Parables for Our Time: Rereading New Testament Scholarship by Tania Oldenhage

Over the centuries, New testomony texts have frequently been learn in ways in which replicate and inspire anti-Semitism. for instance, the myth of the "wicked husbandmen," who kill the son in their landlord so that it will grab the land, has been used guilty the Jews for the loss of life of Christ. because the Holocaust, Christian students have more and more well-known and rejected this inheritance. In Parables for Our Time Tania Oldenhage seeks to type a biblical hermeneutics that consciously works with stories of the Holocaust.

New testomony students haven't without delay faced the horror of Nazi crimes, Oldenhage argues, yet their paintings has still been deeply suffering from the occasions of the Holocaust. through putting twentieth-century biblical scholarship inside of its particular old and cultural contexts, she is ready to hint the method in which the Holocaust progressively moved into the collective cognizance of latest testomony students, either in Germany and within the usa. Her concentration is at the scholarly interpretation of the parables of Jesus. She units the degree with the paintings of Wolfgang Harnisch who exemplifies the issues surrounding Holocaust remembrance within the Germany of the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties. She then turns to Joachim Jeremias's eminent paintings at the parables, first released in 1947. Jeremias's anti-Jewish rhetoric, she argues, may be understood not just as a perpetuation of an age-old interpretive trend, yet as consultant of German problems in responding to the Holocaust instantly after the warfare. Oldenhage is going directly to discover the way Jeremias's procedure was once challenged through biblical students within the U.S. through the Nineteen Seventies. specifically, she examines the flip to literature and literary thought exemplified within the works of John Dominic Crossan and Paul Ricoeur. Nazi atrocities turned a part of the cultural reservoir from which Crossan and Ricoeur drew, she exhibits, even supposing they by no means engaged with the historic evidence of the Holocaust. In end, Oldenhage bargains her personal analyzing of the myth of the depraved husbandmen, demonstrating how the flip from historic to literary feedback opens up the textual content to interpretation in gentle of the Holocaust. If the parables are to be significant in our time, she contends, we needs to take account of the troubling resonances among those historic Christian tales and the atrocities of Auschwitz.