The T & T Clark Blog

Did God have a wife?

In BBC 2’s recent serial ‘The Bible’s Buried Secrets’ Francesca Stavrakopoulou claims that the original Jewish religion was not mono-theistic. Evidence suggests that there was a female figure too, the goddess Asherah, and that God, in fact, did have ‘a wife’. This female goddess was then edited out of the bible to create the image of Judaism as a strictly mono-theistic faith.

However, the idea of a female figure in early Judaism is not new. In her 2003 publication ‘The Great High Priest’, Old Testament scholar Margaret Barker wrote a chapter on a female figure in the Jerusalem Temple, known as ‘The Queen of Heaven’, or ‘Mother of the Lord’.

“The Lady in the Temple is mentioned in Jeremiah and Isaiah, but there are traces in other Old Testament writings too”, states Barker. Unlike Stavrakopoulou, who describes herself as an atheist, Margaret Barker writes from a decidedly Christian perspective. A former president of the British Society for Old Testament Study, she has published 14 books on the links between the ancient Jewish Temple and early Christian liturgy.

For Barker, the Lady in the Temple was never completely forgotten, but survived in oral traditions and extra-canonical writings. It is this memory which fed into the veneration of the Virgin Mary in early Christianity, when the Lady became known by her ancient title again: ‘The Mother of the Lord’.

Margaret Barker’s book ‘The Great High Priest’ was first published in 2003 and is available from T&T Clark. Her most recent book ‘Temple Themes in Christian Worship’ was published in 2008. Her forthcoming book ‘The Mother of the Lord’ will be published by T&T Clark in 2012.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s book ‘Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah’ (2010) is also available from T&T Clark.

Dr. Margaret Barker is an independent Old Testament scholar, a former President of the Society for Old Testament Study, co-founder of the Temple Studies Group and author of 14 books in this field. The Archbishop of Canterbury created her a Lambeth Doctor of Divinity for her research. Barker is also one of a small team of experts assessing the hoard of ancient sealed books, recently found in Jordan.

Philosophy and Theology Series

Habermas and Theology, Agamben and Theology and Foucault and Theology are the three new titles in this series.

Habermas and Theology by Maureen Junker-Kenny has just been published and its back cover has two great endorsements from Hille Haker and William Storrar, please, see below:

‘In this knowledgeable work, Junker-Kenny examines the turn to religion in Habermas’ latest work calling for a process of mutual translation of religion and postsecular reason. She traces this back to his early engagement with religion and the later chastening of religion in discourse ethics. She lucidly presents the major philosophical objections to the founding concepts of Habermas’ reasoning, welcoming the called-for alliance of theology and postsecular reason against the ‘pathologies of modernity’. The book is a thorough systematic reconstruction and a groundbreaking source for the dialogue between theology and philosophy.’ – Hille Haker, Loyola University Chicago, USA.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945 review in The Christian Century

The March 22 issue of The Christian Century features an excellent review of our title Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance.

 

An excerpt from the review:

"One measure of a good biography is the degree to which it keeps this anachronistic tendency in check. When judged by this criterion, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen's new book is without peer. The author's knowledge of Bonhoeffer and his familiarity with the massive amount of research that has been done over the past 50 years are readily apparent, and they result in a clear and compelling picture of Bonhoeffer's life, work and witness. . . . Schlingensiepen excels at navigating through the many settings, characters and plots that converge to form the contours of this life. . . . Schlingensiepen is equally masterful at relating the intimate relationships of Bonhoeffer's life. . . . We are in his debt for the good work that he has done, opening a new window into the remarkable life, witness and scholarship of Dietrich Bonhoeffer."

Logos March Madness

I came upon the Logos March Madness website late last week. You can find a number of T&T Clark titles on their list. Vote for your favorites. All titles will be discounted, but the ones with the most votes get the biggest discounts. A nice way to support Logos Bible Software and get a number of T&T Clark titles at anywhere from 30% to 75% off.

Another new title in the LNTS series!

