Search Results (17)

This paper offers a new explanation for the quotation of Psalm 68:18 in Ephesians 4:8. There are at least three puzzles in this text: (1) the significance of the quotation within the argument in the Ephesians passage (and why the apparent interruption between 4:7 and 4:11); (2) the divergent form of the quotation from the MT and LXX vis-a-vis the giving of gifts versus receiving; (3) why is only one set of gifts—proclaiming/verbal gifts, not gifts of service or discernment—mentioned in 4:11–12? This paper argues three points. First, diversity of spiritual gifts is not the focus of Eph 4:7–16, but rather, the same gift given to many: the word of truth about Jesus’s identity as Messiah and Son of God and his resurrection. Second, Ephesians 4:8–10 is comprehensible in context if viewed through another lens: Romans 10:6–8, the motif of “Messiah ascending victorious after having previously descended”. Third, the invocation of Psalm 68:18 in Ephesians 4:8–10 matches the Aramaic textual tradition, over-against the MT and the LXX. Paul’s use of the verse mirrors the proto-Targumic understanding of the “gifts given to the sons of mankind” as the Law of Moses. Paul is adopting this motif of “ascending with the Law-truth”, but with his own implied substitution of “the truth about Jesus”. Full article

This study examines the pervasive and multifaceted nature of racism, police violence, and law enforcement mistrust among immigrant and refugee communities in the Twin Cities, with a focus on the Latinx, Somali, and Karen populations in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In-depth interviews were conducted with 32 participants to understand their lived experiences. There were three key findings about the immigrant population’s perceptions and experiences, including experiences of racism, feelings of insecurity, and mistrust toward police. Participants from all three ethnic groups reported experiences of racism and expressed concerns about their safety explicitly related to their race. The findings reveal both shared experiences and unique challenges across the Latinx, Somali, and Karen communities, highlighting the intersection of race, immigration status, and systemic racism in shaping their perceptions of safety and law enforcement. While all three groups expressed fear, mistrust, and a desire for systemic change following the murder of George Floyd, the nuances of their experiences reflect the distinct ways in which racism and police violence manifest in their lives. These findings underscore the urgent need for addressing systemic racism and implementing measures to ensure the safety and well-being of immigrant communities. Full article

“Church’s law is first and foremost lex libertatis”—this proclamation by Pope Benedict XVI (2008) inspired the author, a Catholic canonist, to attempt an aspectual reflection on the question of the quality and relevance in Ecclesia of contemporary legislation, keeping in mind the universal (ecumenical) goal of Church law: salus animarum. For in the face of today’s “signs of the times”, it is impossible to avoid the question of how, in legislating this law, interpreting and applying it, to safeguard and optimize the operability of communion bonds (bonum commune) along with the realization of subjective rights (bonum personae)? It is necessary to ask what contemporary proposals for legislative activity can serve to stimulate “organic development in the life […] of the ecclesial society and of the individual persons who belong to it” (John Paul II)? The inescapable context for this reflection today is the epochal enunciation, according to some, of Pope Francis “it is clear that ecumenical dialogue […] enriches canon law”. In the author’s opinion, the last decade has brought two interesting answers to the questions formulated above. The two “ecumenical enterprises”—to use Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s apt phrase—“fill the historical juridical deficit”; especially since theologians and jurists from different traditions have not yet worked together to demonstrate the ecumenical potential of church law. The results of this work—offering original methodologies—are the idea of “receptive ecumenism”, by Catholic canonist Paul Murray, and Norman Doe’s project, culminating in the Statement of Principles of Christian Law, produced by the International Panel of Experts. Both “ecumenical enterprises” give new impetus to ecumenical initiatives, but also, according to Francis’ quoted words, carry with them the potential to enrich church law and serve its renewal. Full article

Several statements in Paul’s letters have led scholars to conclude that Paul was not Law-observant and that he was at best indifferent, if not antagonistic, to Jewish Law-observance. This article challenges these views by situating supposedly “negative” statements on the Law within Paul’s discourse on justification (Gal 2) and freedom from the Law of sin and death (Rom 7), and argues that aspects of 1 Cor 7, Gal 2–3, and Rom 3–4 imply Paul expected even believing Jews to remain Law-observant. Full article

