Readings: A New Biblical Commentary – serie

Deborah Krause offers a reading of 1 Timothy that opens up new avenues of interpretation both in regard to historical understandings of the text and in regard to how the text has shaped and continues to shape practices of the church. Deborah Krause examines the letter's rhetoric as a discourse of power and reveals the writer's struggle with the community addressed regarding the social, economic, political and ecclesiastical shape of the church. In this sense, the letter writer's claims about women, children, widows and slaves are seen as particular to a contentious environment within the early church, rather than as a normative picture of early Christianity. In order to expose the letter writer's rhetoric to such scrutiny, Krause provides extensive citations of non-canonical early Christian writings that represent alternative social structures and ecclesiastical organizations. Her goal is to allow interpreters a better understanding of the complexity of the letter and to expose its many competing voices in their historical, canonical, and interpretive contexts.

This reading of Hosea explores the book from a feminist, psychoanalytical and poetic perspective. What is God doing with a prostitute? How does the theme of prostitution relate to the abjection of the woman as the other, and the fantasy of sexual ecstasy, precisely because she escapes patriarchal order? Where is the prophet situated in the dialectic of rage and desire that both seduces and condemns Israel? His voice is both masculine and feminine, and poetically embodies the sensuality of wayward Israel. The ambiguity of voice is also that of the prophet's role, which is both to nurture Israel, as on its Exodus from Egypt, and to be the trap that destroys it. The problematic of voice and prophetic function is evident in the vivid dissection of Israel's social institutions, whose disintegration is inversely related to the centrality of the discussion in the structure of the book, and in the violent swings from despair to impossible hope. The focus on immediate and uncontrollable entropy, manifest in extended tangled metaphors, that occupies the centre of the book, is framed in the outer chapters by intertextual references to Israel's primordial vision, and the romantic distantiation of the Song of Songs, in which the erotic and poetic contradictions of the book find their perhaps ironic resolution.

This reading offers a traveller's guide through the book of Acts, charting both narrative features (plot development, character building and shifting points of view) and cultural scenarios informing the story (honor-shame contests, patron-client relations and purity-pollution boundaries). Within this 'literary-cultural' framework, Spencer undertakes to map the temporal, spatial and social settings of each segment of the Acts journey. While often detecting internal repetitive patterns along the way as well as comparative links with the preceding Lukan gospel and Jewish scriptures, this reading also exposes certain dramatic tensions within Acts (such as a 'double message' regarding women's prophetic ministry) and distinctive moves beyond prior narratives. The element of surprise is maximized, so that the commentary reads somewhat like a first-time exploration of the text.