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Peter Saccio Great Figures of the New Testament Parts I & II Amy-Jill Levine, Ph.D. PUBLISHED BY: THE TEACHING COMPANY 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-2299 1-800-TEACH-12 Fax—703-378-3819 www.teach12.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2002 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. Amy-Jill Levine, Ph.D. E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies Vanderbilt University Divinity School/ Vanderbilt University Graduate Department of Religion Amy-Jill Levine earned her B.A. with high honors in English and Religion at Smith College, where she graduated magna cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Her M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion are from Duke University, where she was a Gurney Harris Kearns Fellow and W. D. Davies Instructor in Biblical Studies. Before moving to Vanderbilt, she was Sara Lawrence Lightfoot Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College. Professor Levine’s numerous publications address Second-Temple Judaism, Christian origins, Jewish-Christian relations, and biblical women. She is currently editing the twelve-volume Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature for Continuum, completing a manuscript on Hellenistic Jewish narratives for Harvard University Press, and preparing a commentary on the Book of Esther for Walter de Gruyter (Berlin). Dr. Levine has served on editorial boards of the Journal of Biblical Literature and the Catholic Biblical Quarterly and has held office in the Society of Biblical Literature (including President of the Southeast Region and Chair of the Matthew Group), the Catholic Biblical Association (Executive Committee), and the Association for Jewish Studies. Her awards include grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. A widely sought-after speaker, Dr. Levine has lectured throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom, for universities, synagogues, and churches. For The Teaching Company, she has contributed both Introduction to the Old Testament and Great Figures of the Old Testament. As a graduate student, Levine was initially prevented from teaching New Testament at Duke Divinity School by an administrator who thought it an inappropriate placement for a Jew. “You can teach Old Testament,” he told her. “I don’t do Old Testament,” she said; “You do now,” was his response. Soon, the administrator was no longer at Duke, but Dr. Levine continued studying Old Testament (TaNaK) along with the New … and has been studying and teaching both ever since. ©2002 The Teaching Company. i Dr. Levine; her husband, Jay Geller, Ph.D. (who also teaches at Vanderbilt); and their children, Sarah Elizabeth and Alexander David, live in Nashville, Tennessee. ii ©2002 The Teaching Company. Table of Contents Great Figures of the New Testament Professor Biography .................................................................................... i Course Scope ............................................................................................... 1 Lecture One The New Testament ........................................... 4 Lecture Two John the Baptist................................................ 10 Lecture Three The Virgin Mary .............................................. 16 Lecture Four Joseph, Magi, and Shepherds........................... 22 Lecture Five Peter ................................................................. 27 Lecture Six John and James, the Sons of Zebedee.............. 33 Lecture Seven Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.............................. 39 Lecture Eight “Doubting” Thomas......................................... 45 Lecture Nine The Gentile Mother.......................................... 51 Lecture Ten The Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son...... 57 Lecture Eleven The Samaritan Woman..................................... 63 Lecture Twelve Mary Magdalene .............................................. 69 Lecture Thirteen Pharisees and Sadducees.................................. 74 Lecture Fourteen The Herodians.................................................. 80 Lecture Fifteen Judas Iscariot.................................................... 86 Lecture Sixteen Pontius Pilate................................................... 92 Lecture Seventeen James................................................................ 98 Lecture Eighteen Stephen ..........................................................103 Lecture Nineteen Philip.............................................................. 109 Lecture Twenty The Centurions............................................... 115 Lecture Twenty-One Paul, the Hero of Acts.................................... 121 Lecture Twenty-Two Paul, the Epistolary Evangelist ...................... 127 Lecture Twenty-Three Jesus of Nazareth ........................................... 132 Lecture Twenty-Four The Christ of Faith......................................... 137 ©2002 The Teaching Company. iii Table of Contents Great Figures of the New Testament Timeline ................................................................................................... 142 Glossary ................................................................................................... 145 Bibliography............................................................................................ 150 iv ©2002 The Teaching Company. Great Figures of the New Testament Scope: The great figures of the earliest years of the church have been remembered in various ways, depending on the needs and interests of the evangelists and their communities, because stories of Jesus and the people surrounding himboth those who followed him and those who did nottook shape in a combination of historical memory, pastoral concern, and aesthetic taste. What one Gospel chose to highlight, another ignores; what one canonical text mentions in passing, later tradition substantially develops. Such ongoing fascination with the great figures and the increasing desire to know more about them testify to the vitality of the Christian imagination. Both the portraits of these figures in the pages of the New Testament and their reframings throughout church history are today increasingly unfamiliar. There was a time when artists and teachers, as well as clergy and worshipers, could presume on the part of all their friends and neighbors a general cultural familiarity with the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son; students of art knew why a skull was often depicted at the foot of Jesus’ cross; and newspaper columnists recognized that the Immaculate Conception was not the same thing as the Virgin Birth. To fail to recognize these terms and images makes us all culturally poorer, let alone theologically more ignorant. The Teaching Company’s The New Testament emphasizes the Bible’s historical context and the critical methods through which the texts have been interpreted; Great Figures of the New Testament, on the other hand, takes a closer look at specific characters: who they are, what they do, and how they have been assessed across the centuries by historians and artists, theologians at their desks, and worshipers in the pew. The figures encountered encompass the range of the great figures from the nascent church: There are shepherds and kings, friends and enemies, evangelists and martyrs, a prodigal son and a good Samaritan. Each lecture begins by retelling in brief the story of the figure at hand. Representing the models of Old Testament piety are the elderly couple Elizabeth and Zechariah; their son, John the Baptist, moves us immediately into the dangerous world of the first century, where ©2002 The Teaching Company. 1 messianic fervor was on the rise and popular prophets knew their lives were in danger. We find a virgin, betrothed to a man named Joseph, who receives an annunciation from an angel, bears a child through the power of the Holy Spirit, and faces a parent’s greatest tragedy as she watches the death of her son. We encounter Jesus’ friends: the contemplative Mary and the vocal Martha, as well as their brother Lazarus. We join the conversations with Jesus’ interlocutors: Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, the centurion with a paralyzed son and the desperate Canaanite mother with a demon-possessed daughter, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We explore the stories of the ApostlesPeter and Thomas, James and John, Mary Magdalene (who becomes known as the Apostle to the Apostles), and Judas Iscariot—from the times they spent with Jesus to their post-canonical fates. From the early years of the church, we find James, “the brother of the Lord,” Stephen the first martyr, and Philip the evangelist of Samaria. Recognizing not only their memorable roles in the canon but also their parts in establishing a historical context, we ask what we can know of the centurions who represent Rome’s military presence; Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect who orders Jesus crucified; and the four generations of the Herodian royal family who appear in the pages of the New Testament. For Paul the Apostle, we investigate both his presentation
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