Bruce J. Malina

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bruce J. Malina (born October 9, 1933 in Brooklyn - † August 17, 2017 in Omaha ) was an American Roman Catholic theologian and New Testament scholar .

Life

As the eldest of nine children of the married couple Joseph and Mary Malina, Bruce John Malina attended a Polish Catholic elementary school (Our Lady of Consolation) in Brooklyn and then the Franciscan boarding school St. Bonaventure in Sturtevant , Wisconsin .

Malina joined the Franciscan Order in 1953 , to which he belonged until 1969. He completed his theology studies in West Chicago (Christ the King School of Theology), Rome ( Antonianum and Pontifical Biblical Institute ) and Jerusalem ( Studium Biblicum Franciscanum ) in 1967 with a doctoral thesis in the New Testament. His first teaching assignment took him to the Philippines from 1960 to 1963 and 1967 to 1969, but ended after a total of five years, as Malina's access to the New Testament aroused the displeasure of the local cardinal. In other respects, the stay in the Philippines was very formative for Malina: in addition to his teaching activities, he studied anthropology and linguistics and worked on field research with two Franciscan anthropologists, Neal Kaminski and Julian Arent.

In 1969, Malina received a teaching position from the University of Creighton , Omaha , and was professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity there for 48 years until his retirement . In Creighton, he developed a distance from life as a Franciscan and priest and married Diane Jacobs Malina in 1972. The couple adopted two Palestinian youth from Beirut.

Politically, Malina took a clearly pro-Palestinian position. In his later years he was accused of making irrational and anti-Semitic statements about Jews and Israelis regardless of the current political conflict, which were occasionally interspersed with his academic work.

Teaching

Malina's importance for biblical studies is that he applied categories from cultural anthropology to biblical texts. In the German-speaking countries, Malina's suggestions were taken up primarily by the social-historical Bible exegesis ( Wolfgang Stegemann ); Stegemann also wrote the foreword to the German edition of Malina's The New Testament World .

Bruce J. Malina was a founding member of the Context Group ; the commemorative publication for Malina was written in 2001 by exegetes who all belong to this group.

Works

  • The Palestinian Manna Tradition: The Manna Tradition in the Palestinian Targums and Its Relationship to the New Testament Writings . (Works on the history of later Judaism and early Christianity, 7) Leiden: EJ Brill, 1968
  • The New Testament World. Insights from Cultural Anthropology , Atlanta 1981
  • Christian Origins and Cultural Anthropology: Practical Models for Biblical Interpretation , Atlanta 1986
  • The Social World of Jesus and the Gospels , Routledge, New York 1996
  • (together with Richard L. Rohrbaugh) Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels , 2nd ed. Minneapolis 2003
  • The World of the New Testament: Cultural Anthropological Insights , Kohlhammer 1993
  • The Revelation of John: Star Visions and Heavenly Journeys , Kohlhammer 2002

Web links

  • Diane Jacobs Malina: Malina, Dr. Bruce J. (Obituary), in: Omaha World-Herald, August 19, 2017 ( online )
  • Robert J. Myles, James G. Crossley: Biblical Scholarship, Jews and Israel: On Bruce Malina, Conspiracy Theories and Ideological Contradictions , December 2012 ( online )

Individual evidence

  1. Bruce J. Malina 1933-2017. In: Philonica et Neotestamentica. Retrieved February 2, 2018 .
  2. ^ A b c Diane Jacobs Malina: Obituary .
  3. ^ A b c John J. Pilch (Ed.): Social Scientific Models for Interpreting the Bible. Essays by the Context Group in Honor of Bruce J. Malina . Brill, 2001, ISBN 90-04-12056-4 .
  4. ^ Robert J. Myles, James G. Crossley: Biblical Scholarship, Jews and Israel. Retrieved February 2, 2018 .