Hans Jonas began his 1961 Ingersoll Lecture by acknowledging the “undeniable fact” “that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality.”1 Jonas nonetheless concluded his lecture by affirming that “although the hereafter is not ours … we can have immortality … when in our brief span we serve our threatened mortal affairs and help the suffering immortal God.”2 While he may not have realized it, Jonas's words capture what I shall argue is the dominant view of immortality in modern Jewish thought. Underlying this view is an effort to refute materialist conceptions of human existence without committing to any particularly theological or traditionally metaphysical notion of immortality.

In the nineteenth century the unrestricted application of the historical-critical method posed an unprecedented challenge to inherited Christian notions about the Bible. While this challenge was eventually to be felt most acutely in the study of the New Testament (nt) once the distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” had firmly established itself, traditional viewpoints on the Old Testament (ot) were actually the first to be called into question. As a consequence of historical investigation, it became increasingly difficult for theologians to claim that the gospel is already taught in the ot. Regarding this matter, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) made a bold proposal. He argued against the canonical standing of the ot on the grounds that it expresses Jewish, not Christian, religion. For him this conclusion was the unavoidable result of the advancing critical scholarship that was undermining the christological exegesis used to defend the church's claim to the ot against the synagogue's counter-claim to its sole rightful possession. Opposing such “christianizing” readings, Schleiermacher broke ranks from Christian theologians and championed the side of the Jews in this historic debate. His only predecessors in this regard were Marcion and the Socinians, although his proposal for relegating the ot to noncanonical status was later endorsed by Adolf von Harnack.

In the introduction to Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Maurice Bloch makes some forthright admissions about the methodological and theoretical pitfalls threatening a project of the scope he undertakes in this slim, provocative volume. He acknowledges, for instance, the temptation, when arguing for what he describes as a “quasi-universal” religious structure, to present “a tendentious selection of examples, and make this structure appear to be present everywhere.”1 In the face of this danger, independent readers, who “choose to continue the exercise by trying to see whether what is proposed here stands up to the test of the other cases they know” become the most important critical constraint.2 In what follows I test Bloch's theory of rebounding violence against the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish theologian.

In the early or mid-second century c.e., a Jewish proselyte named Aquila1 translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek.2 The translation survives today only in fragments, but both Jewish and Christian sources from Late Antiquity offer perspectives on and information about Aquila as well as citations of his translation. To fully understand the role his legacy played in Jewish and Christian communities requires careful analysis of each of the sources. I believe that prior scholarship, especially regarding ancient perspectives on Aquila and his translation, as well as the popularity of his translation in various communities, has drawn conclusions based on overall impressions of texts that may appear quite differently when examined closely and in context. My goal in the following pages is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Aquila's Bible translation in Late Antiquity.