An advance copy of ‘Dialogue Not Dogma. Many Voices in the Gospel of Luke’, by Raj Nadella, has just landed on my desk. In this volume Nadella interprets selected Lukan passages in the light of Bakhtinian concepts, such as dialogism, loophole and exotopy, to show that the disparate perspectives, as well as interplay between them, display Luke’s superior literary skills rather than his inability to produce a coherent work. In turn Luke emerges as a polyphonic work that accommodates competing views on several issues and allows them to enter into dialogue as equal partners. This volume will be available next week in the UK and at the end of May in the US.

John de Gruchy on Dietrich Bonhoeffer

John W. deGruchy has written a review of Schlingensiepen's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which he asked to be distributed widly. We are happy to oblige:

"The definitive biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and martyr, is undoubtedly that by his close friend Eberhard Bethge which, in the new English edition translated by Victoria Barnett runs to over a thousand pages. Bethge wrote his biography in 1967 when interest in Bonhoeffer’s legacy was growing apace, and he did so mindful of the historical and theological issues of that post-war time. Since then there have been a number of other biographies of Bonhoeffer, some good and some less so. But now, in the most recent by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, undertaken originally with the encouragement of Bethge, we have one that is not only a worthy successor to Bethge’s monumental volume, but in some respects better for our day.

Continuum Independent Publisher of the Year 2011

So, here is the full story to the Twitter style news from earlier: Continuum was given two awards at this year's Independent Publishers Guild awards ceremony:

IPG Independent Publisher of the Year

Ingram Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year.

From the article:

Continuum won this flagship Independent Publishing Award after a year in which it transformed its previously flagging strategies and finances. Judges noted in particular its work to reinvigorate sales and marketing activities and to straighten out its databases. “This is a compelling story of a company that has turned itself around in challenging economic times,” they said. “Line by line and piece by piece, Continuum has put itself back together again, and in doing so offers lessons for all independent publishers. This is Continuum’s moment.”

Also shortlisted for the IPG Independent Publisher of the Year Award were the winners of three other Publisher of the Year categories: Bright Red Publishing, Faber & Faber and Search Press.

The full list of awards can be found here.

A story from The Bookseller is available here: Continuum Crowned Indie Publisher of the Year

 

 

Just in case you missed it on twitter Continuum won two awards at the recent IPG Independent Publishing awards: Independent Publisher of the Year and Academic & Professional Publisher of the Year.

We're very proud of ourselves.

T&T author in the Daily Mail...

... which is not necessarily something to brag about given the general standard of the Daily Mail, but we do get excited by such things. Francesca Stavrakopoulou (Exeter University, LHBOTS Board Member, author of Land of Our Fathers, and editor of Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah) has written an article on the goddess Asherah, as publicity for her new TV series, which starts on BBC 2 next week.

We are are all looking forward to it tremendously.

Four New Titles in the Library of the New Testament Studies Series

I was just looking at our blog and suddenly realised that I’ve been mentioning mostly books from Thomas’ list – I would not want you all to think that we have only Theology books to look forward to. On the contrary, there are few months ahead of us when we have many good books coming out in the LNTS series.

There are four titles that will be available in March 2011 and one of these is Geir O. Holmås’ volume titled ‘Prayer and Vindication in Luke-Acts. The Theme of Prayer within the Context of the Legitimating and Edifying Objective of the Lukan Narrative.’ This comprehensive study discusses the literary function of prayer in Luke-Acts, employing narrative critical methodology and focuses on the theme’s relation to Luke’s historiographical aims. This study is divided into three parts. In Part I Holmås ‘sets the framework by defining the scope of examination in terms of text selection and by presenting, in a general way, the pragmatic-rhetorical motivations underlying Luke-Acts as an ancient historical work and the implications of this for the interpretation of Lukan prayer’. In Part II he examines the passages featuring prayer in Luke’s gospel, whereas in Part III he investigates the continuation of the prayer theme in Acts.

‘Who is this son of man? The Latest Scholarship on a Puzzling Expression of the Historical Jesus’, edited by Larry W. Hurtado and Paul L. Owen is another title that is coming out in March 2011. This volume is the first ever collection of scholarly essays in English devoted specifically to the theme of the expression ‘son of man’. This lively discussion is taken up by contributors such as Albert L. Lukaszewski, David Shepherd, P.J. Williams, Darrell L. Bock, Benjamin E. Reynolds and Darrell D. Hannah, as well as by both editors.