Monographs by Jonathan M. Potter
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, 2024
How early Christian gospels were written is an old question that continues to engage scholars. Mo... more How early Christian gospels were written is an old question that continues to engage scholars. Moving beyond the traditional approach of reading Luke as a "gentile" gospel composed primarily using Greco-Roman methods of history and biography writing, this book argues that Luke’s use of the earlier Gospel of Mark should be understood in the context of contemporaneous early Jewish writings known as "Rewritten Scripture." Texts like the Book of Jubilees and Josephus’s Antiquities interpret Scripture by rewriting it in such a way that ambiguities and contradictions are diminished, while also adapting it to contemporary beliefs and practices. A similar strategy of interpretation through rewriting best explains Luke’s reworking of Mark. Even if Mark is not yet "Scripture," Luke’s manner of rewriting Mark suggests that Luke views the earliest gospel as an authoritative narrative about Jesus that merits interpretive clarification and expansion rather than rejection or critique. This approach offers solutions to various "problems" in the composition of Luke, such as the combination of expansion and omission, verbatim repetition and free paraphrase, and it also places Luke’s compositional process within a plausible ancient literary context.
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Articles by Jonathan M. Potter
The lack of a Transfiguration account in the Gospel of John is well-known. But what would it look... more The lack of a Transfiguration account in the Gospel of John is well-known. But what would it look like if someone steeped in Johannine discourse and conceptuality reimagined the Synoptic Transfiguration? This study explores how Acts of John reconfigures the Transfiguration not only in episodes that bear obvious resemblance to the Synoptic Transfiguration (A.J. 90, 91), but also throughout a larger section of the work (89–93) where John gives testimony to Jesus’s constantly changing physical embodiment. Through a close comparative reading of Acts of John and the Gospel of Luke, a remarkable portrait of Jesus emerges. While the Transfiguration in the Synoptic stories of Jesus represents a unique preview of future glory, in Acts of John, Jesus is constantly being transfigured. This fluctuating form points to a central claim in Acts of John: Jesus is divine and not truly human, a logos only temporarily and partially concealed in human flesh.
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Edited Volumes by Jonathan M. Potter
Like Philo and Josephus, as well as those who earlier produced the Septuagint and the Hellenistic... more Like Philo and Josephus, as well as those who earlier produced the Septuagint and the Hellenistic Jewish fragmentary texts, the writers of the New Testament were Jews writing in Greek. They may have been articulating and promoting a particular form of Jewish messianism that eventually became a distinctive form of religious belief, but in the first and early second centuries, those Christ-followers who were writing in various genres operated with many of the same assumptions as their Jewish counterparts in the land of Israel and in other places such as Alexandria and Rome. This collection of essays, spanning the scholarly career of Carl R. Holladay, investigates the Hellenistic Jewish writings in their own contexts and explores how they illuminate the writings of the New Testament. Included are six new essays on such topics as Hellenistic Judaism, the Beatitudes, and Luke-Acts.
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Book Reviews by Jonathan M. Potter
Review of Kyrios Christos: A History of Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to I... more Review of Kyrios Christos: A History of Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, by Wilhelm Bousset. Review of Biblical Literature (2015). http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/9477_10485.pdf. [Download at link]
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This boldly comparative work is a slight revision of Cavin's Durham dissertation, completed in 20... more This boldly comparative work is a slight revision of Cavin's Durham dissertation, completed in 2010 under Stephen Barton (v). Not only is this one of the few major comparisons of Colossians and 1 Peter, but it is certainly the first to compare those two New Testament texts with two further texts from an ostensibly very different milieu: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Cavin compares " patterns of thought " in 4QInstruction and the Hodayot with Colossians and 1 Peter, respectively, to clarify what is distinct in the two New Testament compositions and to provide a plausible background for their portrayal of the dynamic between theology and behavior (thus " new existence and righteous living ").
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Review of The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity: From Toland to Baur, edited by F. Stanley Jones... more Review of The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity: From Toland to Baur, edited by F. Stanley Jones. Review of Biblical Literature (9/2016). https://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/8564_9388.pdf.
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Review of Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition, by Eric Eve. Review of Biblical L... more Review of Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition, by Eric Eve. Review of Biblical Literature (10/2016). https://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/9907_10962.pdf
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Review of Biblical Literature, 2017
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Review of Biblical Literature, 2017
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Conference Presentations by Jonathan M. Potter
Paper presented at the 2016 European Association of Biblical Studies Graduate Symposium.
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Teaching Documents by Jonathan M. Potter
A timeline of the development of NT textual criticism, put together for one of my doctoral semina... more A timeline of the development of NT textual criticism, put together for one of my doctoral seminars in 2014. This is uncorrected, unpublished work; I'm posting it here in case it is useful to anyone, perhaps in teaching.
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Monographs by Jonathan M. Potter
Articles by Jonathan M. Potter
Edited Volumes by Jonathan M. Potter
Book Reviews by Jonathan M. Potter
Conference Presentations by Jonathan M. Potter
Teaching Documents by Jonathan M. Potter