The article examines Paul’s critique of Jews in Romans, focusing on Romans 1–3. It adopts an approach of reading Paul within Judaism while differing from some interpreters representative of this approach by arguing that Paul is critiquing his fellow Jews and that his critique is relevant to his gentile audience. It argues against the traditional Protestant problematization of “works righteousness”, Sanders’ claim that Paul reasons from solution to plight, and the New Perspective’s problematization of ethnic distinctiveness. Paul’s critique is grounded in Jewish intramural prophetic critique and restoration eschatology, over against Torah-wisdom traditions. Consistent with this perspective, Paul’s fundamental criticism of Jews and Israel is their failure to keep the divine Torah. Central to Paul’s argument is the interplay between Jewish particularity and the universal scope of Paul’s gospel. Israel’s failure is an intermediate but not an ultimate divine purpose. Jewish distinctiveness and Torah reveal the seriousness of sin and affirm the justice of God’s wrath. Thus, Paul’s prophetic critique also implies a prophetic hope for Israel, intertwined with his critique of and hope for all humanity, whom he views as sinners standing under God’s judgment and needing salvation through faith in the Davidic messiah, Jesus. Full article

In Romans 5, Paul says that prior to law “sin is not counted” (v. 13), and that upon law’s arrival, “the trespass increased” (v. 20). For most interpreters, the law that counted sin and increased the trespass is the law that God revealed to Israel at Sinai. Origen of Alexandria offered significant exegetical objections to this reading and proposed that natural law is in view. I modify Origen’s proposal to align Paul with the early Jewish tradition of Adam’s law, and I argue that “law” in vv. 13a and 20 refers to law’s arrival to Adam. Romans 5:12–21 is Paul’s re-telling of Scripture and chronicles Sin and Death achieving their global reigns. Understood this way, vv. 12–14 and 20–21 tell us what transpired when God’s law came to Adam: Sin and Death united, and they launched and secured their cosmic tyranny. This is Sin and Death’s origin story. Full article

Judaism was not Paul’s background, but his context, and much of his gospel’s content. Modern Pauline Studies, however, often see Paul’s mission as an expression of what he found wrong with Judaism, a Judaism that supposedly discouraged relations with Gentiles. This essay investigates all the various ways that Jews and Gentiles comfortably cohabited the Graeco-Roman Diaspora. What spurred Paul’s mission was not a critique of an ethnically exclusive Judaism, but his conviction that, in Christ, the end times had arrived. Accordingly, he taught that Gentiles should repudiate their own gods and commit exclusively to the worship of Israel’s god. Paul’s contest was not with Jewish law. It was with pagan gods. Both his mission and his message place him firmly within the pluriform Judaism of his time, a Judaism that took its place within the god-congested world of first-century Mediterranean paganism. Full article

This essay focuses on the reception of Pauline ideas in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, commonly dated to the early fourth century. At first, the claim that the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies contain Pauline ideas may seem surprising, since the Homilies are commonly considered “Jewish Christian” and thus anti-Pauline. However, new readings of Paul generated by the “Paul within Judaism” perspective, along with new insights on the Homilies, reveal that the latter work seems to contain Pauline ideas not preserved in other receptions of Paul. The Homilies share with Paul the following traits and ideas: (1) like Paul, the Homilies distinguish between Jews and non-Jews (the term “Christian” never appears) and, like Paul, the Homilies’ teachings about law address gentiles and prescribe a kind of Judaism for them; (2) gentiles must adapt to a Jewish lifestyle and keep the commandments that the Torah prescribes for non-Israelites; (3) Jews and Jesus-oriented gentiles together make up the people of God (called theosebeis in the Homilies), but the distinction between them remains. They have equal status in the eyes of God but differences in their observance of the law remain. An important point where the Homilies deviate from Paul is their insistence that Jews do not necessarily need Jesus. For the Homilies, Jesus is primarily the teacher of gentiles, and they envision two parallel paths to salvation: Moses for Jews and Jesus for gentiles. This essay suggests that the Homilies’ understanding of ideas that we recognize as Pauline developed in a milieu marked by the presence of non-Jesus-oriented (rabbinic) Jews. Full article

