Reviewed by: ʿAbd al Jabbār: Critique of Christian Origins Cornelia B. Horn ʿAbd al Jabbār: Critique of Christian Origins Edited, translated, and annotated by Gabriel Said Reynolds and Samir Khalil Samir Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2010. ʿAbd al Jabbār, a respected figure among the Muʿtazila, a group of rationalist Muslim theologians, spent the years of his long life (ca. 320s/930s to 415/1025) [End Page 311] between the cities of Baghdad and Rayy in Iran. His account of the history of Christianity, likely the first such undertaking by a Muslim, examines significant aspects of Christian doctrine and attends to aspects of Christian liturgy, pious practices in daily life, social customs (some of which are singled out for criticism), and miracle stories that prominently feature ascetics. ʿAbd al Jabbār's approach of combining refutations of the Christians' doctrines with critical discussions of their history and practices grounds the novelty of the work. Given the author's geographical location in Iran, the focus of the work's critique on East Syrian Christians and their practices is easily contextualized. The introduction to the volume situates the Critique within the framework of early Islamic anti-Christian polemical literature. It presents ʿAbd al Jabbār's life and works, comments usefully on still unedited works by him, and attempts to modify scholarly judgments of the author's role primarily as a compiler of earlier material by highlighting the "shockingly original" (p. xxxvi) character of the Critique. It discusses the Critique in relation to literature that expounded on the signs or proofs of Muhammad's prophethood and thus to texts situated in an explicitly inter-religious environment. It describes ʿAbd al Jabbār's method, characterizes the cultural context of the Critique by way of detailing various groups of people with whom the author interacted and whom he targeted in his refutation, and attempts to identify multiple written and oral sources for the Critique. The Critique of Christian Origins is only a portion of one of ʿAbd al Jabbār's larger works, the Tathbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa (Confirmation of the Proofs of Prophecy), edited previously for the first time by ʿAbd al-Karim\ ʿUthman\ in 1966. The present volume offers a corrected edition with full vocalization of the Arabic text of the Critique, accompanied on facing pages by the first English translation of the text. Throughout the Arabic text, the edition provides a numbering system that is also represented in the translation. This feature facilitates access to both texts for purposes of comparison. The translation adds numerous headings and subheadings, which in turn supply the bulk of the information listed in the table of contents. They offer the reader a quick orientation to the main points and structure of this voluminous work. Overall, the translation into English is certainly the work of (a) competent translator(s). Still, there are a number of infelicities in grammar and word choice. Some are a bit jarring: for example "screw" (p. 152 [639]) in the sense of "have sex with." Occasionally, however, greater precision and care to theological nuance would have been necessary. Instead of "We did not say God is Christ" (p. 3 [22]), one would need to translate it as "We did not say about Christ that he is God," or at least, "We did not say that God is in Christ." If there is a good reason to translate the verb waladat in reference to Mary as "Mary begot (sic!)" Christ/God, as happens in several instances (p. 15 [137 and 144]; p. 19 [184 and 189]; p. 82 [488 and 491]), it would require a footnote or comment on why the same verb at other times should be rendered as "Mary gave birth to" (p. 19 [186]). At stake is the difference between referring to the one who was born as "Christ" or "God," but not any difference between how she did, [End Page 312] or even could, act. (The English verb "beget" refers properly only to males; the preterite form is "begat.") The annotations are, for the most part, helpful. They provide references to citations from, and parallels to, the Qur'ān and biblical...
