This set of eight papers on Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Psalter is the second volume published from an inter-disciplinary project of the University of Lorraine's Centre Écritures on ‘Judaism and Christianity in the Fathers’, the first volume having focused on Genesis. The series tries to identify the boundaries between Christian authors and Judaism, to see how Christian writers might or might not have been influenced in their scriptural interpretation. It does not cover anti-Jewish polemical literature. According to the editor, the papers document more of an ‘interaction’ than an influence, an exegetical ‘inter-weaving’ conducted by figures from both communities. The scope of the papers is chronologically broad, from Daniel Boyarin's paper (‘Midrashim dans le Nouveau Testament’) on the Letter to the Hebrews and on the book of Revelation, to Marie-Luce Charpin-Ploix on Maximus the Confessor's commentary on Psalm lix and Jacques Elfassi on the Psalms in Isidore of Seville's De fide catholica contra Iudaeos (I didn't quite see how his subject was reconcilable with the stated intention of the series). The papers are sober and competent treatments of their subjects, though the only other early Christian writers treated are Augustine and John Chrysostom. Origen's absence is noteworthy (Lorenzo Perrone has made available the text of Origen's newly discovered homilies on the Psalms, and Joseph Trigg is preparing an English translation), as is Eusebius', whose commentary on the Psalter survives in substantial portions (PG xxiii). Of the papers that engaged Jewish sources most fully, Boyarin reads the Letter to the Hebrews not in terms of Jewish ‘background’ but as a Jewish text, in which the letter's use of Psalm xcv is presented as midrash pure and simple, ‘as evidence for midrashic forms quite prior to other attestations in Palestinian Hebrew literature’. Similarly, he sees Revelation as a Jewish as well as a Christian text, and holds that the book's ‘strategies of reading’ are the same as those of other Jewish apocalyptic texts of the same epoch. José Costa's paper on the reading of Psalm ii in the Midrash Tehillim exhaustively considers its eschatological and non-eschatological dimensions, and has interesting observations on the commentary's awareness of Christian messianic readings. Isabel Bochet focuses on Augustine's readings of Psalms lxxii and lxxxi (LXX numbering), two of the twelve ‘psalms of Asaph’. Presumably relying on an onomasticon like the one attributed to Jerome, Augustine construed Asaph not as a person but a typological symbol that understands Asaph as congregatio, thus enabling Augustine to read into the Psalms his theology of the synagoga and the ecclesia. Bochet shows the similarity and differences of his exegesis with that of the rabbis, and also defends his reading of Psalm lxxxi as consistent with earlier Christian readings (Irenaeus; Justin) in not construing the ‘assembly’ as either the Synagogue or the Church in a univocal institutional sense.
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