Edwin M. Yamauchi

Edwin Masao Yamauchi (born 1937 in

Yamauchi's areas of expertise include: Ancient History, Old Testament, New Testament, Early Church History, Gnosticism, and Biblical Archaeology. He has been awarded eight fellowships, contributed chapters to several books, articles in reference works, and has published 80 essays in 37 scholarly journals. He has been a member and officer of the Institute for Biblical Research, an organization of scholars devoted to the research of the Bible.^[2]

Yamauchi has also contributed essays to various reference works in biblical studies and Christian history, and written commentaries on the books of

Other areas where Yamauchi has written include the social and cultural history of first century Christianity, the relevance of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls for New Testament studies, the primary source value of Josephus' writings, and the role of the Magi in both ancient Persia and in the nativity narrative of the Gospel of Matthew. Yamauchi has written several books and essays on ancient gnosticism. He has been highly critical of scholars, such as Rudolf Bultmann, who have used third and fourth century AD Gnostic texts as primary evidence for the existence of pre-Christian gnosticism.^[4]

In the 1970s he was a prominent critic of the late Morton Smith's interpretation of an apocryphal text known as the Secret Gospel of Mark. Yamauchi revisited the corpus of Smith's writings on the topics of the lost gospels and Jesus as a magician-healer in his lengthy essay on magic and miracles (1986). Yamauchi faulted Smith's work on several points. One problem Yamauchi found was Smith's anachronistic use of third, fourth and fifth century AD Greek magical papyri sources in his reinterpretation of Christ as a magus-magician. He argued that Smith's "penchant for parallels with the life of Apollonius by Philostratus" was "historically anachronistic".^[5]

Religious beliefs

Though he was raised as a Buddhist,

• Africa and Africans in Antiquity (editor; East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001;
  ISBN 0-87013-507-4
• Africa and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).
  ISBN 0-8010-2686-5
• Archaeology and the Bible (with
  ISBN 0-310-38341-2
• The Archaeology of New Testament Cities in Western Asia Minor (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980).
  ISBN 0-8010-9915-3
• "A Secret Gospel of Jesus as 'Magus'? A Review of the Recent Works of Morton Smith," Christian Scholar's Review, 4/3 (1975): 238–251.
• Chronos, Kairos, Christos: Nativity and Chronological Studies Presented to Jack Finegan (co-edited with Jerry Vardaman) (Winona Lake: Eisenbruans, 1989).
  ISBN 0-931464-50-1
• Composition and Cooroboration in Classical and Biblical Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1966).
• "The Descent of Ishtar, The Fall of Sophia, and the Jewish Roots of Gnosticism," Tyndale Bulletin, 29 (1978): 143–175.
• Foes From The Northern Frontier (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982).
  ISBN 0-8010-9918-8
• Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
• Greece and Babylon (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1967).
• Harper's World of the New Testament (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).
  ISBN 0-06-069708-3
• "Immanuel Velikovsky's Catastrophic History,"
  Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation
  , 25/4 (December 1973): 134–139.
• "Jewish Gnosticism? The Prologue of John, Mandaean Parallels and the Trimorphic Protennoia," in Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions, R. van den Broek and M. J. Vermaseren, eds. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981): 467–497.
• "Josephus and the Scriptures" Fides et Historia, 13/1 (Fall 1980): 42–63.
• "Magic or Miracle? Diseases, Demons and Exorcisms," in Gospel Perspectives Vol. 6: The Miracles of Jesus, David Wenham and Craig Blomberg, eds. (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1986): 89–183.
• Mandaic Incantation Texts (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1967).
• Peoples of the Old Testament World, (co-edited with Alfred J. Hoerth and Gerald L. Mattingly) (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994)
  ISBN 0-8010-4383-2
• Persia and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990).
  ISBN 0-8010-9899-8
• Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Proposed Evidences (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1973)
  ISBN 0-8010-9919-6
• "Pre-Christian Gnosticism in the Nag Hammadi Texts?" Church History, 48 (1979): 129–141.
• "The Present Status of Mandaean Studies," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 25 (1966): 88–96.
• The Stones and The Scriptures (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972)
  ISBN 0-87981-002-5
• The Story of the Church (with Robert G. Clouse and Richard V. Pierard) (Chicago: Moody Press, 2002)
  ISBN 0-8024-2481-3
• "Tammuz and the Bible," Journal of Biblical Literature, 84 (1965): 283–290.
• Two Kingdoms: The Church and Culture Through the Ages (with Robert G. Clouse and Richard V. Pierard) (Chicago: Moody Press, 1993).
  ISBN 0-8024-8590-1
• Ramm's View of Scripture ... at Best a Compromise in The Outlook, Vol. 5, Issue 4, 1955.
• Is Theistic Evolution in Accord with the Christian Conception of the Origin of Things? in The Outlook, Vol. 11, Issue 8, 1962.
• Problems of Radiocarbon Dating and of Cultural Diffusion in Pre-history, in Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, (March 1975): 25-31

Reviews

• Molefi K. Asante, "Africa and Africans in Antiquity (review)", Research in African Literatures, 34/3, (Fall 2003): pp. 178–182.
• Grant LeMarquand, Africa and the Bible, Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005^[9]

References