising their allegiance to the symbol of their faith in Jerusalem. They successfully negotiated their own place within the world of Greco-Roman Society: they were appropriationists rather than assimilationists. And they shunned the melting pot.” Would not this also be a fitting description of Philo's attitudes to the Greco-Roman culture?

Conference on the Septuagint

In, July 20 to 23, 2006, there will be a conference in Wuppertal, Germany, on The Septuagint – Texts, Contexts And Cultural Setting. A Congress organised by Septuaginta Deutsch presided by Martin Karrer / Wolfgang Kraus at the Barmen School of Theology in cooperation with Universität des Saarlandes – UniversitätWuppertal – Universität Koblenz-Landau.

You can find further inforamtion about the conference and its program here.

The New Testament Mysticism Project

From the Novum Testamentum blog I gather some information about (the SBL) The New Testament Mysticism Project. The project has its own web page at http://www.newtestamentmysticism.com/.

This project should probably be of interest to some Philo scholars too. Its webpage has links with information about seminar members, steering committee, style guide, working, definition, Glossary, and the 2006 session: Matthew.

The link to definition leads you to an informative paper written by April D. DeConick on "What is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?"

The selfpresentation of the group says that the New Testament Mysticism Project Seminar (NTMPS)"understands early Jewish and Christian mysticism as a tradition located within formative Judaism and Christianity, a tradition centering on the belief that a person directly, immediately and before death can experience God or his manifestation. These mystical encounters occur as waking visions, dreams, trances and auditions."
One of aims of the project is "to collectively write a commentary covering mysticism in the New Testament. The Seminar will progress systematically through each New Testament text, writing overviews of each text as well as commentaries on relevant pericopes. Each entry will include the original language passage, a new translation, a line-by-line commentary, an interpretative history of the pericope through the Ante-Nicene period, literature parallels, and select bibliography."

Calabi on the Decalogue

Jim West has pointed to a recent publication on the Decalogue by F. Calabi:According to him , a note from the Italian Biblical Association says:

Segnalo ai neotestamentaristi e storici del cristianesimo primitivo l'utilità della recentissima edizione traduzione e commento di F.Calabi del trattato sul decalogo di Filone (De Decalogo, a cura di Francesca Calabi, ETS Pisa, 2005) ovviamene gli specialisti di giudaismo ellenistico hanno meno bisogno di questa segnalazione. Io ho imparato dal libro diverse cose che non sapevo sul contesto del sorgere delle prime comunità di discepoli di Gesù.
The book is also available here. Alas, I do not read Italian. But there are also some other studies on Philo available on the web, as for instance this study:LINGUA DI DIO, LINGUA DEGL I UOMINI
Filone alessandrino e la traduzione della Bibbia.
belonging to I Castelli di Yale.

Up and away

I have been away for a couple of weeks, not having access to internett, and hence not being able to read blogs or to post. But now we have finally made our great move from Volda to Stavanger; the old house is sold, and we have moved in in another here in Stavanger.But what a mess; packages all over; where are my books, clothes, etc etc..

I logged into Bloglines today; there is a lot of unread postings..... uffda, I have some reading to do....

A Philo Review article

Reading the blog of Michael Bird, the Euangelion Blog, via Bloglines, I discover a review article written by Ellen Birnbaum, recently published in Currents in Biblical Research:

Ellen Birnbaum,
'Two Millennia Later: General Resources and Particular Perspectives on Philo the Jew,' Currents in Biblical Research 4 (2006):241-276.

I have not been able to get my hand on the article yet, but the journals own abstract runs like this:

Twenty centuries after he lived, Philo is regarded by scholars in many disciplines as an important and intriguing subject of study. Extensive print and electronic resources are available to facilitate and inform Philonic research. Fifty years ago, writers debated whether Philo—long neglected by mainstream Jewish tradition—was more fundamentally a Jew or a Greek. To illuminate this issue, these writers often focused on possible Jewish and/or Greek sources of Philo’s ideas and examined his ideas in relation to Jewish and/or Greek parallels. In recent works, however, scholars have probed the complexity of Philo’s Jewish identity from a wider range of perspectives. These include describing what constitutes Philo’s Judaism (‘the descriptive approach’); examining how he deals with Jewish and universal aspects of certain themes (‘the thematic approach’); comparing his ideas to Jewish and other traditions to see how he uses these traditions (‘the comparative approach’); studying how he presents Jews and Judaism to create a positive impression among his readers (‘the presentational approach’); and taking into account the socio-political context of first-century Alexandria to explore his attitudes about Jews and others, to find reflections of contemporary circumstances in his works or to explore the relationship between his exegetical and historical writings (‘the socio-political approach’). Generally considered by scholars today to have been a loyal and observant Jew, Philo is occasionally being integrated into broader studies of the Second Temple period and of Diaspora Jews during that time, and he has also been included in surveys of Jewish topics from the Bible to the present.

There is also another review article in the same volume, interesting for me, at least:
Mark Dubis
Research on 1 Peter: A Survey of Scholarly Literature Since 1985
Currents in Biblical Research 2006 4: 199-239.