Monday, December 29, 2014

Shaye Cohen on the value of pre-modern Christian exegesis

"Jewish and, to some extent, Christian scholarship has long recognized the continuing value of much of medieval Jewish exegesis for an understanding of the Hebrew Bible, and I do not understand why contemporary scholarship on the New Testament (excluding, of course, textual criticism) ignores practically all works that predate the nineteenth century." - Shaye Cohen, "Was Timothy Jewish?" in Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 367 n. 9.

For the record, Cohen's answer to the question, "Was Timothy Jewish?" is no. 

No comments: