Christianity: sacred texts and revered writings

That Christian missionary efforts have long gone hand-in-hand with European colonization and American imperialist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is well recognized.

Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have traced out the rich and complex traditions of biblical interpretation in Second Temple Judaism.

One of the most interesting questions facing New Testament scholarsHow did Christianity emerge from Judaism?

In Dialectical Theology and Jacques Ellul, Jacob E.

Moving beyond discussions of patriarchy and prescribed "e;womens roles"e; in the Roman worlddiscussions that have relied too much on elite literary sources, in her viewKatherine Bain explores what inscriptional data from Asia Minor can tell us about the actual socioeconomic status of women in the first and second centuries C.

Demetrios Tonias's Abraham in the Works of John Chrysostom is the first comprehensive examination of John Chrysostom's view of the patriarch Abraham.

Fathers, sons, and mothers take center stage in the Bibles grand narratives, Amy Kalmanofsky observes.

A brief history of assisting ministers in Christian worship, what makes a good assisting minister, and a step-by-step walk through the role.

Jesus’ words of indictment and judgment in the Gospel according to Matthew have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and the horrors of the twentieth-century Holocaust.

This title explores why Christians have different ways of looking at time, at how the life of the church is ordered and organized by days, weeks, seasons, and years.

After ten years in youth ministry, Michael Novelli felt like he had tried everything to help his students connect with the Bible.

Practical help, encouragement, preparation exercises, and spiritual wisdom for those who serve as readers in worship.

Was Esther uniquean anomaly in patriarchal society?

The "e;Great Whore"e; of the Book of Revelationthe hostile symbolization used to illustrate the authors critique of empirehas attracted considerable attention in Revelation scholarship.

In Portraits of a Mature God, Mark McEntire traced the narrative development of the divine character in the Old Testament, placing the God portrayed at the end of that long story at the center of theological discussion.

Important ecclesiastical documents have stressed the urgency of addressing world hunger and put in the foreground its natural and historical causes, from famine to global austerity measures and welfare.

Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem, as florid Orientalist portraits imagine them, or were they trusted court officials who may never have been castrated?

In the subsistence agricultural social context of the Hebrew Bible, children were necessary for communal survival.

Giving careful exegetical attention to Paul’s letter to the Romans, Kevin W.

It is a commonplace today that Paul was a Jew of the Hellenistic Diaspora, but how does that observation help us to understand his thinking, his self-identification, and his practice?

The pseudo-Clementine writings are one of the most intriguing and valuable sources for early Jewish Christianity.

Melvin traces the emergence and development of the motif of angelic interpretation of visions from late prophetic literature (Ezekiel 4048; Zechariah 16) into early apocalyptic literature (1 Enoch 1736; 7282; Daniel 78).

Presuming that the heart of Paul’s gospel announcement was the news that God had raised Jesus from the dead (as indicated in 1 Thessalonians 1:9b-10), Pillar explores the evidence in Paul’s letter and in aspects of the Roman imperial culture in Thessalonica in order to imagine what that proclamation would have evoked for its first hearers.

Key to a theology of scripture are the important issues of history, consciousness, rhetoric, and how theology functions in relation to interpretation of Christianitys religious texts.

Memory and Covenant applies new insights into the meaning and function of social memory to analyze the two major “religions” of the Pentateuch (D and P) and their relationship to one another.

Much of the scholarship on the book of Kings has focused on questions of the historicity of the events described.

We are constantly engaged in processing data and sensory inputs all around us, even when we are not conscious of the many neural pathways our minds are traveling.

Maia Kotrosits challenges the contemporary notion of “early Christian literature,” showing that a number of texts usually so described—New Testament writings including Hebrews, Acts, the Gospel of John, Colossians, and 1 Peter, as well as the letters of Ignatius, the Gospel of Truth, and the Secret Revelation of John—are “not particularly interested” in a distinctive Christian identity or self-definition.

In these chapters, a group of renowned international scholars seek to describe Paul and his work from “within Judaism,” rather than on the assumption, still current after thirty years of the “New Perspective,” that in practice Paul left behind aspects of Jewish living after his discovery of Jesus as Christ (Messiah).

Scott Shauf compares the portrayal of the divine in Acts with portrayals of the divine in other ancient historiographical writings, the latter including Jewish and wider Greco-Roman historiographical traditions.

Walter Wink's writing has been described as brilliant, provocative, passionate, and innovative.

Modern scholarship on the parables has long been preoccupied with asking what Jesus himself said and what he intended to accomplish with his parables.

Fresh translations of early Jewish texts 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, written in the decades after the Judean War, which saw Jerusalem conquered, the temple destroyed, and Judaism changed forever.

For far too long, Lauri Thuren argues, the parables of Jesus have been read either as allegories encoding Christian theology—including the theological message of one or another Gospel writer—or as tantalizing clues to the authentic voice of Jesus.

At the origin of the Watchers tradition is the single enigmatic reference in Genesis 6 to the sons of God who had intercourse with human women, producing a race of giants upon the earth.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is a story of near universal importance.

Although healing constitutes both a major theme of biblical literature and a significant practice of biblical communities, healing themes and experiences are not always conspicuous in presentations of biblical theology.

The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5‒7) is the best-known repository of the teachings of Jesus and one of the most studied.

Mark A.

The Texts @ Contexts series gathers scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light.

Illnesses are perceived and understood differently across cultures and over time.

Scholars of the Gospel of Mark usually discuss the merits of patristic references to the Gospel’s origin and Mark’s identity as the “interpreter” of Peter.

Biblical scholars have often contrasted the exegesis of the early church fathers from the eastern region and school of Syrian Antioch against that of the school of Alexandria.

Power and Politics in the Book of Judges studies political culture and behavior in premonarchic Israel, focusing on the protagonists in the book of Judges.

Vital to an agrarian communitys survival, threshing floors are agricultural spaces where crops are threshed and winnowed.

Christians around the world recite the “Lord’s Prayer” daily, but what exactly are they praying for—and what relationship does it have with Jesus’ own context?

Readers have long puzzled over the absence from the Johannine “Last Supper” of any words by Jesus over bread and wine—suggesting to some that John is indifferent or even hostile to sacramental thought or action—and the apparent dislocation to the feeding miracle, in John 6, of Jesus’ declaration that believers must eat his flesh.

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God can be an object of experience and how we should account for God’s empirical availability to us.

Questions surrounding the relationship of Scripture and doctrine are legion within the Protestant tradition.

Karoline Lewis draws together the strengths of two exegetical approaches to the Gospel of John in this volume of the Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries series.