Matthew's Jesus is typically described as the humble, compassionate messiah. This 2002 book argues that this is, however, only half the story. Matthew's theologically rich quotation of Isaiah 42.1-4, traditionally considered one of the four servant songs, underscores that manifest in Jesus' powerful message and deeds, particularly his healings and inclusion of the marginalized, is the justice that was thought to accompany the arrival of the kingdom of God. The study explores modifications to the text-form of the Isaianic citations, their relationship to the surrounding context, and the rhetorical force of the final form. It argues that the quotations are bi-referential, functioning on both a narrative and theological level, and also explores the issues surrounding the troublesome 'extraneous' content. It arrives at the conclusion that this citation was central to Matthew's understanding of Jesus' life and mission. All totalled, this study offers a refreshing exploration of Matthew's high, ethical Christology.

This 1999 book was the first to use all the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls to reconstruct original Aramaic sources from parts of Mark's Gospel. The scrolls enabled the author to revolutionize the methodology of such work, and to reconstruct whole passages which he interpreted in their original cultural context. The passages from which sources are reconstructed are Mark 9.11-13; 2.23-3.6; 10.35-45; and 14.12-26. A detailed discussion of each passage is offered, demonstrating that these sources are completely accurate accounts from the ministry of Jesus, from early sabbath disputes to his final Passover. An account of the translation process is given, showing how problems in Mark's text arose from the difficulty of translating some Aramaic expressions into Greek, including the notoriously difficult 'son of man'. A very early date for these sources is proposed, implying a date of c. 40 CE for Mark's Gospel.

This study contributes to debate about the portraits of Paul in Acts and his epistles by considering Paul's Miletus speech (Acts 20.18b-35) and identifies and compares major themes in Luke and Paul's views of Christian leadership. Comparisons with Jesus' speeches in Luke show how Lukan the speech is and, with 1 Thessalonians, how Pauline it is. The speech calls the Ephesian elders to service after Paul's departure to Jerusalem, focusing on: faithful fulfilment of leadership responsibility; suffering; attitudes to wealth and work; and the death of Jesus. Paul models Christian leadership for the elders. Parallels in Luke highlight his view of Christian leadership - modelled by Jesus and taught to his disciples, and modelled by Paul and taught to the elders. Study of 1 Thessalonians identifies a remarkably similar portrait of Christian leadership. The Miletus speech is close in thought, presentation and vocabulary to an early, indubitably Pauline letter.

In this 2006 text, Daniel M. Gurtner examines the meaning of the rending of the veil at the death of Jesus in Matthew 27:51a by considering the functions of the veil in the Old Testament and its symbolism in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Gurtner incorporates these elements into a compositional exegesis of the rending text in Matthew. He concludes that the rending of the veil is an apocalyptic assertion like the opening of heaven revealing, in part, end-time images drawn from Ezekiel 37. Moreover, when the veil is torn Matthew depicts the cessation of its function, articulating the atoning role of Christ's death which gives access to God not simply in the sense of entering the Holy of Holies (as in Hebrews), but in trademark Matthean Emmanuel Christology: 'God with us'. This underscores the significance of Jesus' atoning death in the first gospel.

This book provides an edition, with a facing translation and detailed commentary, of the three apocryphal gospels of Mary written in Old English. The gospels, which deal with Mary's birth, childhood, death and assumption, are found in manuscripts in Oxford and Cambridge, but have rarely been treated as a group before and in fact have been almost totally neglected by English scholars. An extensive introduction explains the origins and development of the apocrypha from the second to the eleventh century, discussing the Syriac, Greek, Coptic and Latin evidence. Clayton goes on to consider in detail the influence of these apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England by placing the Old English texts in a very broad context. Editions of Latin analogues from eleventh-century English manuscripts are also included in appendices.

Judaean society in the first century did not conform to the stereotypical 'Mediterranean honour culture', in that it lacked a significant gentile population and was dominated by a powerful religious elite. Timothy Ling argues that this demands a new social-scientific approach to the Gospel and Letters of John that moves away from the accepted 'sectarian' interpretation. He attributes their distinctiveness instead to their roots in Jesus's Judaean ministry, as contrasted with the Galilean ministry that has attracted much recent study. In particular, Ling contends that the numerous references to 'the poor' in the New Testament can be better understood in the context of the 'alternative' ideologies found among pietistic religious groups practising asceticism, renunciation, and other forms of 'virtuoso religion' in first-century Judaea. In doing so, he mounts a convincing challenge to the current dominant reading of the Gospel of John as a product of early Christian sectarianism.

The authorship of the Pastoral letters has been a matter of intense scholarly debate for almost two hundred years. The letters clearly purport to be written by Paul, but perceived differences in the literary style, vocabulary and theology of the Pastorals when compared with that of the genuine Pauline letters suggests that this was not so. The arguments have centred primarily on the question of whether Paul or a disciple of Paul - a gifted pseudonymist - composed these letters. It is the 'either/or' nature of the debate that is brought into serious question in this book. Dr Miller argues that the Pastorals reflect a compositional history that was commonplace throughout the ancient Near East. He takes the reader on a wide-ranging tour of biblical and extra-biblical sources, examining their literary histories, and arguing that the Pastorals are composite documents, not unlike many Jewish and early Christian works.

This book, first published in 1997, examines the influence of angelology on the christology of the Apocalypse of John. In the Apocalypse, Jesus appears in glorious form reminiscent of angels in Jewish and Christian literature in the period between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Dr Carrell asks what significance this has for the christology of the Apocalypse. He concludes that by portraying Jesus in such a way that he has the form and function of an angel, and yet is also divine, the Apocalypse both upholds monotheism and at the same time provides a means for Jesus to be presented in visible, glorious form to his Church.

This study refutes the allegation that the author of Luke-Acts showed no systematic thought about the significance of Jesus's death, that is, he has no theologia crucis. Peter Doble focuses sharply on the Gospel's death scene and explores those features which appear in Luke alone, then extends the results into the longer account of Jesus's final days in Jerusalem. In the final section Doble demonstrates how specific words and patterns from Wisdom shape and fill Luke's retelling of the story of Jesus's entrapment, trials and death. Luke wanted his readers to understand that what had happened to Jesus was not a humiliating rejection but in accord with scripture's presentation of God's plan for salvation, and he modelled traditional material about Jesus's road to the crucifixion around an explanatory model which he drew from Wisdom.

The aim of this book is to illuminate the manner in which Mark understood Jesus' death. That death forms the climax of the Gospel, and is all-important for the evangelist. Since it is central to every form of Christianity, much has already been written on the significance Jesus' death had for Mark. Most previous studies, like the first edition of this book, used redaction criticism to interpret Mark's viewpoint from the alterations he made to the form of the Passion narrative as he had received it from tradition. More recently the Gospels have been examined as continuous stories, and the author adopts this approach in the additional material of his new edition. By examining the general sweep of the narrative, and in particular of its last chapters, Professor Best attempts to show how Mark saw Jesus' death as both an atonement for sin and as creative of the new community of the Church.

This book considers the early history of Jewish-Christian relations focussing on traditions about the fallen angels. In the Book of the Watchers, an Enochic apocalypse from the third century BCE, the 'sons of God' of Gen 6:1-4 are accused of corrupting humankind through their teachings of metalworking, cosmetology, magic, and divination. By tracing the transformations of this motif in Second Temple, Rabbinic, and early medieval Judaism and early, late antique, and Byzantine Christianity, this book sheds light on the history of interpretation of Genesis, the changing status of Enochic literature, and the place of parabiblical texts and traditions in the interchange between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In the process, it explores issues such as the role of text-selection in the delineation of community boundaries and the development of early Jewish and Christian ideas about the origins of evil on the earth.

Luke's two-volume work begins with a formal preface unlike anything else in the New Testament, and it has long been academic orthodoxy that Luke's choice of style, vocabulary, and content in this short passage reveal a desire to present his work to contemporary readers as 'History' in the great tradition of Thucydides and Polybius. This study challenges that assumption: far from aping the classical historians, Dr Alexander argues, Luke was simply introducing his book in a style that would have been familiar to readers of the scientific and technical manuals which proliferated in the hellenistic world. The book contains a detailed study of these Greek 'scientific' prefaces as well as a word-by-word commentary on the Lucan texts. In her concluding chapters, Alexander seeks to explore the consequences of this alignment both for the literary genre of Luke-Acts (is it meant to be read as 'history'?) and for the social background of the author and the book's first readers.

Spanning a variety of disciplines, this 1995 enquiry focuses on one particular Pauline characteristic: the apostle's habit of making matters of faith the object of logical appraisal. A tracing of the elliptical patterns of argument in Romans 1-8 illustrates this habit and, at the same time, displays how Paul's vigorous persistence in it seems often not to be matched by the solidity, or at any rate the lucidity, of his logic. By viewing Paul against the background of semiology, more especially the semiological theory of Umberto Eco, new light is shed on the genesis of Paul's reasoning. The discussion which ensues is marked by an interesting and productive combination of modern linguistics and classical logic. Moreover, the singular potential of today's techniques of 'fuzzy' logical analysis for measuring the intellectual muscle of Paul's argumentation is brought out dramatically by the uniqueness of his semiological situation. His rationality takes on a new face.

A study of the authenticity and interpretation of the last twelve verses of St Mark's Gospel. These verses are omitted from at least one important manuscript tradition and queried in most modern translations (though not from the NEB). Professor Farmer traces the history of the text tradition for omission back to Egypt, and argues that one important factor contributing to their omission was the dangerous teaching they seemed to contain: they appear to encourage Christians to handle deadly snakes and drink poisons to prove their faith, a practice which has been revived today by some Christian sects who accept the scriptural authority of these verses. The teaching of these verses has, however, never become established in orthodox Christianity and indeed most Christians are unaware of their doctrinal significance. Professor Farmer reviews all the textual and patristic evidence and examines the most plausible solutions that have been canvassed. This is another substantial contribution to a series that has set the highest standards of scholarship in biblical and New Testament studies.

St Mark's Gospel was put together from oral and perhaps written source material, which the redactor-editor edited and linked together by seams' or joining phrases. The evangelist is thus regarded as a translator/editor of sources, and also as a creative artist in his shaping of the material and in his editorial writing which moulds the disparate sources into an integrated narrative. Dr Pryke tests some eighteen syntactically unusual features of 'Markan usage' statistically to see if they are mainly source material (S) or redactional (R). Objective criteria are provided for distinguishing redactional passages, and the linguistic method is used to see if residual S passages might be converted to R. Appendixes analyse the vocabulary for a list of the most frequently used words in R passages, annotate unusual syntax and special vocabulary of R verses, and provide a complete redactional Greek text. Dr Pryke's methods and conclusions will be of great value to those concerned with the analysis of St Mark's Gospel, and of interest to all concerned with linguistic studies of New Testament texts.

It has often been suggested that Luke's two volumes were written as an apology for Christianity, to demonstrate to the Roman authorities that the new faith was not a dangerous and subversive innovation, a threat to the Pax Romana and to Roman rule. This book reviews the development of the 'traditional perspective', then raises some questions, e.g. if Luke was writing an apologia pro ecclesia, why does he include so much material politically damaging to the Christian cause? Is it possible that the approach has been made from the wrong angle, that Luke was writing an apologia not pro ecclesia but pro imperio, to assure his fellow Christians that Church and Empire need not fear or suspect each other? This conclusion is then supported by an investigation of the text of Luke-Acts, particularly the trials of Jesus and Paul. This challenging volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the New Testament and to ecclesiastical and Roman historians.

The author of this lucid and interdisciplinary study of Mark's Gospel believes that - when applied to Gospel texts - sociological analysis and literary criticism may be far closer together in purpose and intent than is often supposed. Professor Camery-Hoggatt therefore begins his work with an exploration of the social functions of narrative in general, and of ironic narrative in particular. He then turns to the literary functions of the internal elements of the narrative, and draws the two discussions together into a single framework that can be used as a lens through which Mark's Gospel can be read. The author's claim is that irony - especially dramatic irony - thoroughly permeates the Gospel, and that this evinces a rhetorical strategy central to Mark's whole narrative. The second half of the book shows that the presence of irony is especially powerful when the deeper level of meaning is somehow hidden from the story's characters.

Among the problems which Hebrews poses for interpretation, its use of sacrificial terminology must cause it to seem remote and obscure. Although the recent work of social anthropologists on the nature of religious systems has been applied by Old Testament scholars to the laws and symbols of the Pentateuch this is the first sustained study of Hebrews to take account of these theories. Building on the work of such writers as Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Claude Levi-Strauss, Hebrews is approached here as a 'structure of symbols', in which the symbol-system of the Old Testament covenant is re-presented and transposed. Motifs explored by the author include sacred time and space; liminality; the sacrificial function of blood, death, oaths, and blessings; and the narrative traditions of election and exclusion. Dr Dunnill assesses Hebrews, not as an argument, but as an act of symbolic communication expressing the possibility of direct communion with God.

