182 ANDREWS UNIVERSITY SEMINARY STUDIES 59 (FALL 2021)
17:22 and Its Theological Implications,” uses linguistic methods to explore
the valence of yw. They document that the Old Testament describes YHWH
as Israel's obedient God in a few important cases. With the help of narrative
analysis, they suggest that the unexpected expression is one of several narrative
strategies to show Elijah as a new Joshua and a prophetic prototype. It also
enables the typological reference to the prophet in Mal 4:5-6 and Matt 4:5-6.
The third and fourth articles involve New Testament studies. In the
third article, “On God’s Side of History: Time and Apocalyptic History in
Paul’s Speech at the Areopagus,” Keldie Paroschi investigates how far Paul's
speech at the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34) agrees with Stoic philosophy. While
some scholars argue that Paul's address is, to a great extent, Stoic in nature,
others have argued that Paul uses Stoic vocabulary only to disagree with its
worldview. Keldie contributes to this discussion by analyzing Pauls reference
to time in terms of Jewish apocalyptic historiography. She shows how Paul’s
call to repentance receives its urgency from his references to apocalyptic linear
time and stands, therefore, in contrast to Stoic moral philosophy.
In our fourth article, “Application of the Term Frequency-Inverse
Document Frequency [TF-IDF] Weighting Scheme to the Pauline Corpus,”
Brandon van der Ventel and Richard Newman apply an algorithmic model
(TF-IDF) to the 13 letters that are traditionally associated with the apostle
Paul. The cosine similarity method quantifies the similarity found among
seven of the undisputed Pauline letters (1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians,
Phillipians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon). For their calculations, the authors
use open-source python tools well known to the digital humanities (natural
language toolkit, genism, etc.) to calculate the similarity between the disputed
Pauline epistles and the undisputed corpus. They show that computational
methods can be used to test the findings of theological and literary studies.
With their permission, we make their Jupyter Notebook available so that
their work can be used to inform your text-critical research.
In addition to these articles, our book reviews section brings fourteen
recent and important books, among which you may find resources that are
helpful for your continuing education and research. In addition, we share
two abstracts of dissertations recently defended at Andrews University. In
July 2021, Elmer Guzman completed his Ph.D. in systematic theology. His
research compared the missional doctrinal hermeneutic of Vanhoozer and
Kirkkidinen to gain deeper insight in the co-dependence of the concepts of
God, eschatology, and mission. In October 2021, Michael Christian Orellana
Mendez defended his dissertation in the field of Archeology. As an expert on
pottery, he developed the historical and geographical context for the Iron Age
[a-c for pottery found in a courthouse excavated in field G4 at the Andrews
University excavation site at Tall Jalul, Jordan.
Please note that the editors of AUSS hereby retract the following book
review by Panayotis Coutsoumpos because of plagiarism: “The Second Letter