Book launch and research seminar

Launch of the two books Scriptural Figures and the Fringes of the New Testament Canon by Kelsie Rodenbiker and Usury: Moneylending, Money and Society in Rabbinic Literature by Amit Gvaryahu.

Scriptural Figures and the Fringes of the New Testa­ment Canon (Oxford UP, 2025) by Kelsie Rodenbik.

The Catholic Epistles played a much larger role in the canonical process than their diminutive size and oft-neglected status would suggest. Though they were perhaps the latest subcollection recognized to be among the New Testament (after the fourfold Gospel and the Pauline corpus), they were not its crowning feature but a wrench in the canonical gears. How did these apostolic letters, most of whose authorship was widely questioned by ancient ecclesiastical writers, eventually come to be accepted as authoritative works?

Through the Catholic Epistles' attributed apostolic authors and use of illustrative exempla from the Jewish scriptural past, this book explores the relationship between the intertwined phenomena of canonical authority, pseudepigraphy, and exemplarity. The suspicion of apostolic pseudepigraphy and the broad range of scriptural links represented by the scriptural figures present throughout the Catholic Epistles prevented their unhesitating inclusion among the New Testament. And yet their apostolic association and substantive ties to Jewish and Christian scriptural tradition also underwrote their reception as authoritative scriptures. In the Catholic Epistles, exemplarity and canonicity are intertwined: scripture receives scripture; scripture begets scripture.

Usury: Moneylending, Money and Society in Rabbinic Literature (Magnes Press, 2025) by Amit Gvaryahu.

Usury: Moneylending, Money and Society in Rabbinic Literature by Amit Gvaryahu is a study of the moneylending norms in the early stratum of rabbinic literature. It shows how these norms use the language of legal formalism to construct a community of status-equals, into which rabbinic adherents can buy their entry by making the correct investment choices. Placing these norms in a broad historical and intercultural context, it is a fresh look at Jewish moneylending norms, the first in over 30 years.