Superstring flux compactifications can stabilize all moduli while leading to an enormous number of vacua solutions, each leading to different $4-d$ laws of physics. While the string landscape provides at present the only plausible explanation for the size of the cosmological constant, it may also predict the form of weak scale supersymmetry which is expected to emerge. Rather general arguments suggest a power-law draw to large soft terms, but these are subject to an anthropic selection of a not-too-large value for the weak scale. The combined selection allows one to compute relative probabilities for the emergence of supersymmetric models from the landscape. Models with weak scale naturalness appear most likely to emerge since they have the largest parameter space on the landscape. For finetuned models such as high-scale SUSY or split SUSY, the required weak scale finetuning shrinks their parameter space to tiny volumes, making them much less likely to appear compared to natural models. Probability distributions for sparticle and Higgs masses from natural models show a preference for Higgs mass $m_h\sim 125$ GeV, with sparticles typically beyond the present LHC limits, in accord with data. From these considerations, we briefly describe how natural SUSY is expected to be revealed at future LHC upgrades. This article is a contribution to the Special Edition of the journal Entropy, honoring Paul Frampton on his 80th birthday. Full article

This research explores the interpretation of nomos in Galatians 2:11–21 within the light of Greco-Roman associations and Palestinian chavurot. As such, it proposes a reading of the text and conflict as a localized issue of conflicting association by-laws between Jews and Gentiles. The members of Jacob’s association in Jerusalem demonstrated Pharisaic behavior in requiring circumcision for membership in the association and requiring the additional observance of purity and tithing regulations as interpreted by the association as crucial elements of its by-laws. Paul chastises Peter for breaking the by-laws of the Jewish assembly when eating with the Gentiles but then “separating himself” from them and requiring the Gentiles to observe the by-laws that he had just broken. Paul then explains how the Jewish association’s by-laws are not required for his Gentile followers and redirects them to the faithfulness of Christ as their means of being set right and the means of acquiring justice. Full article

The Letter to the Galatians is a polemical correspondence about the course of gospel mission that is at stake in the view of the apostle Paul. When Paul represents his own contacts with the Jerusalem church, he defends “our freedom which we have in Christ Jesus” (Gal 2:4). In his aim to focus on the unity of all in Christ, Paul even goes at lengths to state that there is no difference between slave and free (Gal 3:28), while polemically associating both a former state of unbelievers (Gal 4:8) and the emphasis by missionary opponents on circumcision and the covenant of the law (Gal 4:12–31) with bondage and slavery. Yet, what did freedom (ἐλευθερία, Gal 2:4) and its opposite, slavery (δουλεία, Gal 4:24, 5:1), exactly mean in the ancient world in which Paul and his readers lived and communicated? Jews, Greeks, and Romans did not necessarily mean the same by these terms, nor did freedom necessarily mean exactly the same as modern conceptions of the term. This paper aims to contextualize Paul’s imagery with a view to biblical traditions, early Jewish notions of freedom, and Graeco-Roman registers of discourse, taking into account historical, literary, linguistic, and rhetorical-critical contexts of interpretation and revisiting the language of freedom and slavery with a view to insights from linguistic anthropology. The paper then revisits the Pauline position of “freedom in Christ” in relation to previous hypotheses of Paul’s gospel mission. Full article

