Browsing by Author "Knust, Jennifer"
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Item Open Access Earth Accuses Earth: Tracing What Jesus Wrote on the Ground(Harvard Theological Review, 2010-10) Knust, Jennifer; Wasserman, TommyThe story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) has a long, complex history. Well-known in the Latin West, the story was neglected but not forgotten in the East. Incorporated within Late Antique and Early Medieval Gospel manuscripts, depicted in Christian art, East and West, and included within the developing liturgies of Rome and Constantinople, the passage has fascinated interpreters for centuries despite irregularities in its transmission. Throughout this long history, one narrative detail has been of particular interest: the content and significance of Jesus— writing. Discussed in sermons, elaborated in manuscripts, and depicted in magnificent illuminations, Jesus— writing has inspired interpreters at least since the fourth century, when Ambrose of Milan first mentioned it. Offering his opinion on the propriety of capital punishment, the bishop turned to the pericope in order to argue that Christians do well to advocate on behalf of the condemned since, by doing so, they imitate the mercy of Christ. Nevertheless, he averred, the imposition of capital punishment remains an option for Christian rulers and judges. After all, God also judges and condemns, as Christ showed when, responding to the men questioning him and accusing the adulteress, he wrote twice on the ground. Demonstrating that “the Jews were condemned by both testaments,” Christ bent over and wrote “with the finger with which he had written the law,” or so the bishop claimed. Ambrose offered a further conjecture in a subsequent letter: Jesus wrote “earth, earth, write that these men have been disowned,” a saying he attributes to Jeremiah (compare Jer 22:29). As Jeremiah also explains, “Those who have been disowned by their Father are written on the ground,” but the names of Christians are written in heaven.Item Open Access Love’s Limits. Love of Neighbor in the First Three Christian Centuries(Journal for Ethics in Antiquity and Christianity) Knust, JenniferItem Open Access Loving Leadership, Joyful Submission: The Dismantling of Female Ordination in the Southern Baptist Denomination(2021-03-29) Hundley, MorganIn this paper, I explore how members of the Southern Baptist (SB) denomination developed their arguments, tactics, and rhetoric to stall integration during the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and how these SBs later refined their strategies during the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) to successfully overturn female ordination. As the SBC’s annual reports, SBC’s resolutions passed at their yearly convention meetings, Christianity Today, and Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism demonstrate, many SBs understood themselves as culturally estranged and on the “wrong” side of history once the CRM concluded. In order to overcome this sense of failure, regain a prior status, and ensure future success, these Baptists utilized the tactics and rhetoric first employed to oppose the CRM as a paradigm for how to combat the WLM. Certain SB leaders sought to expose what they interpreted as the unbiblical implications of the WLM, prevent the movement’s advancement, and reobtain their perceived loss of influence in the South. These leaders emphasized individual choice in the denomination’s publications, promoted Biblical arguments about traditional gender roles, outlined their definition of God’s social hierarchy, and endorsed practices that embodied what they portrayed as proper SB representations of men’s divine masculinity and women’s sacred femininity. These tactics enabled SB leaders to overturn female ordination, contribute to the creation of the Moral Majority in 1979, and influence the creation of legislation that aligned with their claims.Item Open Access Marriage as a Social Good: Origen of Alexandria and John Chrysostom, Revisited(Marriage, Family, and Spirituality, 2020) Knust, JenniferAs Elizabeth Clark has shown, early Christian theories of marriage spun around an ‘axiology of ‘difference’’ that employed sexual renunciation as its central axis. In the gap between an idealized marriage of the soul and Christ and the actual marriages of most believers, sexual congress emerged both as a generative metaphor and a key validation of human-human and human-divine marriage. This essay revisits Clark’s famous argument by reconsidering the homilies of two Greek Christian writers: Origen of Alexandria and John Chrysostom. Origen’s imaging of marriage is first presented. He envisioned a future ‘marriage’ between the soul and Christ, seeking release in the dissolution of the bounded self. Marriage operates in his texts as the ideal image of human-divine union. Actual marriage, with the necessarily involvement in conjugal activity, is best avoided so that one’s desire can be lifted beyond the physical to the transcendent love of Christ. His imagery centers on the male ascetic, and women can access this divine union to the degree that they participate in these manly virtues. The essay then turns to John Chrysostom. He