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The parables of Jesus are often susceptible to patriarchal, androcentric interpretations. By using a realistic reading and social-scientific criticism, this article will investigate the voices, roles, and presence of women in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and how the 1st-century audience of the parable would most likely have understood women to be present, even if not mentioned in the parable. Women played critical roles in terms of hospitality, travel, innkeeping, and healing. These roles and voices of women are often ignored by modern interpreters and exegetes. This article not only emphasises the valuable roles that women fulfilled in the time of Jesus but also critiques the lack, or absence, of women as a point of discussion, acknowledgement, and study in most biblical commentaries and books concerning the parable of the Good Samaritan. The aim of this research is to contribute to the unhiding of women voices in patriarchal, androcentric texts thereby reconstructing and deconstructing gender paradigms within biblical scholarship.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implicationsThe interdisciplinary nature of this article contributes to the debate on the roles and importance of women in the church by investigating the value that women had in the parables of Jesus. By reading women as present in the text, emphasis is given to the voices of women in the Bible and the importance of their representation today. This research is also in line with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Gender equality and women empowerment.

The parables of Jesus have historically been attributed with a plethora of interpretations. The first hearers of the parables of Jesus had native (emic) knowledge of the social realities embedded in the parables told by Jesus, that is, cultural scripts present in the parables that might not be apparent to modern readers. Because of this, the modern reader of a parable might not be aware of all the different cultural scripts in a given parable, especially if these scripts are not specifically mentioned or explained by the gospel narrators. Using the parable of the Prodigal Son as an example, this study argues that there are voices in the parable most probably heard by its first hearers that modern hearers might not be aware of. These ‘muted’ voices not heard by modern readers of the parables often include the voices of women and other minority figures. In this study, a case is made for the possible value that a ‘realistic reading’ of familial parables could bring to the interpretation of the parables.Contribution: It is suggested that this reading can contribute to feminist biblical scholarship’s deconstruction and reconstruction of gender paradigms of Christian theology if the voices of women are ‘exhumed’ from or ‘unhidden’ within, patriarchal and androcentric texts.

In the Ancient world poverty was a visible and common phenomenon. According to estimations 9 out of 10 persons lived close to the subsistence level or below it. There was no middle class. The state did not show much concern for the poor. Inequality and disability to improve one’s social status were based on honour and shame, culture and religion.In order to understand the activity of Jesus and the early Jesus movement in Galilee, it is essential to know the social and economic context where he and his followers came. The principal literary source in first-century Galilee is Josephus, who provides a very incomplete glimpse of the political and economic character of the Galilee and his account is both tendentious and selfserving. There is no consensus among the scholars on the conditions of ordinary people in Galilee at the time of Jesus and the early Jesus movement. The evidence can be interpreted either so that first-century Galilee was peaceful and people had somewhat better times economically because of the large building projects, or just the opposite – the building projects demanded a lot more taxes and forced labour and made life even more difficult. In this article it is argued that the latter conditions explain better the birth and rapid increase of the early Jesus movement in Galilee.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Setting Paul within the First Century Counter‐imperial Messages in the Letters? Conclusion References

There is little consensus as to the historical nature of the sect identified by Tacitus in \"Annales\" 15.44 as the \"Christiani.\" Nor is there any firm consensus on the authenticity and historicity of all of that fragment known as Tacitus' fragment 2 (= Sulpicius Severus \"Chronica\" 2.30.6-7), whose references to \"Christiani\" are widely suspected of being later Christian interpolations. Much of this fragment is thought, nevertheless, to be from the lost portion of the fifth book of Tacitus' \"Historiae.\" A solution can be found to both of these problems by adducing from fragment 2 new evidence indicating that this fragment indeed represents a primary historical source. This new evidence takes the form of the discovery of a significant statistical relationship among the following three words: (1) The metaphor stirps (branch, descendants) used to describe the \"Christiani\" in fragment 2, (2) and (3) Ναζωραι̂ος and Ναζαρηνός (Nazorean), describing the New Testament sect associated with the Χριστιανοί of Acts 11.26. The connecting link among, as well as the common source for, the three words listed above appears to be the Hebrew netser (branch, descendants--apparently influenced by Isa 11.1), which both translates into stirps and transliterates into Ναζωραι̂ος/Ναζαρηνός. It is mathematically extremely unlikely that this link with netser represents a random coincidence. Also, it appears that a later Christian redactor of fragment 2 or his target audience would not have known of this connection. Because of this and other contextual explanations, the posibility is largely eliminated that fragment 2 could have been significantly redacted by a later Christian. We are thus left with the substantial probability that this fragment constitutes a primary historical source, most likely via Tacitus. In turn this source supplies us with a probable solution to the problem of the \"Christiani's\" identity by depicting them in fragment 2 as being major participants in the first Jewish revolt against Rome in 66-73 CE.

This chapter contains sections titled: Prologue Protestants 1949–1954: Compliance The “Christian Manifesto” and Growth of the Three Self The Fate of Evangelicals in the TSPM: The Case of Chen Chonggui Catholics 1949–1957: Resistance From the Great Leap to the Cultural Revolution, 1958–1966 Some Thoughts

In Greek mythology, the TitanessMnemosyne—who personified memory and bequeathed to us the wordmnemonic—is associated mostly with language and words and with the muses, including history (Clio) and poetry (Calliope). She is also a goddess of time, which reflects an association of memory and temporality. Yet thears memoriae(art of memory) of the Ancients, inherited with great enthusiasm by Renaissance practitioners, links memory to the additional qualities of space and visuality: memory could also be pictorial and topographic (as well as textual). The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci famously invoked a sense of space and of the

This chapter contains sections titled: Bibliography

Members of the Jesus movement in Johannesburg, South Africa, were presented with Brown and Lowe's Inventory of Religious Belief and the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale. These were completed so as to reflect the respondents' past and present attitudes. The respondents were Caucasian, English-speaking young men and women between the ages of 17 and 28. The control group, comprised of members of mainstream-church denominations, was matched with the Jesus People for age, home-language, occupation of father, and general intelligence. Results indicated that, as a consequence of their conversion, the Jesus People became more Biblically fundamentalistic, and less conservative, less militaristic, less antihedonistic, and less ecclesiastically fundamentalistic. There were no changes in their degree of ethnocentrism and realism.