Werner H. Kelber

A Breath of Fresh Air

Ethics, Culture & Social Issues

“This book addresses a colossal social problem: the United States has just 5 percent of the world's population, but nearly 25 percent of the world's prisoners. What makes Breath of Fresh Air a unique piece of literature is that it combines factual information about mass incarceration with deeply spiritual insights. Boomershine vividly describes her prison ministry, which uses the performative voice of biblical stories with the aim of empowering the men and women behind bars. A masterful storyteller herself, Boomershine's book amounts to a moving appeal to transform the retributive system into restorative justice.”

A Myth of Innocence

“A Myth of Innocence is the most penetrating historical work on the origins of Christianity written by an American scholar in this century. Its strikingly innovative feature is the recombination of literary and social histories, and the placement of diverse Jesus movements into their respective social contexts.”

First-Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“For some time now, the question is being asked what difference it makes whether the Gospels are orally performed or privately apprehended in silent readings. Boomershine offers deeply insightful observations about the Gospels’ auditory data and performative function. This highly accessible book demonstrates how the Gospels of Mark and John are appropriately being processed through the sensory gateways of the ears. This is performative criticism at its very best.”

In Search of Coherence

Philosophy

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)

Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Among the many books composed in the wake of the quest for the historical Jesus, Richard Horsley's study is a much-needed contribution. His is one of the most socially sensitive interpretations of the Gospels, especially of Mark and Q. As a historian of the politics of Roman Palestine, he is in a class by himself. Vividly evoking the time and circumstances of Roman Palestine, easily accessible, and intriguingly original, this book fills a big lacuna in the ongoing quest of Jesus's life and death.”

Jesus in Context

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“For some time now, Richard Horsley's exploration of Jesus and the early traditions about him has been a performance in plural registers. He has sought at once to unify economic history and power politics, popular memory and elite traditions, oral performance and oral-derived texts. In Jesus in Context, he realizes a new synthesis, infusing new life into the study of Christian origins and giving us a people's history deeply rooted in the turmoil of the time and in the memories of Israel. In a field where scholarship is all too often narrowly focused, these chapters represent a refreshing enlargement of our historical vision.”

John, Jesus, and the Renewal of Israel

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Challenging an established scholarly history of isolating sayings from Gospel narratives and dissecting texts into sources, Horsley and Thatcher exhibit an admirable aptitude for synthesis. Their approach combines narrative criticism, text criticism, media studies, performance criticism, and a sociology of power relations into a unified theory. Thoughtfully perceptive and genuinely innovative, this timely book may well change the way we think about the Gospels as historical narratives, the feasibility of the Jesus quest, and the conventional divide between the Gospel of John and the Synoptics.”

Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

Foreword

“Although largely shrouded in silence by the academy, the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse is a giant in the study of oral cultures. This collection of essays and lectures introduces readers into the Galilean oral-style tradition of the first century CE. Relying on the Aramaic Targums, the author places before us a culture that is generated by the intricate operations of memory and formulaic diction. Jousse’s work remains an immense intellectual achievement that presents a viable alternative to the form critical model of the Jesus tradition and the gospels.”

Oral and Manuscript Culture in the Bible

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

Foreword

“... the theses Professor Loubser's book posits and the challenges it represents need to be pondered by all of us who care to revitalize the biblical tradition.”

Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

Foreword

“Huebenthal’s (re)introduction of memory and orality rewards readers with a host of fresh insights into the history of gospel studies, the Gospel of Mark, and the gospel’s social environment and formation, and it invites them to raise entirely new questions.”

Sound Mapping the New Testament, Second Edition

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Updated, expanded, and provided with a superbly informative preface, this second edition effectively reinforces the authors’ central concept of sound as a medium of intelligibility. Rather than viewing the New Testament as a bookish environment divided into chapters, verses, and literary units, we are invited to rediscover its breath units, sound patterns, and audible features. Since its inception some thirteen years ago, the book has steadily grown in importance.”

Sound Matters

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Sound Matters has set itself the awesome task of transforming typographic space into soundscape. In this, the book has succeeded magnificently. Margaret Lee and the nine contributors are to be applauded for their formidable efforts in forging suitably analytical tools and criteria, and for placing sound mapping on a firm empirical basis. More than merely recovering lost or ignored meanings in interpretation, sound mapping, along with a number of other fields, is clearly driving toward a genuinely new paradigm in biblical scholarship.”

The Messiah of Peace

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Boomershine's Messiah of Peace ambitiously moves readers toward a new paradigm in biblical interpretation: an appreciation of Mark's passion-resurrection story as interactive performance. When structured into sound units, the gospel's narrative voice draws hearers into the process of involvement and sympathetic identification. As a result, centuries of referential readings, be they of a theological or historical kind, are overcome, and interpretation is restored to what it used to be: meaning as narrative experience.”

The Oral Ethos of the Early Church

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Joanna Dewey, a leading voice in orality-scribality studies, has made an extremely valuable contribution to the lively and rapidly progressing debate on media and communication. Challenging our habits of equating early Christian identity with written texts, she demonstrates persuasively the oral-aural factor in Paul and Mark, illuminates the great significance of the storytelling tradition, and astutely develops links between oral-scribal media shifts and power relations.”

Why John Wrote a Gospel

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Rejecting a lengthy developmental composition history, Thatcher confronts the text - and us - with the fundamental question: why did John write, and write this kind of gospel? Unsettling in the best possible sense, this book offers a new point of departure for Johannine studies. It is my hope that the new perspectives Thatcher has introduced will initiate a genuine reevaluation of our thinking about one of the most intriguing texts in early Christianity.”