also celebrated the celibate dedication to Christ and Christ alone, but he developed a place for marriage in the path of holiness. He thus reaffirmed the good of human marriage as beneficial even as he celebrated the superior self-control of virgins. For Chrysostom, while the ascetic life lifts one beyond specific social and gender concerns, those Christians who live in the world should conform to these concerns. Thus, marriage becomes a way of living out one’s maleness and femaleness in the proper way. The article concludes by reflecting on how neither re-evaluation of marriage’s central meaning overturned the quotidian practices associated with marriage as a legal instrument; marriage legislation was perceived to be a principal duty of emperors and civic assemblies both before and after the advent of Constantine. Chrysostom’s recalibration of the duties of marriage within the newly Christian state preserved this dynamic while also re-emphasizing a strict, gendered dimorphism that disallowed non-marital forms of male-female intimacy.Item Open Access Review of Beyond Mary or Martha: Reclaiming Ancient Models of Discipleship, by Jennifer S. Wyant(Review of Biblical Literature, 2020-07-30) Knust, JenniferItem Open Access Review of The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ascetical Theology, by Raphael A. Cadenhead(Journal of Roman Studies, 2021-11) Knust, JenniferItem Open Access The Biblical Odes and the Text of the Christian Bible: A Reconsideration of the Impact of Liturgical Singing on the Transmission of the Gospel of Luke(Journal of Biblical Literature, 2014) Knust, Jennifer; Wasserman, TommyItem Embargo “Those Who Love Me Will Keep My Word”: Narrative Variants in New Testament Gospel Stories(2023) Schrader Polczer, ElizabethThis dissertation examines dozens of “narrative variants” preserved in copies of ancient New Testament gospel manuscripts. In antiquity every copy was made by hand, so even texts understood to hold sacred status were always susceptible to meaningful change. Although New Testament textual criticism has traditionally sought to recover a singular text of the gospels, this study argues that early Christianity was in fact centered in an environment of interpretive expansions and editorial revisions, rendering such a recovery impossible in many passages. In antiquity, gospel stories were regularly altered by a single letter, a single word, an added or omitted phrase, an altered phrase, a rewritten section, or the revision of an entire book. The narrative variants highlighted here are limited to those preserved in gospel manuscripts copied no later than the fifth century, whether in Greek, Coptic, Latin, and/or Syriac. The study also examines the reception of story variations in artwork, liturgy, and ancient quotations of the gospel text; various modern scholars’ attempts to establish the “original text” in these passages are also surveyed. Three goals are in view: to demonstrate that 1) early Christian copying emerged at the confluence of Second Temple Jewish and Roman-era literary practices, both of which were centered in textual change; 2) consequently, the exact narrative authored by an evangelist is sometimes uncertain, despite the best efforts of modern scholars; and 3) even in cases where the direction of textual change is reasonably certain, a tendency to create narrative variants was present from the beginning. The dissertation concludes that a wide variety of forms of gospel stories were understood as sacred in the first centuries of Christianity, that narrative multiplicity is inherent to the Christian gospels, and that this multiplicity should be embraced by Biblical scholars.
Item Open Access Where Did John Baptize? From Bethany to Bethabara and Back Again(Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum) Knust, JenniferItem Open Access "Who's Afraid of Canaan's Curse? Genesis 9:18-29 and the Challenge of Reparative Reading"(Biblical Interpretation) Knust, JenniferThe story of Noah’s curse of his grandson Canaan (Gen. 9:18–29) is especially well suited to an interpretive style Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has labeled “paranoid reading.” Oft exploited by those invested in xenophobia and racism, this passage appears to present an intrinsically identitarian plot that cannot be shaken off, either by historicizing or by other kinds of critical engagement. Indeed, historical critical analysis has tended to confirm rather than undermine the story’s determination to justify disinheritance on the basis of some vague form of sexual perversion. In her later work, however, Sedgwick began to call such paranoid readings into question, advocating a more open, descriptive, and anti-foundational approach to texts and histories. These “reparative reading” practices cede paranoia’s determination to be “in the know” to descriptive multiplicity and more limited acts of noticing. Inspired by Sedgwick’s insights, this essay considers the advantages of paranoid reading strategies, especially when it comes to this story, even as it acknowledges the serious limits of such readings, which have yet to succeed if the goal is to undermine the stickiness of sexualized and racialized blaming rooted in this difficult biblical text.