Deborah Forger

***Note: This is only the first page. PM me for the full article.*** The prologue of the Gospel of John famously depicts Jesus as the divine λόγος made flesh. Ancient evidence and insights from sensory analysis support that John also presents Jesus as materializing Israel's God through the λόγοι he speaks. Because the physical act of speaking creates sound, and sound becomes perceptible to persons through the auditory sense, Jesus' words render the God of Israel accessible in the somatic realm. John presents the Father as remote and inaccessible, yet suggests that Jesus uniquely shares in his divinity, so Jesus' speech functions to make the ineffable thoughts of the Father God both heard and thus corporeally known. The materiality of Jesus' speech underscores an important distinction between the divinity of Jesus and that of his transcendent Father; its corporeal connection to audition also reveals how John presents persons coming to believe in and know God tangibly, and, ultimately, to acquire eternal life

***Note: this is only the first page. PM me for the entire article.*** After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews lived under Flavian lords who peppered Rome’s landscape with sculpted images of themselves, oftentimes suggesting that these images, and the emperors who stood behind them, functioned as gods in embodied form. This paper considers how these divine images impacted Jews, given that these same Jews lived under Roman authority yet also served the God of Israel alone. By analyzing Josephus’s Antiquities 11.331-334 in light of Israel’s strong anti-idolic tradition, I explore how the name of Israel’s God, inscribed on the high priest’s golden miter, may have functioned as visible counterpoint to the Flavians’ graven images. It is widely assumed that first-century Jews viewed God as invisible, incorporeal, and utterly removed from the material realm, but for Josephus at least God’s name offered a means by which Jews could gaze upon an aspect of their God in visible, perceptible, and material form.

All too often our academic work emphasizes the cerebral over the corporeal, the mind over the senses, the intellect over the body. But I reject these false dichotomies. Here I reflect on how to concretize our digital classrooms with a hands-on 'parchment kit' I sent students in my course on the Jewish Jesus.  By creating a pedagogical experience in which my students’ eyes could see, their ears could hear, their hands could touch, and their noses could smell the pungent odors often associated these materials, I introduced them to the very materiality of our ancient extant sources and the complex and oftentimes laborious processes by which they were made. Our work together thus illustrated what non-Western cultures have long known and which the recent proliferation of scholarship on the senses has made clear. Epistemology is not the exclusive purview of the mind: our bodies also enable us to know.

Because later polemics established Jews and Christians as binary opposites, distinguished largely by their views on God’s body, scholars have not sufficiently explored how other Jews in the early Roman period, who stood outside the Jesus movement, conceived of how the divine could become embodied on earth. The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria often operates as the quintessential representative of a Jew who stressed God’s absolute incorporeality. Here I demonstrate how Philo also presents a means by which a part of Israel’s God could become united with human materiality, showing how the patriarchs and Moses function as his paradigms. This evidence suggests that scholarship on divine embodiment has been limited by knowledge of later developments in Christian theology. Incarnational formulas, like that found in John 1:14 were not the only way that Jews in the first and second century CE understood that God could become united with human form.

This article offers a new way to explore the category of “Jewish Christians,” by examining how two fourth-century Syrian authors, namely John Chrysostom and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilist, each respectively made sense of Jesus’s harsh treatment of a suffering Roman Syrian woman, first recounted in Mark 7:24–30 and Matthew 15:21–28. In the biblical retellings of the story, when a distraught gentile mother approaches Jesus to solicit his aid in alleviating the torments of her demon possessed daughter, Jesus does not respond with the alacrity one would expect. Instead, he utterly humiliates her, insinuating that she was less than a human, no better than a dog. My analysis reveals that while the former distanced Jesus’s actions from his Jewish ethnicity, the latter suggests the woman received Jesus’s aid only after she becomes a “Jew” herself. Since the two authors lived in chronological and geographical proximity to one another, I suggest that their different exegetical responses shed light onto the dynamic manner in which Christian and Jewish identity formation played out in the Roman Syrian context, thereby complicating past assumptions that the parting of the ways between these two religions occurred in a manner that was unilinear in character and global in scope. The evidence suggests instead that, in Roman Syria at least, efforts to draw the boundary between who was a Jew and who was a Christian constituted a long and involved process, insinuating that—at least in this geographical context—these two designations were not fixed entities even as late as the fourth century CE.