Margaret Barker

This final book published in the Ashgate SOTS monograph series collects together for the first time in English translation a selection of important essays on central themes and texts in Old Testament criticism and exegesis by Rudolf Smend, one of the world's most eminent senior scholars in the field. The essays focus on key topics such as Moses, covenant, history, Old Testament theology, the state, Elijah, Amos, and major movements in the history of the discipline over the past three centuries. All are marked by penetrating exegetical and critical insight as well as by an unrivalled knowledge of the history of Old Testament scholarship, and many of them have already made highly-respected and influential contributions. Their publication will serve to make the range and vitality of Smend's work more widely known to English-speaking readers.

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The Great Lady of the Jerusalem temple was a defining presence in the religion of ancient Israel, yet she has been almost erased from the official biblical narrative. Only in recent years have her eclipse, and her shadowy enduring presence, been noticed and understood. In a diligent but daring and incisive approach to texts and material evidence, Margaret Barker begins a comprehensive restoration of the Lady's story.As Barker has shown in her earlier books, a drive to expel the Lady, revered as Mother of the Davidic kings, culminated in King Josiah's purge in 623 BCE. Moses and the Law became central for the post-exilic faithful; Enochic voices called them the apostate generation; and the Hebrew Scriptures were edited by their scribes. Memories remained, but have been identified as later additions. In this volume Barker shows the Lady and herSon hidden beneath the rewritten Scriptures. Her devotees, Isaiah and his disciples, fled to 'Arabia'.They preserved her ways and wisdom.These Melchizedek priests were Matthew's Magi with symbols of their temple.The Lady's most faithful son was Jesus of Nazareth, who restored the older faith.The Lady's ancient titles appear in Christian hymns to Mary, the Mother of God. The New Testament is in fact the Older Testament.The Great Lady: Restoring her Story is the second volume in a trilogy. It reveals the Lady in the Book of Revelation giving birth to her Son in the temple, and how her teaching underlies the Beatitudes. The first volume The Mother of the Lord was published in 2012. A third volume, The Oracle Page, will show how some newly-discovered leadbooks encode the older world of the Lady and her Son.

This collection of articles confirms Norman Whybray's place as one of the foremost contributors to scholarship on wisdom literature in the last three decades of the twentieth century. A former President of the Society for Old Testament Study, and winner of the British Academy's Burkitt Medal, Whybray wrote extensively on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and his interests extended to Job, Ben Sira, and wider areas of concern such as the relationship of wisdom to other Old Testament books and genres. Including a Foreword by David Clines and an Introduction by Katharine J. Dell, this collection brings together for the first time all of Norman Whybray's articles in this subject, thus not only inspiring afresh, but also providing a useful resource for scholars interested in that enigmatic group of writings that make up the wisdom literature of the Old Testament.

Waiting on Tables addresses the well-known enigmatic verse appearing in Acts 6:1. This book purports to solves the mystery by ascertaining the ethnic background of Stephen and the Hebrews. Prior studies have said that Stephen was a Hellenist and that the Hebrews were Aramaic-speaking Jews. Both findings are inaccurate, as Luke employed hidden polemic.

The book starts with background chapters on the Jews, Moses, the King in the Old Testament, and moves on to the King in the New Testament (apart from John) and then reaches its main focus on the Gospel of John. Only John's Gospel says that Jesus was crucified as Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews. Jesus was the keeper of the ways of the first temple in Jerusalem. These had almost been lost when the Moses traditions came to dominate in the second-temple period. Jesus' mission was to restore the ways of the original temple. He entrusted his visions to John the Elder, a priestly disciple in Jerusalem, and John compiled them into the Book of Revelation. Later, John wrote his Gospel to show how the visions had been fulfilled. The background to the Fourth Gospel is temple tradition. John shows how Jesus' debates with the Jews centred on the great difference between the world of the second temple and the world of the priest-kings of the first temple from which Christianity emerged. The Johannine community were the Hebrew disciples of Jesus who saw themselves as the true high priesthood restored. "Those at Qumran who worshipped as/with the angels in heaven cannot have been very different from those who wrote and read John's gospel and the Book of Revelation. The latter were the Hebrew-Christian community who saw themselves as the heavenly throng ... "Their Lamb on the throne opened a sealed book - secret teaching - and they were originally people chosen from all the twelve tribes of Israel to receive the Name of the Lord on their foreheads (Rev.7.3-4). This vision was set in the early days of the first temple, before the kingdom divided, and it had become the hope for the future." Taken from the Introduction.

This final book published in the Ashgate SOTS monograph series collects together for the first time in English translation a selection of important essays on central themes and texts in Old Testament criticism and exegesis by Rudolf Smend, one of the world's most eminent senior scholars in the field. The essays focus on key topics such as Moses, covenant, history, Old Testament theology, the state, Elijah, Amos, and major movements in the history of the discipline over the past three centuries. All are marked by penetrating exegetical and critical insight as well as by an unrivalled knowledge of the history of Old Testament scholarship, and many of them have already made highly-respected and influential contributions. Their publication will serve to make the range and vitality of Smend's work more widely known to English-speaking readers.

Are there Old Testament roots of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Margaret Barker traces the roots of the devotion to Mary as Mother of the Lord back to the Old Testament and the first temple in Jerusalem. The evidence is consistent over more than a millennium: there had been a female deity in Israel, the Mother figure in the Royal cult, who had been abandoned about 600BCE. She was almost written out of the Hebrew text, almost excluded from the canon. This first of two volumes traces the history of the Lady in the Temple, and looks forward to the second volume in which Barker will show how the Lady of the Temple is reclaimed in the advent of Christianity, and becomes the Lady in the Church. The result is breathtaking, and like all Barker's work, is impossible to put down.

