Biblical Interpretation

While almost all commentators take notice of Job's descriptions of physical suffering, the ways Job uses his body to rhetorical effect have not been fully recognized. This article considers the impact of the legal metaphor on Job's use of body imagery (Job 9:20,(30)(31) 16:8;(22)(23)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27) and maintains that Job's speeches draw on the ancient world's understanding of the body to question and invert traditional usage of body imagery, particularly the stock of body images from the Psalms that present the body, the self, and the voice as a manifold unity. Job overturns traditional images of the disintegrated body known from the biblical laments in order to distance his body's appearance of guilt from his testimony of innocence. In contrast to the psalmists, who petition God to restore them to health, Job uses images of disembodiment and bodily disintegration to separate his broken body from his contention that he is innocent. In this way, Job uses imagery of the body to form a counternarrative that testifies to his innocence.

Roland Boer marshals Marxist economic theory to stage an intervention designed to do nothing less than unseat neoliberalism as the regnant economic model in the study of ancient Israel. This response to Boer raises questions about the Boer's treatment of the sacred and the notion of embedded religion. It also suggests that Bourdieu's notion of " doxic " ideology can provide a balance to Boer's voluntaristic model. Keywords Marxist – economics – neoliberalism – Régulation theory – capitalism – Bourdieu

Roland Boer marshals Marxist economic theory to stage an intervention designed to do nothing less than unseat neoliberalism as the regnant economic model in the study of ancient Israel. This response to Boer raises questions about the Boer’s treatment of the sacred and the notion of embedded religion. It also suggests that Bourdieu’s notion of “doxic” ideology can provide a balance to Boer’s voluntaristic model.

Using images of Jonah in early Christian funerary art as a case study, this article explores questions of reception and the nature of the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and images of Jonah, especially as they appear in the Roman catacombs. I will argue that while the images do not represent a straightforward interpretation of the biblical text qua text, this reception of Jonah is not as divorced from the text as one might suspect. Indeed, both the biblical book of Jonah, in particular the psalm uttered in Chapter 2, and the funerary images highlight Jonah's position on borders between real and imagined social spaces, chaos and order, and death and life. As such, the images, when read as an entanglement of text, art, and ritual, reflect and support socio-religious crossings between Romans, early Christians, and Jews as well as ritual crossings between the living and the dead.

This essay argues that the book of Jonah reflects a culture that grew out of intense engagement with biblical traditions and tropes even as it renders them strange and often problematic. While recognition of Jonah's myriad allusions is widespread, many scholars have seen them as upholding traditional theologies about God's sovereignty and Israel's sinfulness, a reading that undergirds interpretations of the dynamic between Jonah and God. However, Jonah playfully critiques the idea of God's sovereignty along with prophetic depictions of the divine word as stable and transferable. The essay concludes with an analysis of Jonah 4 to show that the book of Jonah is imprinted with the aesthetics, concerns, and values of an innovative and skeptical iteration of scribal culture.

When early Christians prayed “Come, Lord Jesus,” they expected the Lord's coming to be a result of God's agency or the Messiah acting on God's behalf. In three very recent, violent, and otherwise quite different comic book series, Jesus is brought back through a wholly human process-- cloning.  I argue that the "Jesus Clone" reflects current trends and anxieties about human control and biblical promises in U.S. popular culture.  The character of Jesus and the medium of comics often provide a cutting-edge window into the U.S. national feeling.  These particular comics provide insight into the way contemporary Americans struggle to reconcile the bible, science, anthropology, and Christology in the Anthropocene Age—that is, the current moment in geological history when human beings have begun to have a significant impact on our environment. The Jesus Clone reveals a picture of humanity that is distressingly violent, troubled by its enormous power, and under tremendous pressure to reconcile or confront what have traditionally been compartmentalized seats of knowledge.

In the comics I present, scientists with an array of intentions collect Jesus's genetic material from sacred relics and make a Jesus clone (or clones).  In Sean Murphy's_Punk Rock Jesus_, a greedy entertainment corporation clones Jesus to star in a new reality series for a Christianity-crazed U.S. public.  The young Messiah is disillusioned by religion and eventually joins a punk band in an effort to save the world from all religion.  Tim Seeley's messianic star of the colorful _Loaded Bible: Jesus vs. Vampires_ is brought back to defend the post-apocalyptic New Vatican City from vampires with his formidable fighting skills and holy water spit.  This Jesus is devastated when he finds out he is only one of an army of Jesus clones.  The vast number of clones in Shawn French's horrific _Escape from Jesus Island_ are a result of Vatican scientists’ fumbling to bring back Jesus but creating a grotesque menagerie of evil mutants in the process.  My paper presents these Jesus Clones, describes the complex ideas that undergird the Jesus Clone type, assesses the role of the bible in these fantastic scenarios, and shows the significance of Jesus Clone in the Anthropocene Age.

Primary Sources, in order of presentation:
1) Murphy, Sean (w,a), Todd Klein (l). Punk Rock Jesus. #1-6 (September 2012- February 2013), New York: Vertigo, 2013.

2) Seeley, Tim (w), Nate Bellegarde (p), Mike Norton (p), Mark Englert (i). Joseph Baker (i), Melissa S. Kaercher (i). Loaded Bible, Book I: The Jesus vs. Vampires Gospels. Berkeley, Ca.:  Image Comics, 2010.