Reviewed by: Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire A. T. Kraabel Martin Goodman. Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. xiv 1 194. $39.95. Despite its sweeping title, this path-breaking volume is mainly about alleged Jewish missionary activity in the Roman world. (The author is successor to Geza Vermes as Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford.) Thus chapter 5, “Mission in the Early Church,” is bracketed symmetrically by four chapters about Jews, specifically on their “attitudes to gentile paganism” and on “proselytes and proselytizing”: chapters 3–4 deal with the third century b.C.E. to the first century C.E., and 6–7 on the Talmudic period. The opening chapter is a clear statement about what is at stake. Goodman will not write an account of the phenomenon of conversion à la A. D. Nock, but raise a prior issue: was mission an inevitable component of religion, any religion, in the Greco-Roman world? Or does that idea rather “reflect an unconscious Christianization of the study of ancient religions”? (The second chapter will take up commonly cited examples of “mission” in the spread of pagan cults and philosophies in Roman times.) Goodman distinguishes four types of mission—informative, educational, apologetic, and proselytizing—but focuses on the last, the only one whose goal is conversion. He mentions a fifth briefly: forcible inclusion of a ruler’s subjects in a state religion seen as a unifying factor for that society. Under Goodman’s critical analysis the traditional picture of a “Jewish mission” evaporates. He separates the two pairs of chapters on Judaism at the latter part of the first century C.E.: the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple, the introduction of the fiscus Judaicus, and the beginning of the rabbinic movement. These years are his hinge for eight centuries of Jewish history. Earlier Jews had condemned any worship of pagan deities by Jews, but were tolerant of or disinterested in gentile paganism in the Diaspora. (Pagans in the land of Israel were a problem; the issue was ritual pollution.) Proselytizing had not been of interest either, contra Schürer, Juster, Jeremias, M. Stern, D. Georgi and a shelf-full of NT handbooks. Conversions to Judaism happened, in anticipation of marriage, sometimes at the point of a sword. But had there been missionary campaigns, had proselytizing been a priority, we would have heard much more about it both from Jews and from their detractors; the references would have been unmistakable. Goodman dismantles the proof-texts from Philo, Horace, and Cicero commonly used [End Page 114] to “prove” the contrary, and argues that Matt. 23.15 is not about making gentile proselytes but about Pharisees trying to persuade other Jews to follow Pharisaic halakha. And those Jews who wrote in Greek did so not in “outreach” to gentiles, but to reach their fellows and their offspring for whom Greek was their first language; the LXX itself is the parade example. In the Talmudic period large shifts occurred within Judaism, results of major historical change. To fuel its propaganda, the Flavian dynasty had transformed the destruction of Jerusalem from “the suppression of insurrection in a comparatively minor provincial backwater” into a mighty Roman victory. The fiscus Judaicus necessitated clearer distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. An important example for students of the early Christian mission to gentiles is the case of gentiles sympathetic to Judaism. Thus, pace Acts, there probably had been no “formal category of gentile Godfearers recognized as such by Jews in the 1st cent[ury].” But the famous Aphrodisias inscription suggests to Goodman a change in Jewish attitudes two centuries later. No review will do justice to the riches of this provocative monograph. This journal’s readers will want their own copies. While agreeing with the thesis and most of the argument, I would raise several points for consideration: 1. I would see even more diversity, especially in Diaspora Judaism, than Goodman does. We are just coming to realize the great variety present in pre-Constantinian Christianity. Judaism in the same time and space had a weaker network, no bishops preaching consensus...
THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE The introductory comments made about rhetoric in our discussion of 1 Thessalonians are relevant to 2 Thessalonians and we urge the reader to review that material at this time. There is wide consensus that 2 Thessalonians belongs to the deliberative genre of rhetoric. This genre includes honour and advantage as the standard topics. These topics are used in 2 Thessalonians to advise the audience concerning their present actions and the result of those actions in the future. Frank Witt Hughes provides the following analysis of the rhetorical structure of 2 Thessalonians. It is one that we accept. I Exordium (introduction) (1:1–12) A epistolary prescript (1:1–2) B thanksgiving prayer (1:3–10) C intercessory prayer (1:11–12) II Partitio (statement of the proposition) (2:1–2) A subjects to be dealt with in the probatio (2:1–2) B point of disagreement (heresy to be refuted) (2:2) III Probatio (proof) (2:3–15) A a first proof (refutatio) (2:3–12) B second proof (2:13–15) IV Peroratio (epilogue) (stated as an intercessory prayer; 2:16–18) V Exhortation (3:1–15) A command (or request) to pray for Paul (3:1–4) B intercessory prayer (3:5) C command to work (3:6–15) VI Epistolary postscript (3:16–17) A intercessory prayer (3:16) B authentication (3:17) C final blessing (3:18) Knowing that 2 Thessalonians is an example of deliberate rhetoric permits the interpreter to be sensitive to the argumentation of the letter in general, and by examining the various components of this rhetorical structure one can be made sensitive to the central issues at stake in the dialogue between this author and his audience.