Early Jewish Christian Relations
Program Unit Type: Section
Accepting Papers? Yes
Call For Papers: For the 2019 annual meeting, Early Jewish Christian Relations plans three sessions. The first session is an invited review session, co-sponsored with the Book of Acts program unit. Paula Fredriksen’s book When Christians were Jews rereads the letters of Paul, the Gospels, Acts, and Josephus to reconstruct the development of the apostolic church as a messianic temple-centered movement through its fragmentation when the Romans destroyed the temple. For this session, a panel of invited scholars from a variety of disciplines will review Fredriksen’s book, and Fredriksen will provide a response. The second session will be titled "Racialized Discourse in Early Jewish-Christian Relations." This session invites papers that explore ancient and modern constructions of race for thinking about early Jewish-Christian relations, including how Roman-period Jews, Christians, and anyone in between employed constructions of race and racial identity for thinking about difference. We are particularly interested in ancient writings that classify people, objects, practices, and places into racial categories marked as inherently dangerous and Other. A third session will be titled “The Weaponization and Deployment of Difficult Jewish-Christian Relations Texts by Contemporary Nationalist Movements: John 8:44 et al.” This session invites 10 minute-long short papers on the contemporary use of New Testament texts considered problematic in the history of Jewish-Christian relations by nationalist, white-supremacist, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, or Christian Identity movements. Examples of such texts are Matthew 27:25, Luke 11:47, John 8:44, Acts 2:23, 3:15, 5:30, 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16. Usage of these texts can include, but is not limited to, rhetorical, symbolic, marking, and signifying.
Program Unit Chairs
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