Protestant Bible Scholarship Anti-Semitism Philo-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (original) (raw)

This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-nd 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ x Preface desuetude, degeneration and decay. Read in this way, the sources of ancient antisemitism served to legitimate these modern scholars' own antisemitism. Konrad Schmid tracks the history of the polemical designation Spätjudentum long before Wellhausen, to its roots in late eighteenth century Germany, whence it traveled as a term of historical description into other European languages. In modern times, Wilhelm Bousset's work deployed Spätjudentum as part of an agenda at once antisemitic and anti-Catholic. Linked to the history of the term is the question of Jewish origins: when did Judaism begin? For scholars such as Klaus Koch and Martin Noth, rephrasing the term as "spätisraelitisch," Judaism was always deteriorated, thus always "late." In " 'Circumcision is Nothing': A Non-Reformation Reading of Paul's Letters," Paula Fredriksen interprets Paul's teachings against "circumcision" and about "new creation" historically, showing that in both cases he has only gentiles in mind. She then traces the ways that patristic anti-Judaism was weaponized anew by sixteenth-century Reformers against Catholics, thereby driving a global condemnation of circumcision and of Torah into modern New Testament Study's constructs of an anti-Jewish Paul. The historical apostle, she argues, lived, thought and taught within his native Judaism. His rejection of circumcision for gentiles rested upon his conviction that their connection to Abraham was achieved not through flesh but only through spirit, as an eschatological act of Christ. In "Anti-Judaism and Philo-Judaism in Pauline Studies, Then and Now," Matthew Novenson reveals the various agendas implicit in current Pauline Studies. Often, he observes, the Paul whom different scholars present (whether anti-Judaic or philo-Judaic) bears a close resemblance to the theologies of his modern interpreters. The distinction between the views of the first-century Paul and his modern interpreters all but collapses. This erasure of difference, concludes Novenson, seems very much a specifically Protestant phenomenon since, for Catholics, there is much less at stake in how exegesis reconstructs Paul. Olivia Stewart Lester, in "The Sibylline Oracles: A Case Study in Ancient and Modern Anti-Judaism," takes scholarship on the highly heterogeneous Oracula Sibyllina as an example of how biased views on Judaism impact modern scholarly attitudes towards the Jewishness of these pseudepigrapha. As Stewart Lester shows, the Sibylline Oracles are a particularly interesting case in point because the corpus itself includes anti-Jewish additions to originally Jewish texts. Jörg Frey, in "Anti-Judaism, Philosemitism, and Protestant New Testament Studies: Perspectives and Questions," first sketches the historical development of various Protestant positions towards Jews and Judaism over time (which