Paleotestamentary

There was a time when biblical religion (paleotestamentary and neotestamentary alike) was studied almost exclusively in terms of individual faith.

We have also consulted the sources themselves. For our purpose, these were the works of Josephus (the Jewish War, the Jewish Antiquities, and the Life), the New Testament, and certain sections of the palaeotestamentary literature—partly apocalyptic in nature—not included in the Canon.

PALAEO-TESTAMENTARY LITERATURE

In the floor, funeral slabs by Tommaso Pecci (XIV cent.) and broken fragments of the original floor of the Duomo (notably the Age of man by [Antonio] Federighi, 1475, and the Paleotestamentary episodes by [Domenico] Beccafumi).

Tomorrow, if I want to write this preface, I will set myself to running down all the paleo- and neo-testamentary courriers.

But I am headed rather toward the testament. Specifically, toward the stories of legacy or delegation on the inside, as en abyme, of what is called the neo- or the paleo-testamentary.

In each feature of this sovereign friendship (exception, improbable and random unicity, metapolitical transcendence, disproportion, infinite dissymmetry, denaturalization, etc.), it might be tempting to recognize a rupture with Greek philía – a testamentary rupture, as some would hasten to conclude, a palaeo- or neo-testamentary rupture.

Probably because he had been born and raised in a Catholic country, though from a Protestant family, Eleazar felt less affinity for the Old than for the New Testament – its miracles, parables, and above all the presence of Jesus. The serpents of Paradise and of Moses took him back to the dawn of man, to the prophets, to Yahweh, a world that seemed brutal and archaic to him. But his Lutheran teachers in Downpatrick disapproved of this view. They taught a return to the paleotestamentary source.