Are there Old Testemant roots of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Margaret Barker traces the roots of the devotion to Mary as Mother of the Lord back to the Old Testament and the first temple in Jerusalem. The evidence is consistent over more than a millennium: there had been a female deity in Israel, the Mother figure in the Royal cult, who had been abandoned about 600BCE. She was almost written out of the Hebrew text, almost excluded from the canon. This first of two volumes traces the history of the Lady in the Temple, and looks forward to the second volume in which Barker will show how the Lady of the Temple is reclaimed in the advent of Christianity, and becomes the Lady in the Church. The result is breathtaking, and like all Barker's work, is impossible to put down.

'In another original, challenging and deeply learned book, Margaret Barker further consolidates her revolutionary rereading of the background of the New Testament. A welcome study, enlarging the mind and the imagination' Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury According to Margaret Barker's ground-breaking theory, temple mysticism underpins much of the Bible. Rooted in the cult of the first temple in ancient Judaism, it helps us to understand the origins of Christianity. Temple mysticism was received and taught as oral tradition, and many texts were changed or suppressed or kept from public access. Barker first examines biblical texts: Isaiah, the prophet whom Jesus quoted more than any other in Scripture, and John. Then she proposes a more detailed picture, drawing on a wide variety of non-biblical texts. The hypothesis of temple mysticism provides new answers to important questions: who did Jesus think he was and what did he think he was doing? Dow did Christianity understand their new faith and how did they express this in their worship. Temple Mysticism presents some remarkable results.

Margaret Barker contributes a characteristically Christian voice to contemporary theological debates on the environment. Most of the issues we face today were not those that faced the early Christian community and so there are often no directly relevant biblical teachings. Barker's starting point is the question of what Jesus himself would have believed about the Creation? What could the early Church have believed about the Creation? She then shows how much of this belief is embedded, often unrecognised, in the New Testament and early Christian texts. It was what people assumed as the norm, the worldview within which they lived and expressed their faith. Barker establishes the general principles of a Christian view of Creation. Some of what she says will show how current teaching would have been unfamiliar to the first Christians, not just in application but in basic principles.

Margaret Barker contributes a characteristically Christian voice to contemporary theological debates on the environment. Most of the issues we face today were not those that faced the early Christian community and so there are often no directly relevant biblical teachings. Barker's starting point is the question of what Jesus himself would have believed about the Creation? What could the early Church have believed about the Creation? She then shows how much of this belief is embedded, often unrecognized, in the New Testament and early Christian texts. It was what people assumed as the norm, the world view within which they lived and expressed their faith. Barker deals with such arguments as, 'But the New Testament says nothing about this', and establishes the general principles of a Christian view of Creation. Starting with how the Bible was understood by early Christians, Barker looks briefly at the history of a text or symbol, before examining what later Christian teachers did with that text or symbol. The idea that Adam was the steward of the creation, for example, is entirely unbiblical, and was imported into the text with disastrous results. Some of what she says will show how current teaching would have been unfamiliar to the first Christians, not just in application but in basic principles.

In Christmas the Original Story Margaret Barker explores the nature of the Christmas stories and the nature and use of Old Testament prophecy. Beginning with John's account, it then goes on to include Luke and Matthew, the apocryphal gospels, and the traditions of the Coptic Church, to throw light upon wise men and their gifts, the character of Herod, Matthew's use of prophecy, the holy family in Egypt. This book also discusses the stories we get from the Infancy Gospel of Jesus and the development of the Orthodox Christmas icon, as well as the Christmas story and the Mary material in the Koran. This is an accessible book based on scholarly work.

For a long time scholarship has been seeking the origins of Christian worship in the synagogue. In this new major book, Margaret Barker traces the roots of Christian worship back to the Jewish temple. By proposing a temple setting, a great deal more can be explained, and the existing rather limited resources can be more fruitfully used. By working with a great variety of sources (canonical, extra-canonical and Fathers, all presented here in tranlsation), it is possible to reconstruct something of the early Christian world view, which shows the Church as the conscious continuation of the temple worship. Fundamental practices such as baptism and the Eucharist had Temple Roots, and familiar words in the liturgy of the church such as Maranatha and Hallelujah derived from the ancient belief that the Lord appeared in the Temple. Jesus was the God of Israel manifested as a the Great High Priest, and the Christians were his new angel priesthood, singing the angelic liturgy to restore and renew the earth.The chapters in this book cover baptism, in theology and practice, the Eucharist, with special emphasis on the symbolism of the elements, the significance of music and hymns, festivals and pilgrimage, use of the Scriptures, both what the early Christians used and how they read them, prayers, including the Lord's prayer, and the shape of church buildings.

The Kingdom of God has been a major concern of New Testament scholars for many years. What did it mean to Jesus? What does it mean for Christian belief and practice today? 'To understand what was meant by the Kingdom of God' writes Margaret Barker in the Introduction, it is necessary to recover what remains of that hidden tradition of the holy of holies and the high priesthood... Recovering the original Kingdom . . . enables us to glimpse again the original vision. We see . . . the complexities of the Kingdom that explain what it became in later Christian teaching. The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God shows how the variety of beliefs about the Kingdom, and the related problems of eshatology, all derive from Temple traditions about the holy of holies. This inner sanctum was the Kingdom in the midst, the Unity beyond all change and decay. It was the state whence the Lord came forth, and where the faithful would go, to see him in his glory. We live in a time when politics, and also geopolitics, are enormously affected by passionate arguements over ehat it would mean to establish the "Kingdom of God" on earth. Anybody with an interest in the outcome of those arguements should pay close attention to Margaret Barker's insightful and thought-provoking investigation of the background and context in which the first Christians spoke of the Kingdom. Bruce Clark, Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Economist.