Hugo Méndez

Featuring vibrant full color throughout, the eighth edition of Bart D. Ehrman's highly successful introduction approaches the New Testament from a consistently historical and comparative perspective, emphasizing the rich diversity of the earliest Christian literature. New to this edition, Hugo Méndez has brought fresh perspectives to the text. Distinctive to this study is The New Testament's unique focus on the historical, literary, and religious milieux of the Greco-Roman world, including early Judaism. As part of its historical orientation, the book also discusses other Christian writings that were roughly contemporary with the New Testament, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the letters of Ignatius.

In John 7:8–9, Jesus tells his brothers he will not “go up” to Jerusalem, but in the very next scene, he makes the ascent in secret. This essay interprets Jesus’s unusual, and seemingly deceptive, behavior in the episode as a symbolic action akin to others structuring the first half of the Gospel. The episode immediately precedes a dialogue in which Jesus predicts his imminent departure from the world. Jesus insists that he will soon “go” to God so that unbelievers “will seek” him “but … not find” him (7:33–34; cf. 20:17). Foreshadowing this future, Jesus “goes up” to Judea but in such a way that leaves unbelievers unaware of his whereabouts, leaving them to ask, “Where is he?” (7:10–11). The article highlights half-truth as an important speech device in the episode and dialogue that follows. It also concludes that the episode is key to interpreting other scenes sharing a motif of misdirection, delay, and secret reversal.

As the site of only a small and obscure Christian population, Jerusalem witnessed few instances of anti-Christian persecution between 135 and 313 CE. This fact became a source of embarrassment to the city in late antiquity—a period when martyr traditions, relics, and shrines were closely intertwined with local prestige. At that time, the city had every incentive to stretch the fame of its few apostolic martyrs as far as possible—especially the fame of the biblical St. Stephen, the figure traditionally regarded as the first Christian martyr (Acts 6-8). What the church lacked in the quantity of its martyrs, it believed it could compensate for in an exclusive, local claim to the figure widely hailed as the "Protomartyr," "firstborn of the martyrs," and "chief of confessors" in contemporary sources. This book traces the rise of the cult of Stephen in Jerusalem, exploring such historical episodes as the fabrication of the saint's relics, the multiplication of his feast days, and the construction of a grand basilica in his honor. It argues that local church authorities promoted devotion to Stephen in the fifth century in a conscious attempt to position him as a patron saint for Jerusalem—a symbol of the city's Christian identity and power.

This article challenges the historical existence of the 'Johannine community'—a hypothesized group of ancient churches sharing a distinctive theological outlook. Scholars posit such a community to explain the similarities of John to 1, 2 and 3 John as well as the epistles' witness to a network of churches. Against this view, this article calls attention to evidence of literary contact between the four texts and the presence of dubious authorial claims in each. Taken together, these features cast John, 1 John, 2 John and 3 John as unreliable bases for historical reconstruction, whose implied audiences and situations are probably fabrications. The article proceeds to develop a new history of the Johannine texts. Those texts represent a chain of literary forgeries, in which authors of different extractions cast and recast a single invented character-an eyewitness to Jesus' life-as the mouthpiece of different theological viewpoints.

(Open Access through SAGE: https://doi.org/10.1177/0142064X19890490)

This article challenges the current consensus dating of the Armenian Lectionary (AL), the earliest record of the feasts and liturgical readings of the church of Jerusalem. For over fifty years, most studies have followed Athanase Renoux in assigning the Greek Vorlagen of AL to the early fifth century C.E., or more precisely, to the years intervening between 417 and 439. This paper highlights severe problems in Renoux’s arguments, however, and produces new evidence supporting a later dating. It concludes that AL reflects the city’s ritual practices in the years following (a) the dedication of Eudocia’s Church of St. Stephen (439), (b) the collapse of bishop Juvenal’s efforts to integrate the 25 December Christmas feast into the local calendar (after 439), and (c) the construction of Ikelia’s Church of Mary Theotokos (Kathisma) near Bethlehem (c. 456). In turn, through a close comparison of AL’s readings for the 15 August feast “of Mary Theotokos” with homilies by two local preachers—Hesychius and Chrisyppus—the paper concludes that the Greek Vorlagen of AL can date no later than 479. In this analysis, AL represents the ritual practices of the Jerusalem church at the beginning of its patriarchal period—that is, after the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, or roughly during the episcopacy of Anastasius I (458–478).