This book was first published in 1996. Matthew uniquely highlights Jesus as 'Emmanuel', but almost wholly overlooked are the deeper implications of this 'presence' motif for Matthean Christology, as well as its centripetal force on his readers. With regard to the rhetorical, historical and theological dimensions of the text, Dr Kupp takes a multi-disciplinary approach. The three verses commonly cited are only the starting point for the weaving of the Emmanuel Messiah into the story-telling, redaction and Christology of the Gospel. Kupp employs the lenses of both narrative and historical criticism to produce the first monograph in English on the subject of divine presence in Matthew. After giving primacy to a whole-story reading, Kupp finds its roots in the familiar social and literary contexts of Sinai, Jerusalem and the Jewish scriptures. Matthew's Gospel is a story that compels, a text with a history and a Christological treatise.

This book is a study of Paul's response to the financial help he received from the church in Philippi whilst he was a prisoner in Rome. Philippians 4.10-20 has always puzzled commentators because of its seemingly strained and tortured mode of thanks. Word studies, psychological studies and literary studies have all failed to provide insight into the text, which is unique in the Pauline corpus. Using contemporary sources Dr Peterman re-examines this difficult passage in the light of Greek and Roman practices and language regarding the exchange of gifts and favours in society. He concludes that 'gift exchange' or 'social reciprocity', with its expectations and obligations, permeated every level of society in Paul's day, and that Paul's seemingly ungracious response was an attempt to create a new, Christian attitude to gifts and to giving.

This programmatic socio-rhetorical investigation approaches the Epistle of James as an instance of written deliberative rhetoric, and it seeks to ascertain the social texture of James 2.5, a rhetorical performance of language that in other contexts is explicitly attributed to Jesus. Utilizing the conventions of Greco-Roman rhetoric, Dr Wachob successively probes the inner texture, the intertexture, the social and cultural texture, and the ideological implications of the rhetoric in James 2.1-13. He analyses James' activation of antecedent texts in the LXX, common conceptions and topics in the broader culture, and also sayings in the Jesus tradition. He concludes that James emanates from the same milieu as the pre-Matthean Sermon on the Mount and shows James 2.5 to be an artful performance of the principal beatitude in that early epitome of Jesus' teachings.

In this 2002 book, James M. Scott focuses on a particular Old Testament pseudepigraphon - the Book of Jubilees, the revelation of an angel to Moses announcing the expectation of a messiah from Judah. He traces the appropriation of the Book of Jubilees in early Christian sources from the New Testament to Hippolytus and beyond, and more specifically focuses on the reception of Jubilees 8-9, an expansion of the so-called Table of Nations in Genesis 10 (1 Chronicles 1). The book takes an interdisciplinary approach based on detailed analysis of primary sources, much of which is seldom considered by New Testament scholars, and explores the neglected topic of ancient geographical conceptions. By studying geographical aspects of the work, Dr Scott is able to relate Jubilees to both Old and New Testament traditions, bringing important new insights into Christian concepts of annunciation.

For many years Luke-Acts has been studied as a work of history and theology. The Trial of the Gospel sets out to examine Luke's writings as an apologetic work, by focusing on those parts of Luke's story where the apologetic overtones seem most prominent - the trial narratives. By analysing the trials of all major Lukan characters - Jesus, Peter, Stephen, and Paul - Alexandru Neagoe argues that the narratives are best understood when viewed as part of Luke's apologia pro evangelio, a purpose which is in keeping with the author's declared aim to give his readers 'assurance' about the 'matters' in which they had been instructed (Luke 1:4). Neagoe concludes that the specific role of the trial narratives is to provide the framework within which important tenets of the Christian faith are themselves put 'on trial' before the reader, with the intended result of the gospel's confirmation.

This is an interdisciplinary study which constructs a dialogue between biblical interpretation and systematic theology. It examines how far a reading of the Book of Revelation might either support or question the work of leading theologians Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jurgen Moltmann on the theology of history, exploring the way in which the author of Revelation uses the dimensions of space and time to make theological points about the relationship between God and history. The book argues that Revelation sets the present earthly experience of the reader in the context of God's ultimate purposes, by disclosing hidden dimensions of reality, both spatial - embracing heaven and earth - and temporal - extending into the ultimate future. Dr Gilbertson offers a detailed assessment of the theologies of history developed by Pannenberg and Moltmann, including their views on the nature of the historical process, and the use of apocalyptic ideas in eschatology.