Come and experience the Scriptures in a fresh and life-giving way. In this collaboration between Alabaster Co. and IVP, the full text of the Gospel of Matthew is presented alongside beautiful full-color photographs and fourteen guided meditations by Bible teacher, author, and spiritual director Jan Johnson. Carefully designed as a practical, study-focused version of Alabaster's other bible books, the Alabaster Guided Meditations invite readers into deeper reflection by incorporating the church's ancient lectio divina and visio divina traditions. Though the intersection of New Living Translation Bible passages, photography, thoughtfully designed layouts, and meditations, readers are invited to experience the Gospel of Matthew anew.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"His father and mother were amazed at what was being said about Him." Luke 2:33 "Everyone was amazed at all the things He was doing." Luke 9:43 "He went home, amazed at what had happened." Luke 24:12 From start to finish, the book of Luke is filled with amazement. Throughout the life and ministry of Jesus, those who met him were astonished by their encounter, from the shepherds at the nativity to the disciples at the empty tomb. With careful attention to detail, Michael Card embarks on an imaginative journey through the Gospel of Luke. He introduces us to Luke the historian and imagines his life as a Gentile, a doctor and a slave. Card explores Luke's compelling account of this dynamic rabbi who astounded his hearers with parables and paradoxes. What might Luke have experienced as he interviewed eyewitnesses of Jesus? What leads Luke to focus on the marginalized and the unlikely? Why does Luke include certain details that the other Gospel writers omit? Join Michael Card in the work of opening heart and mind to the "Gospel of Amazement."

Using the church as a framework, Through the Year with John Stott explores in 365 days the whole biblical story from creation to the end times. One of the most highly respected Bible teachers of our times, John Stott gets to the heart of each of the 365 carefully selected passages, covering every essential Christian teaching in a single volume. The readings are broken up into weekly themes. Each devotion is based on a key passage of Scripture, and includes biblical references for further exploration. This new edition of this much-loved classic devotional includes a new foreword from Old Testament Scholar Chris Wright.

Stephen Ahearne-Kroll examines the literary interaction between the Gospel of Mark's passion narrative and four Psalms of Individual Lament evoked in it. These four psalms depict a David who challenges God's role in his suffering, who searches for understanding of his suffering in light of his past relationship with God, and who attempts to shame God into acting on his behalf only because he is suffering. Mark alludes to these psalms in reference to Jesus; David's concerns become woven into the depiction of Jesus. Reading David's challenge to God as part of Jesus' going 'as it is written of him' (i.e., suffering and dying according to Scripture; Mark 14:21) calls into question the necessity for Jesus' death within an apocalyptic framework of meaning. Finally, the suffering King David offers a more appropriate model for Jesus' suffering in Mark than that of the servant from Deutero-Isaiah.

A modern revision of a timeless but forgotten spiritual classic by Robert Law In researching Jesus's emotional life, Episcopal priest and Day1 producer and host Peter Wallace came across a scanned copy of Robert Law's book, The Emotions of Jesus, in the Internet Archive. He found it to be a brilliant jewel of a book that flashes light on the facets of Jesus's emotions and personality, brightening our understanding and appreciation of who Jesus was, how he lived, what it must have been like to be with him, and follow him. Law's century-old text has been carefully revised for a contemporary audience, without diminishing its beauty. Wallace addresses obscure wording and gender bias and provides background information and notes in order to ensure a fresh appreciation by modern readers. The result is a new approach to understanding Jesus, the wholly human one, who embodied a range of emotions as we do, and who serves as a model for living bold, authentic, and fervent lives today as followers of the way of love. Questions for meditation or discussion are included with each chapter.

The Revelation Of St John The Divine. the terminal document of the Holy Bible, subject of countless studies and interpretations.

Is Revelation in fact the ultimate Satanic text, an invocation to the Anti-Christ, the Great Beast 666 who is poised to take control of our decaying planet?

