Bøker av Peter Schafer

This third volume, which offers further insights into the most important source of late antique Judaism, the Talmud Yerushalmi, in relation to its cultural context, marks another step in a research project on the Talmud Yerushalmi initiated by the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Free University (Berlin) in 1994 and concluded by a conference held at Princeton University in November 2001. This volume focuses on a wide range of topics such as gender studies, aspects of everyday life, Roman festivals, magic etc., hereby reflecting on the methodological problems inherent in intercultural studies. Thus, this collection of articles could also serve as a model for similar enterprises in other studies of Judaism in various cultural contexts.From reviews of the previous volumes: "This collection reflects the state of contemporary scholarship and its struggle to understand and thoughtfully reconstruct Jewish culture in late antique Palestine. It belongs in all specialized Judaica libraries and in research libraries that collect deeply in classical civilization."Steven Fine in Religious Studies Review 3 (1999) vol. 25, p. 331f.

Die vorliegende Untersuchung geht davon aus, da abstrakte Kategorienwie die des reinen Gottesbegriffes"e;, der Transzendenz Gottes"e; oder derVermeidung von Anthropomorphismen"e; von auen an die rabbinischen Texteherangetragen werden und nicht geeignet sind, diese zu erhellen. Denkformen,unter denen eine bestimmte Vorstellung zu subsumieren und von denen hersie zu interpretieren ist, konnen sich nur aus der rabbinischen Literatur selbstergeben. Der Ausgangspunkt der Arbeit war daher die Sammlung und Sichtungsamtlicher Stellen in der rabbinischen Literatur, in denen die Engel erwahntwerden.

In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schafer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.

Examines Judaism in Palestine throughout the Hellenistic period, from Alexander the Great's conquest in 334 BC to its capture by the Arabs in AD 636

The period chosen for this study is that represented by the global domination of Hellenism, from the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great in the second half of the 4th century BCE until the seizure of the land by the Arabs in the 7th century CE.