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Margaret Barker Biblical scholar |
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Margaret Barker Biblical scholar |
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Margaret Barker |
| The Mother of the Lord: Volume 1: The Lady in the Temple | ||||
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Are there Old Testament roots to the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Margaret Barker traces this devotion back to the Old Testament and the First Temple in Jerusalem. The evidence is consistent over more than a millennium: there had been a female deity in Jerusalem, the Mother of the Lord in the royal cult. She was expelled around 600 BCE, was almost written out of the Hebrew text, and virtually excluded from the canon - but not entirely. The second volume will show how the Mother became so important for the Christians who saw themselves as restoring the First Temple. |
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"Once
again, Dr Barker offers us a massively learned and creative
re-reading of what the Bible has to tell us about the religion of
ancient Israel, using her wide knowledge of material in Hebrew, Syriac
and other Semitic languages, texts from Jewish, Gnostic and Christian
sources. She reinforces the case she has made in earlier books that the
Hebrew Scriptures represent a deeply conflicted set of traditions, and
excavates the lost cult of the divine 'Lady of the Temple', the
personification of divine Wisdom and the bearer of the divine Son. Her
contention that this alone makes sense not only of tensions within the
text of the Hebrew Scriptures, but also of persistent and otherwise
baffling themes in early Christianity is argued with vigour and
comprehensiveness of scope. Controversial as it is, this is a very
significant contribution to a fuller understanding of both Christian and
Jewish origins." Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury Published by T&T Clark in September 2012. ISBN: 9780567528155
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(c) Margaret Barker 2006.