Titel: Jesus, Paul and Matthew, Volume Two:
To and From Jerusalem  
Outeur: Andries Van Aarde
Prys: Op aanvraag by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK
Publikasiedatum: Augustus 2020

This book is the second of two volumes which reflect on the trend in biblical scholarship that contrasts the vision of the historical Jesus with that of the apostle Paul, on the one hand, and the vision of Paul with that of the evangelist Matthew, on the other. It argues that Jesus replaced the concept of ‘politics of holiness’ with that of ‘politics of compassion’. This means that the church as a community of Jesus-followers forms a fictive family, replacing a soteriology grounded in the biological family. God’s adoption of people as God’s children is based on the potential of people to absorb the divine into their humanity. This truism is to be found in the visions shared by the peasant Jesus, the apostle Paul and the rabbi Matthew, as well as in creedal Christianity. The book concludes with autobiographical reflective notes, analogous to the parabolic story of the travellers to Emmaus from Jerusalem (Luke 24) and that of the African eunuch (Acts 8) on his way back from Jerusalem to Africa. The notes serve to consolidate the two volumes on Jesus, Paul and Matthew and their messages of God’s wisdom, justice and mercy.

 

[It is] an amazing feat of research, genius, and compilation [and] unparalleled in terms of both depth and breadth of first-century philosophies, religious practices and theologies, history, and contemporaneous narratives plus two thousand years of secondary literature.  No library (institutional and private) should be without this volume.  Comprehensive, up-to-date, and timingly relevant.

Professor Glenna S. Jackson

Department of Religion and Philosophy, Otterbein University, Westerville, Ohio, USA 

 

Andries G Van Aarde

Andries Van Aarde served as Professor in New Testament Studies at the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, for 25 years. Subsequently, he was Honorary Professor from 2009 to 2015 and Senior Research Fellow in the Unit of the Advancement of Scholarship at the same university. His current appointment is Senior Research Fellow in the Dean’s Office and Researcher-in-Residence at the Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He obtained an MA in Semitic Languages and holds a DD, PhD and DLitt. He acts as Editor-in-Chief of the journal HTS Theological Studies, and is a rated scholar of the South African National Research Foundation. He has received three awards for academic achievements from the South African Academy of Science, Culture and Arts, and authored the ground-breaking book Fatherless in Galilee: Jesus Child of God (2001).