From Text to Persuasion: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Lauri Thurén on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday ed. by Anssi Voitila et al (review)

Reviewed by: From Text to Persuasion: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Lauri Thurén on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday ed. by Anssi Voitila et al Duane Watson anssi voitila, niilo lahti, mikael sundkvist, and lotta valve (eds.), From Text to Persuasion: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Lauri Thurén on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday (Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 123; Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 2021). Pp. 314. Paper €31.50. This festschrift contains fourteen essays in three parts honoring Professor Lauri Thurén of the University of Eastern Finland. Niilo Lahti begins the volume with a survey of the scholarly contributions of the honoree, “Professor Lauri Thurén as Advancing the Methodology in Biblical Literary Studies” (pp. 12–18). Part 1, “From the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament,” contains three essays. In the first essay, “The Book of the Wars of Yahweh” (pp. 21–43), Antti Laato argues that earlier tradition underlying Num 21:10–35 emphasized God’s care for the Israelites during the wilderness wandering rather than their rebellion, as did later tradition. In “Institutions as Texts: The Dissemination of Knowledge in Ancient Synagogues” (pp. 44–64), Anders Runesson examines how material culture, spatial contexts, and institutions communicated and disseminated knowledge within Judaism and early Christianity. “Elijah, Elisha, and Other ‘Prophets’ in Hebrews 11:33–38” (pp. 65–82) by Lotta Valve explores Jewish literature and some Church Fathers to show that the prophets of Heb 11:32–38 primarily refer to Elijah and Elisha, yet they are not specifically identified so as to maintain an encompassing image of the prophets. Part 2, “The New Testament,” contains five essays. The first by Petri Luomanen, “Social Identity, Prototypes, and Exemplars in Gospel Narratives: Methodological Considerations” (pp. 85–110), employs the social identity approach and narrative criticism to illuminate how Gospel narratives present exemplars of prototypical behavior to establish group formation in early Christianity. Runar M. Thorsteinsson, in “Epistolography as Rhetoric and Paul’s ‘Non-Parousia’ in Rome” (pp. 111–28), argues that Paul preferred sending a letter with an envoy to address the Romans rather than visit personally, and skillfully used epistolary conventions for rhetorical purposes. Gert J. Steyn, in “Scriptural Retrodiction in 1 Corinthians 15:25–27 and the Resurrection and Exaltation of Jesus of Nazareth” (pp. 129– 52), shows that the early Christians did not develop christology and eschatology using previous Jewish tradition with a prediction–fulfillment approach, but rather with retrodiction, reading that tradition through the lens of the crucifixion and resurrection. In “Loaves of Life: Relecture and Redaction in John 6” (pp. 153–72), Kari Syreeni defines relecture as a text explicating an antecedent text and accentuating its themes, demonstrating how John 6 is a relecture of the Synoptic account of the multiplication of the loaves. Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, in “The Intersectional Power of ‘the Book’: The Shepherd of Hermas as Biblical Literature” (pp. 173–89) examines the roles of women in writing, copying, reading, and transmitting texts in the opening visions of the Shepherd of Hermas, concluding that, while men were primarily responsible for these literary activities, women also contributed. Part 3, “The Early Church and Beyond,” contains six essays. “A Philosopher’s Conversion, [End Page 585] or How Justin Martyr argues for Christianity as the True Philosophy,” by Teuvo Laitila (pp. 193–212), adapts Stephen Toulmin’s trio of datum, warrant, and backing to explore how Justin argues his conversion from pagan philosophies to Christianity as the true philosophy. In his essay, “Four Faces of Meaning: Ezekiel’s Living Beings in the Fourth-Century Patristic Reading” (pp. 213–31), Serafim Seppälä shows how the four-faced beings of Ezek 1:4–12 came into Christian interpretation in the fourth century on three levels to represent divine transcendence and incomprehensibility, four functions of Christ and each of the four Gospels and their perspectives on Christ, and mystical understandings of the inner being and the inward operation of the Spirit. Anni Maria Laato, in “The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) in Augustine’s Many Interpretations” (pp. 232–51), investigates Augustine’s several interpretations of this parable to show that he viewed parables as polyvalent...