Here’s a short review of Boyarin’s 2004 book. The review notes the two powers theology and Boyarin’s use of it in this work.
Archive for the ‘Two Powers Doctrine in Judaism’
Making Room in the Godhead for Metatron
Here’s a link to an interesting article about Metatron as a member of the Jewish godhead (viewed as heretical, of course):
Daniel Abrams, “The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion of Metatron in the Godhead,” HTR 87:3 (1994): 291-321
Recent Two Powers in Heaven Article
This article just appeared:
Adiel Schremer, “Midrash, theology, and history: two powers in heaven revisited,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period, 39 no 2 (2008): 230-254.
If you are a student or faculty (or have a college or university library card) your library should enable you to get this article in PDF. Some public libraries also give access to the ATLA Religion database or JSTOR, through which you can get this. I haven’t read it yet, but I will be downloading it soon.
A “Two Powers” Scholar You Should Know About: Daniel Boyarin
Daniel Boyarin is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. Like Alan Segal before him, he is a Jewish scholar with a special interest in the two powers “heresy”. I’ve attached a PDF of his important Harvard Theological Reivew article, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John” (John 1:1-14). It’s a terrific piece of scholarship that demonstrates that John primarily got his doctrine of the Logos from the Old Testament and his own Jewish context, not pagan Greco-Roman thinking.
It’s scholarship like this that makes me (and others) groan when people like Bart Ehrman want to argue that the idea of Jesus being God was a late invention of the early church.
Metatron as the Deity: The Lesser YHWH
Part of what I want to do on this blog is expose readers to the Jewish Two Powers material. Here’s an interesting paper by Dr. Andrei Orlov.