Is it a prophecy of nuclear war and entropy, the utter destruction of the universe which comes with the breaking of the Seventh Seal?

Or is it an eye-witness account of the first wave of alien invasions of Earth, a primitive response to deep-space technology we can only now begin to comprehend?

Revelation is presented here as a work in its own right, as its millennial significance reaches critical mass, to be re-evaluated by theologians, scientist and the common man alike. In his revolutionary introduction, apocalypse watchman Kenneth Rayner Johnson (author of Armageddon 2000) ponders each and every possibility of the text's origins and meaning -- and emerges with a staggering conclusion.

The ecological crisis has created new interest in the ideas about nature found in the Bible, which is often depicted as the source of attitudes that have led to the destruction of our environment. The Hebrew Scriptures, for example, are seen as enshrining oppositional views of nature, because it is assumed that the earliest Israelites were living in a hostile desert environment. In this book Theodore Hiebert re-examines these assumptions, and offers a new understanding of the role of nature in biblical thought. Hiebert stresses the importance of reading the Hebrew Scriptures in their ancient Near Eastern context. He concentrates on the Bible's earliest account of origins: the narratives of the Pentateuch, or Torah, usually attributed to a single author, the Yahwist. His analysis incorporates evidence from recent work in archaeology, history, anthropology, and comparative religion concerning the ecologies, economies, and religions of the ancient Levant. Hiebert shows that the Yahwist's formative landscape was actually hill country with a mixed agrarian economy. The view of God and the kinds of religious ritual described in the Yahwist's narratives are closely linked to this agricultural landscape and reflect the challenges of human survival within it. Rather than posing a problem for biblical religion, the world of nature is seen to play a foundational role in the shape and content of that tradition. Hiebert concludes that the Yahwist's ideology is relevant to contemporary efforts to frame a theology of ecology. Particularly useful to these efforts are the Yahwist's views of reality as unified and non-dualistic, humanity as limited and dependent, nature and humanity as interrelated andof sacred significance, and agriculture as a context for an ecological theology.

Second Corinthians is Paul's apology to the Corinthians for failing to visit them, using rhetorical persuasion in his letters, and appearing unapproved for the collection. The scholarly consensus maintains that 2 Corinthians is a conglomeration of letters due to its literary and logistical inconsistencies. Consequently, most interpretations of 2 Corinthians treat only parts of it. However, a different consensus is emerging. Fredrick Long situates the text within Classical literary and rhetorical conventions and argues for its unity based upon numerous parallels with ancient apology in the tradition of Andocides, Socrates, Isocrates and Demosthenes. He provides a comprehensive survey and rigorous genre analysis of ancient forensic discourse in support of his claims, and shows how the unified message of Paul's letter can be recovered. His study will be of relevance to Classicists and New Testament scholars alike.

This accessible selection of the most important and significant of the remarkable and often bizarre apocryphal stories surrounding the life of Jesus and the Early Church has established a reputation as an invaluable introduction to the genre of Christian apocryphal literature. J. K. Elliott clearly explains the scholarly importance of the genre and introduces each section of texts with reference to biblical texts and later church history. Stories found in this selection include Jesus' birth in a cave, his childhood escapades, his secret sayings, and his descent to the underworld; the torments in Hell; Saint Paul baptizing a lion; the death of Pontius Pilate and Saint Peter being crucified upside down. These all come from early Christian legends which did not get into the Bible, yet have had a profound influence on art, literature, and theology from the second century through the Middle Ages and even modern times. Some of the stories included here, especially those involving the Virgin Mary, have affected matters of doctrine; others have influenced the church's teaching on the after life, whilst from the apocryphal Acts there are some of the best examples of accounts of the lives of Christianity's earliest saints.

For generations, poets have turned to the Bible for insight and inspiration. What did so many creative minds find in scripture? Is the Bible still a vital source of poetic inspirations?

