PISTIS in Josephus

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Mar 18 06:02:27 EST 1999


Inasmuch as Josephus writes in Rome and under a good deal of Roman
(Flavian?) influence, it would hardly surprise me if Latin FIDES and its
political associations has a good deal to do with the way he's using
PISTIS. I hasten to add, however, that I haven't looked directly at how
Josephus in fact DOES use PISTIS--I just would suspect that Roman thinking
might have some bearing on his usage.

At 6:54 PM -0600 3/17/99, Jeffrey B. Gibson wrote:
>Steve Long wrote:
>
>> B-Greekers,
>>
>> I've started reading Josephus to expand my Greek horizons and I've
>come
>> across something interesting already. Josephus uses PISTIS in a
>political
>> sense in terms of loyalty or allegiance to Rome. I'm wondering if this
>
>> sense of allegiance would be the more prevalent sense of the word
>rather
>> than belief or faith, or is this just a case of one word having more
>than
>> one meaning depending on context?
>>
>
>Steve,
>
>A great deal of support for your observation that PISTIS/PISTEUW in the
>NT
>has more to do with allegiance than a cognitive process can be found
>Pilch and
>Malina's _Hanbook of Biblical Social Values_ (Hendrickson, 1998). You'll
>also
>probably be interested to know that Tom Wright is making some hay from
>the import of
>the Joesphean usage of the terms to illuminate the PISTIS XRISTOU
>(faithulness
>that Jesus displayed and therefore the faithfulness that his followers
>are to display)
>debate.
>
>Yours,
>
>Jeffrey
>--
>Jeffrey B. Gibson
>7423 N. Sheridan Road #2A
>Chicago, Illinois 60626
>e-mail jgibson000 at ameritech.net
>
>
>
>---
>B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek
>You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
>To unsubscribe, forward this message to
>$subst('Email.Unsub')
>To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek at franklin.oit.unc.edu

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad at yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



More information about the B-Greek mailing list