Band 5, Heft 1

In this article, I present a meta-analysis of reception history as a discipline, followed by a study in the interpretative methods used by transgender Christians. Following Helen Savage’s work on transgender Christians’ spirituality, I concede her three observed hermeneutical methods: 1) establishing a hierarchy of texts, 2) resolution through historical criticism, and 3) changing the subject. I also add to her observations two additional observed methods: 4) self-insertion and 5) Scripture as precedent. These observations noted, the landscape of transgender Christians’ theologies is revealed as more diverse than others have previously anticipated, and increasingly so. This research also opens up space for theologians, scholars, and clergy to understand transgender hermeneutics and theology with a greater deal of nuance and care.

This short essay follows a thread of evidence employed across many languages and lands, genres and generations to defend the historicity of the Samson story. Based upon this line of interpretation it stresses some necessary lessons for scholars writing the history of biblical scholarship. The inquiry extends beyond an interest in modern history to show the relevance of the history of scholarship for present research on ancient history and biblical literature.

David’s lament in 2 Sam 18:33, on hearing of Absalom’s death, has been an extremely popular text for composers to set to music. The traditional English language settings utilise a text that begins ‘When David Heard’, though these words are absent from the 1611 King James Bible, and the 1560 Geneva bible, and no other extant text supports this rendering. However, a cluster of some thirteen settings of the text in the seventeenth century which appropriated this translation established somewhat of a ‘tradition.’ Settings through to the twenty-first century have continued to utilise this text, with one prominent composer assuming that the textual tradition came from the King James Bible. However, Australian composer Nigel Butterley has produced a setting which makes use of Robert Alter’s translation of the David story. Rather than focus on the single verse, Butterley redacts four chapters of Alter’s translation into a comprehensible narrative, punctuated by the refrain ‘Beni Avshalom. Beni, veni Avshalom’ which appears three times, and the full lament which occurs on the last two occasions. This paper examines Butterley’s appropriation of Alter’s translation, and the musical vocabulary which is employed in conveying this deeply moving text. Interested as it is in issues of interpretation, it reveals Butterley as a both sensitive and powerful reader of scripture.

This paper investigates the Chinese reception and transformation of the Bible through dramatic texts during the early Republican period, and the ways in which members of the Catholic community attempted to resolve the cultural and moral conflicts, mainly through the lens of the martyrdom narratives in the dramatic text Majiabai’a zhuan (The Story of the Maccabees, 1918). The Chinese playwright Fei Jinbiao, well aware of the contesting moral values in the Chinese cultural contexts, adopted some dramatizing strategies to resolve the moral dilemma among most Chinese audiences. The dramatization of biblical and martyrdom stories in Chinese were employed as a tool of proselytization and religious education in Catholic families and schools. The reading and performing of the dramatic texts on martyrdom also contributed to the identity building of the Chinese Catholic community as a distinctive group on the borders of the mainstream Chinese society. From a broader perspective, the making of martyrdom in Chinese Catholic dramatic texts and the performance of martyrdom stories in China facilitated the “re-membering” of not only the Western saints into the Chinese church but also the Chinese martyrs into the universal Catholic Church.

In a 1978 study, Krister Stendahl traced the use of Johannine theology in the Book of Mormon’s most central narrative: the climactic story of the resurrected Jesus visiting the ancient Americas. According to Stendahl, the reproduction of the Sermon on the Mount with occasional slight variations suggests an attempt at deliberately recasting the Matthean text as a Johannine sermon. Building on Stendahl’s work, this essay looks at the use of John earlier in the Book of Mormon, in a narrative presented as having occurred almost a century before the time of Jesus. In an inventive reworking of the narrative of John 11, the story of the raising of Lazarus, the Book of Mormon suggests that it bears a much more complex relationship to the Johannine theology than its unhesitant embrace at the book’s climax indicates. Broad parallels and unmistakable allusions together make clear that the Book of Mormon narrative means to re-present the story from John 11. But the parallels and allusions are woven with alterations to the basic structure of the Johannine narrative. As in John 11, the reworked narrative focuses on the story of two men, one of them apparently dead, and two women, both attached to the (supposedly) dead man. But the figure who serves as the clear parallel to Jesus is unstable in the Book of Mormon narrative: at first a Christian missionary, but then a non-Christian and racially other slave woman, and finally a non-Christian and racially other queen. But still more striking, in many ways, is the fashion in which the Book of Mormon narrative recasts the Lazarus story in a pre-Christian setting, before human beings are asked to confront the Johannine mystery of God in the flesh. Consequently, although the Book of Mormon narrative uses the basic structure and many borrowed phrases from John 11, it recasts the meaning of this structure and these phrases by raising questions about the meaning of belief before the arrival of the Messiah. The Book of Mormon thereby embraces the Johannine theology of a realized eschatology while nonetheless outlining a distinct pre-Christian epistemology focused on trusting prophetic messengers who anticipate eschatology.