Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies In The Gospels

Product Information

Robert W. Yarbrough, professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School I have long been an admirer of Kenneth Bailey’s helpful insights. As in his earlier works, his breadth of knowledge of Middle Eastern culture sheds rich light on numerous points in the Gospels, providing fresh perspectives and often illumining details we have rarely considered. He provokes those of us who depend mostly on ancient written sources to consider new approaches, often cohering with but often supplementing such research. For more than ten centuries, Christians who translate the gospels into Arabic have not seen the prodigal as repenting in the far country. They say he’s returned to his senses. He’s figured out how to play his father and earn money for food and land.

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the

I could say something similar about PtME's theological and pastoral applications. Many These are goodhearted but don't reflect sustained critical reflection on the relationship of what amount to truism and the text. PtME does, thankfully, forward some important reflection on the missiological and cultural impacts of application. That is a worthwhile contribution to the conversation around 1 Cor. Now imagine yourself at a Christmas play, where, in the opening scene, the narrator says that Bethlehem is too small to support an inn. You watch a family lead farm animals inside their house. Mary and Joseph arrive, move in with this family and their beasts—and, three weeks later, still no Jesus.

Cultural Studies in the Gospels

What is your reaction to Ken Bailey’s take on the Christmas story? Which changes might you like to make in your congregation’s Advent or Christmas services?

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes - Google Books

Paul took on all of these issues in his first letter to the Corinthians (or at least his first letter that survives). He also gave them some of his most powerful and enduring passages: the hymn to the cross (as Kenneth E. Bailey calls it) in 1 Corinthians 1:17-2:2; Chapter 13, the love chapter; and Chapter 15, the argument for the Resurrection.Making arguments based on the grammar of the Aramaic original - What Aramaic original? This is pure speculation. We have no textual evidence from an Aramaic original, not one line, not one sentence. So, in essence, Bailey is making arguments from a possible Aramaic original that he must construct on his own and analyze. That is bad scholarship. Not totally uncommon, but still bad. Bailey is emeritus research professor of Middle Eastern New Testament studies for the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem. As he writes in the introduction, his childhood years were spent in Egypt, and for forty years he taught New Testament “in seminaries and institutes in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cypress” (p. 11). His “academic efforts have focused on trying to understand more adequately the stories of the Gospels in the light of Middle Eastern culture” (ibid.). Middle Eastern cultures have valued family and hospitality for millennia. When Caesar Augustus decreed that people had to register for the census in their hometown, Joseph went to Bethlehem “because he belonged to the house and line of David” (Luke 2:4). The distinctiveness of these essays is their interaction with early Syriac and Arabic Christian literature on the Gospels, such as the powerful ideas of Ibn al-Tayyib, a medieval scholar from Baghdad. Interaction with Arabic versions of the New Testament (translated from Syriac and Coptic) also provide insights into Eastern exegesis of the Bible. Since these linguistic sources share the broader culture of the ancient Middle East “… all of them are ethnically closer to the Semitic world of Jesus than the Greek and Latin cultures of the West” (p. 12).