Exegetes have long puzzled over the purported clash of eschatologies in John 5:19–30—one framed by an apparent shift between figurative and literal speech in the passage. In this article I argue that the evidence for such a shift—most of it rooted in inconsistencies in the imagery and language of verses 24–25 and 28–29—is weak. Literary-oriented studies of the Fourth Gospel have called atten- tion to the dynamism and fluidity of its imagery. Metaphorical vehicles, once introduced into a given discourse, are often further developed, modified, or alto- gether reimagined in successive lines—a technique known as “metaphor shift- ing.” I identify this technique as the best explanation for the discrepancies observed between verses 24–25 and 28–29. When the entire passage is read as a continuous stream of shifting and interpenetrating metaphors, it contains no sudden clash of eschatologies and no tensions for the interpreter to resolve. Rather, the passage reads as a coherent and more complete exposition of the gospel’s realized eschatology.

Two peculiar alternations of grammatical form appear in the Magnificat: a tense shift in verses 46b–47 and an alternation of object constructions in verse 55. Though most studies treat these phenomena as outlying examples of Greek usage, a better explanation is found in the marked language character of the canticle itself. A previous study by Randall Buth (1984) has argued that the tense shift in verses 46b–47 reflects a common Semitic poetic device. I defend that analysis and extend it to verse 55, identifying the preposition/case shift there as a second stylistic grammatical alternation in the canticle, specifically: an instance of reversed ballast prepositions. The presence of these devices in the Magnificat demonstrates that its poet possessed an interior grasp of the conventions of Semitic poetry and could execute a hymn in that tradition with skill. Furthermore, with the goal of supplementing inventories of the Magnificat’s poetic features, I undertake a literary and linguistic analysis of both devices, giving particular attention to the negotiation of likeness and unlikeness in parallelisms, ambiguity as a vehicle of poetic expression, and the impact of these devices in a Greek presentation.

This article isolates three parallels to the expression, “he spoke... forever” (Luke 1,55) in translations of the Psalms of Solomon and Jubilees. These parallels suggest that Luke 1,55 calques a Hebrew idiom for oath-swearing, likely known to Luke from Greek translations in his sources. Read in light of these parallels, Luke 1,55 fulfills a crucial structural and rhetorical function in its climactic position in the Magnificat, reinforcing the unity of the hymn’s second strophe (vv. 50- 55), and giving shape to its theology of covenant and salvation.

An invited response to Paul Anderson's "On Biblical Forgeries and Imagined Communities—A Critical Analysis of Recent Criticism," itself a response to my own article, "Did the Johannine Community Exist?" (Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 2020).

This course traces the evolution of John—both as a written text and as an object of interpretation—to illuminate the shifting interests and anxieties of Christians living in the 1st–3rd centuries CE.

(Minor update of a syllabus from 2018.)

This article challenges the historical existence of the ‘Johannine community’ – a hypothesized group of ancient churches sharing a distinctive theological outlook. Scholars posit such a community to explain the similarities of John to 1, 2 and 3 John as well as the epistles’ witness to a network of churches. Against this view, this article calls attention to evidence of literary contact between the four texts and the presence of dubious authorial claims in each. Taken together, these features cast John, 1 John, 2 John and 3 John as unreliable bases for historical reconstruction, whose implied audiences and situations are probably fabrications. The article proceeds to develop a new history of the Johannine texts. Those texts represent a chain of literary forgeries, in which authors of different extractions cast and recast a single invented character – an eyewitness to Jesus’ life – as the mouthpiece of different theological viewpoints.