Chapters Into Verse is the first comprehensive collection ever made of poems written in English inspired by the Bible. A groundbreaking anthology, it introduces readers to a distinct heritage of English poetry: the scriptural tradition. Though frequently ignored and sometimes suppressed, this tradition rivals the classical and is every bit as venerable.

Drawing a unique map of the history of English poetry, the two volumes of Chapters Into Verse survey and define the literary legacy of the Scriptures from the fourteenth century to the present. Each volume is arranged in scriptural order, and each poem is preceded by the biblical passage that inspired it. Thus readers can conveniently witness the various ways sacred text has sparked the imagination of poets throughout the ages.

Volume II follows the Gospels (harmonized) through Revelation. The collection features verses both famous and unfamiliar, from John Donne's meditative masterpieces to D.H. Lawrence's quirky expostulations. The editors have included poems by virtually all the prominent religious poets--among them, John Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Edward Taylor, Christopher Smart, and Gerard Manly Hopkins. Included, too, are devotional and visionary works from a wide range of vintage poets--Edmund Spenser, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning.

Proving that the Bible is just as powerful a source of inspiration today as it was in the past, the collection assembles a mixed congregation of modern and contemporary poets, such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Countee Cullen, William Butler Yeats, John Berryman, Robert Graves, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Lee Murray, Amy Clampitt, and Richard Wilbur.

Of enduring interest to readers of both scripture and literature, this anthology illuminates key passages of the New Testament. The measured speech and inspired leaps of poetry offer a spirited alternative to the textual exegesis usually supplied by prose commentary. As such, Chapters Into Verse is truly a poets' Bible. In selection after selection, readers will encounter an astonishing variety of religious experiences, as a host of poets from many eras and many backgrounds respond to Holy Scripture spiritually, profoundly, and imaginatively.

Read how Jesus feeds five thousand geezers with just five loaves of Uncle Fred and two Lillian Gish. Or how Noah built a bloomin' massive nanny. Then there's always the story of David and that massive geezer Goliath, or the time when Simon's finger and thumb-in-law was Tom and Dick in Uncle Ned and Jesus healed her... A very down-to-earth 'translation' that brings scripture out of the pulpit and back onto the streets. 'It certainly is a good laugh while imparting the essential message of the Bible.' Reverend Stan in The Badge, the London cab drivers' newspaper

This volume examines characterization in the four Gospels and in the Sayings Gospel Q. Peter in Matthew, Lazarus in John, and Jesus as Son of Man in Q are examples of the characters studied. The general approach is narrative-critical. At the same time, each contribution takes special effort to widen the scope beyond the narrated world to include the text's ideological and real-life setting as well as its effective history. New ways of doing narrative criticism are thus proposed. The concluding essay by David Rhoads delineates the development and envisions the future of narrative criticism in Gospel studies.

This is the first English translation of the major Armenian epic on Adam and Eve composed by Arak'el of Siwnik' in the early fifteenth century. Arak'el writes extremely powerful narrative poetry, as in his description of the brilliance of paradise, of Satan's mustering his hosts against Adam and Eve, and Eve's inner struggle between obedience to God and Satan's seduction. In parts the epic is in dialogue form between Adam, Eve, and God. It also pays much attention to the typology of Adam and Christ, or Adam's sin and death and Christ's crucifixion. By implication, this story, from an Eastern Christian tradition, is the story of all humans, and bears comparison with later biblical epics, such as Milton's Paradise Lost. Michael E. Stone's version preserves a balance between literary felicity and faithfulness to the original. His Introduction sets the work and its author in historical, religious, and literary context.

Hebrews 12: 1-13 portrays the suffering of the community to which it is addressed by means of two images: an athletic contest, and God's fatherly discipline. In this 1998 book, N. Clayton Croy provides a thorough exploration of the theme of suffering in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman traditions, and surveys the different interpretations of this passage which have been offered by Christian writers over the centuries. He argues that the concept of 'training' unites the passage, which presents Jesus as the supreme athlete, an agonistic exemplar for those running the race. These verses also support a non-punitive understanding of discipline, in which God's children undergo a positive process of education. The educative notion of paideia combines with images of athletic training to establish a call to faithful endurance rather than repentance.

