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Situating the New Testament Within Its Intellectual and Ritual Contexts
The Center for the Study of Religion welcomes participation not only from Ohio State faculty members and students, but from anyone in the central Ohio area. The following is a piece written by our new neighbor, Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll, who is an Assistant Professor of New Testament at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, Delaware, OH. Steve writes:
After receiving my Ph.D. under the direction of Adela Collins and Hans-Josef Klauck at the University of Chicago, I have focused on contextualizing the writings of the New Testament within the thought systems and religious activity of the ancient world in which they were written. Along with Master’s level courses on particular books of the New Testament that try to address this issue, I also teach “Religion and Religious Practice in the Greco-Roman World” and “Expressions of Identity in Second Temple Judaism,” both of which try to understand better the literature, social life, and ritual activity that shaped ancient cultures from a religious perspective.
My first book (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007) is concerned with the way that the Gospel of Mark uses the traditions of lament psalms to tell the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. I argued for a clear connection between the suffering of King David as depicted in these psalms and the suffering of Jesus depicted in the Gospel of Mark. What makes this interesting to me is the idea that the suffering of David in the psalms challenges God’s role in this suffering and tries to convince God to act on his behalf to end the suffering. David appeals to his past relationship with God and tries to shame God into action using accusations that God has somehow betrayed this relationship between chosen king and God. Reading Mark’s story of Jesus’ suffering with these traditions in the foreground allows for a more complex reading of the relationship between Jesus and God and the depiction of messianic suffering in Mark.
My latest work concerns situating the Gospel of John in its larger ritual and philosophical contexts. John 6 contains a fascinating discourse on Jesus’ identity as “the bread come down from heaven.” In the midst of this discourse, he also claims, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you” (6:53). In some Greek rituals, drinking blood elicits some kind of contact between the living and the dead, and in one case it taps into the power of the divine. I am interested in studying what drinking blood might mean in a Greek ritual context and how such language might affect our understanding of John’s rhetoric about the living and the dead.
A second project on the Gospel of John addresses the similarities between the aspects of Johannine and Platonic epistemologies that deal with memory. In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul’s otherworldly experience of following the gods to the upper heavens where it beholds the ideal forms. He then claims that there is a relationship between the ability to remember this experience and the social status of the post-birth, embodied soul (or living being). In other words, the more one is able to remember from the world of ideas, the higher one’s social status is in Plato’s ideal social order. Something similar underlies Johannine epistemology. John expresses learning as post-(re)birth memory of beholding the divine world of the Father through remaining with Jesus the divine being. The ability to remember depends upon the Spirit which facilitates (re)birth and reminds the disciples of all that Jesus said while they encountered him as a physical embodiment of the divine world. The abiding Spirit, then, acts to mark one’s status as disciple and raise the level of knowledge of the divine world, thus legitimating the community’s existence, perhaps even as above other groups that claim Jesus as their central figure.