Romans 1:18-2:29 connects with Stoic philosophy in a way that would be unmistakable to a Gentile audience. While acknowledging the Hellenistic tone of the passage, this paper focuses on the Stoic elements of natural law that were broadly recognized in Rome. Particularly, Cicero’s speeches, rhetorical handbooks, and philosophical treatises provide a comprehensive account of the connections between Hellenistic philosophy and Roman law and declamation. Although no direct evidence exists to show that Paul had read Cicero, these texts reveal the culture of the Roman Christians to whom Paul was writing. Key concepts of natural law appear in Romans that contextualize Paul’s message on internal obedience in 2:27-29, although he reworks them. Paul emphasizes spirit ‘πνεῦμα’ as the generating force of obedience. Two interpretations of πνεῦμα echo Stoic perspectives as the intent opposed to the letter of the law and as the inward motivation of the person obeying the law. The third interpretation as a foreshadowing of the Holy Spirit would be new for Paul’s Roman audience. This paper demonstrates that by incorporating Stoic elements on natural law, Paul presents the central significance of internal obedience in a way that would be understandable to his Christ-believing auditors and readers in Rome. Full article

Interpretations of Philippians have commonly suggested that the letter seeks to demonstrate the worthlessness of Paul’s own (former) Jewish identity, and thus that the Philippians should not be led astray by those who would persuade them to adopt the Jewish Law. Accordingly, it is assumed that Paul understands Judaism to have been superseded by Christianity and, moreover, that Christian identity has superseded all other identities that persons may have possessed upon entrance into the Christ community. In contrast to this long-standing interpretive tradition, this article contends that, for Paul, the ethnic distinction between Jew and gentile within the greater Christ community remains intact, along with a continued role for the Torah for both subgroups. Rather than advancing a supersessionist agenda, Paul fundamentally seeks in this letter to strengthen the Philippians’ identity as members of the nations who have, alongside those in Israel, become members of God’s holy, multiethnic people. Full article

The MEG experiment took data at the Paul Scherrer Institute in the years 2009–2013 to test the violation of the lepton flavor conservation law, which originates from an accidental symmetry that the Standard Model of elementary particle physics has, and published the most stringent limit on the charged lepton flavor violating decay ${\mathsf{\mu }}^{+}\to {\mathrm{e}}^{+}\mathsf{\gamma }$: BR(${\mathsf{\mu }}^{+}\to {\mathrm{e}}^{+}\mathsf{\gamma }$) $<4.2\times {10}^{-13}$ at $90\%$ confidence level. The MEG detector has been upgraded in order to reach a sensitivity of $6\times {10}^{-14}$. The basic principle of MEG II is to achieve the highest possible sensitivity using the full muon beam intensity at the Paul Scherrer Institute ($7\times {10}^7$ muons/s) with an upgraded detector. The main improvements are better rate capability of all sub-detectors and improved resolutions while keeping the same detector concept. In this paper, we present the current status of the preparation, integration and commissioning of the MEG II detector in the recent engineering runs. Full article

Pauling introduced the concept of electronegativity of an atom which has played an important role in understanding the polarity and ionic character of bonds between atoms. We set out to define a related concept of atomic reactivity in such a way that it can be quantified and used to predict the stability of covalent bonds in molecules. Guided by the early definition of electronegativity by Mulliken in terms of first ionization energies and Pauling in terms of bond energies, we propose corresponding definitions of atomic reactivity. The main goal of clearly distinguishing the inert gas atoms as nonreactive is fulfilled by three different proposed measures of atomic reactivity. The measure likely to be found most useful is based on the bond energies in atomic hydrides, which are related to atomic reactivities by a geometric average. The origin of the atomic reactivity is found in the symmetry of the atomic environment and related conservation laws which are also the origin of the shell structure of atoms and the periodic table. The reactive atoms are characterized by degenerate or nearly degenerate (several states of the same or nearly the same energy) ground states, while the inert atoms have nondegenerate ground states and no near-degeneracies. We show how to extend the use of the Aufbau model of atomic structure to qualitatively describe atomic reactivity in terms of ground state degeneracy. The symmetry and related conservation laws of atomic electron structures produce a strain (energy increase) in the structure, which we estimate by use of the Thomas-Fermi form of DFT implemented approximately with and without the symmetry and conservation constraints. This simplified and approximate analysis indicates that the total strain energy of an atom correlates strongly with the corresponding atomic reactivity measures but antibonding mechanisms prevent full conversion of strain relaxation to bonding. Full article