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Vilification and Self-Definition in the book of Revelation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Adela Yarbro Collins
Adela Yarbro Collins
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

New Testament scholars, as well as preachers, are in frequent danger of perpetuating negative stereotypes about the Jews. The reason for this state of affairs is that the polemical anti-Jewish remarks in the NT are often simply repeated or paraphrased in the interpreter's context without attention to the difference in meaning these remarks have when read in their original social and historical contexts. Krister Stendahl has done much to sensitize Christians to this danger in his writing, public speaking, and teaching. This concern about relations between Jews and Christians today is a major reason for doing a historical analysis of the passages in the book of Revelation in which Jews are vilified (2:9 and 3:9).

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 79 , Issue 1-3: Christians Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl on His Sixty-fifth Birthday , July 1986 , pp. 308 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1986

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References

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15 Yarbro Collins, “Insiders and Outsiders,” 190–96.

16 ibid., 198.

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23 This interpretation was reported to the community of McCormick Theological Seminary by Sheri Noah, who was an international student for a time in Costa Rica.

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25 See 1QS 5.1–2, 10–20; 9.16; CD 1.12; 1QM 1.1; and esp. 1QM 4.9–10 and 1QH 2.22; see also Yarbro Collins, “Insiders and Outsiders,” 208–9.

26 Ignatius Smyrn. 9.1; Polycarp Phil. 7.1; Bauer, Walter, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971) 70Google Scholar.