3) French, Shawn (w), Mortimer Glum (a), Peeter Parkker (i), Rachel Leon (l). Escape from Jesus Island. Wisdum Publications, forthcoming.

Comics have undeniably entered the mainstream. Comic books and graphic novels meet with regular acclaim. The industry is a force of nature. Adaptations of comics into wildly successful films has created a whole new crop of readers. Many times the nuances and contributions of comics are overlooked, in spite of the fact that comics have been engaging with religious themes, used for religious purposes, and part of the lives of religious people for decades and across many cultures. Their reputation for being lowbrow has often kept their valuable resources and imaginative possibilities from the hands of scholars. To address the scholarly queries around the importance and possibilities of comics in the study of religion, we propose a panel that invites scholars to open a dialogue around the question: How is working with comics an act of discovery: of comics, of the study of religion, and/or of religions?

Our structure for the panel is as follows: the presenters will each make a presentation in which they critically engage comics and articulate ways comics have entered their own work, scholarship, and teaching, in answer to our framing question. Since comics cover such a wide swath of subjects and can be engaged from a number of angles, the panel includes scholars who attend to the work of comics in a variety of ways and will explore reading, researching, talking, teaching, and writing as acts of discovery. The remainder of the time will be given to moderated discussion open to the attendees.

Both the theme and structure of this proposed panel come out of conversations at regional meetings over the past few years, in which we decided our meetings would be enriched if we experimented with other formats, particularly those that enable us to engage in cross-disciplinary conversation.  Several recent sessions have included papers and conversations that have examined comics and some of these have engaged specific examples of comics art/literature with significant depth, but none so far have sought to explore the breadth of the field. Therefore, we are committed to using our time to stimulate creative, substantive, and hopefully satisfying conversation around this burgeoning field. We hope both to educate attendees on the work being done in comics and religion as well as give them useful information that they might apply to their own work.

Panelists:
Dan Clanton, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Doane College
Terry Clark, Associate Professor of Religion, Georgetown College
Elizabeth Coody, PhD Candidate, University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology

Panel Moderator: Leonard Greenspoon, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations/Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization, Creighton University

During last year’s regional meeting, a conversation began around the larger implications of popular culture and biblical studies in several forms to the American religious landscape. This panel hopes to continue this endeavor with a substantive conversation organized this time around representation and minority groups on “television.” Religious language and practice runs through the American media landscape. In our conversation last year, we struck upon the idea that certain pop culture forms are consistently used as mythic and iconic forms, that they are used as both texts and ritual acts. “Television” is currently undergoing a shift of ritual practice. Fewer people watch network television shows together, but more people are watching screens than ever. This fracturing of the audience might be a new part of the culture or it might actually be an illustration of divisions that already existed in audiences.

We hope that this conversation will allow us to bring some broader questions to the region in a panel that focuses on conversation and the process of collaboration rather than more traditional papers. We will provide a quite brief introduction that will include some initial comments on definitional and methodological issues, the future of the field, the value of this field of inquiry. The rest of the panelists will contribute presentations that concentrate somewhat on the questions: In what ways does this show represent minority or religious groups? How does the way the show is distributed impact its production, audience, or reception?
 
The remainder of the panel will be devoted to a moderated conversation that we hope includes those in attendance.

This study will take as a working assumption that John knew at least part of the synoptic tradition, if not all of it, but intentionally chose to make a change. If that is the case, for what purpose did John offer an alternative to the synoptic story? What significance do John's changes have?
Chapters 12 and 13 of John offer an opportunity for us to explore this question in miniature. This section contains several passages that parallel Matthew, Luke, and especially Mark, while at the same time having a plentitude of uniquely Johannine material. We will use it as a case study.

In this paper, I will explore how Paul constructs Abraham and his unwavering faith and compare that with the Abraham story in Genesis. I will argue that the details of the Abraham narrative in Genesis are indeed problematic, both for Paul’s construction in Romans 4 of Abraham as a paragon of unwavering faith, and for the conceptions of later Pauline interpreters. We will find, though, that Paul has the weight of Second Temple tradition on his side when he chooses to ignore these details in order to make his theological point.

In her 2005 article, “Portraying the Temple in Stone and Text: The Arch of Titus and the Epistle to the Hebrews,” Ellen Bradshaw Aitken argues that the Christology of Hebrews can be correlated with Roman imperial history, specifically with the triumph of the Flavians — Emperor Vespasian and his sons, the future emperors Titus and Domitian — and the propaganda campaign that secured their legitimacy. She concludes that Hebrews uses the details of the triumph in order to subvert imperial claims and, by juxtaposing them with the actions of Jesus, to show that Christ is the true and superior imperator.1 In this essay, I intend to build on her work by giving additional arguments for the validity of her thesis and by showing that the Melchizedek material of Hebrews also fits into the context of this connection between Jesus and the Flavians. I will show that Melchizedek, Jesus, and the Flavian emperors can be correlated in Hebrews, and that they can all be described as King and Priest of Salem. I am not arguing that Hebrews was written purely as an anti-imperial tract, but rather that Hebrews hits certain notes that would likely have raised Flavian associations for its first audience.