The present study focuses on the theology of the Book of Jeremiah. That theology revolves around themes familiar from Israel's covenantal faith, especially the sovereignty of YHWH expressed in judgment and promise. The outcome of this theological nexus of context, person, and tradition is a book that moves into the abyss and out of the abyss in unexpected ways. It does so, in part, by asserting that God continues to be generatively and disturbingly operative in the affairs of the world, up to and including our contemporary abysses (such as 9/11). The God attested in the Book of Jeremiah invites its readers into and through any and all such dislocations to new futures that combine divine agency and human inventiveness rooted in faithfulness.

The Synoptic Gospels contain traditions about Jesus which differ in some respects from Gospel to Gospel and, it is presumed, from the very earliest Christian traditions. Scholars often seek to establish the earliest form of each tradition and the methods and criteria they use are of the greatest importance. Dr Sanders here provides a reassessment of this whole problem. His study deals directly with the question of determining the reliability of the Synoptic Gospels.

The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers offers an informative introduction to the extant body of Christian texts that existed beside and after the New Testament known to us as the apostolic fathers. Featuring cutting-edge research by leading scholars, it explores how the early Church expanded and evolved over the course of the first and second centuries as evidenced by its textual history. The volume includes thematic essays on imperial context, the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the growth and diversification of the early church, influences and intertextuality, and female leaders in the early church. The Companion contains ground-breaking essays on the individual texts with specific attention given to debates of authorship, authenticity, dating, and theological texture. The Companion will serve as an essential resource for instructors and students of the first two centuries of Christianity.

Now available in English for the first time, Augustine's Commentary on Galatians is his only complete, formal commentary on any book of the Bible and offers unique insights into his understanding of Paul and of his own task as a biblical interpreter. Yet it is one of his least known works today - and this despite its importance in the past for such major figures as Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, and Newman. The present volume seeks to remedy this situation by providing not only an English translation with facing Latin text, but also a comprehensive introduction and copious notes. Since Galatians happens to be the only biblical book commented upon by all the ancient Latin commentators - including Jerome, Pelagius, Ambrosiaster, and Marius Victorinus, as well as Augustine - it provides a basis for comparing them and for identifying Augustine's special concerns and emphases. Augustine's Commentary also has crucial links to other works he wrote at the time, especially his monastic rule and De Doctrina Christiana. Augustine's emphasis on Galatians as a pastoral letter designed to preserve and strengthen Christian unity links the commentary to his monastic rule, while his method and sources link it to, and indeed pave the way for, the theory of biblical interpretation set forth in the De Doctrina Christiana.

In this exhilarating book, John Pritchard reclaims the narrative power of the gospels by retelling well-known stories in vivid, imaginative language, and showing us how our own stories fit into the Christian story and can be transformed by it. He takes key narratives like the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, the parable of the rich fool, and the Last Supper, and helps us to be part of them. We are given the opportunity to see the people involved more clearly, not least of all Jesus himself - and so to consider whether we might live our own lives a little differently. An ideal resource for anyone concerned to communicate the Christian faith in a lively, contemporary style, Living the Gospel Stories Today will prove no less helpful as an aid to personal meditation and group discussion.

Whether used as an individual Bible study or used for studying with a group, the "Nelson Impact Bible Study Guide Series will deepen your knowledge and understanding of the Bible, book by book.

Written in an easy-to-read, interesting style, each study guide will help you to experience the true meaning of the messages of the Bible, and in turn, empower you to truly make a difference in the world for Christ.

Key Features Include:

Timelines

Fun cultural facts and probing questions

Plenty of room for taking notes

Biblical and present-day maps

Other study guides in the series include:

1 Corinthians ISBN: 1418506192

Exodus ISBN: 1418506168

Genesis ISBN: 1418506087

Isaiah ISBN: 1418506095

John ISBN: 1418506109

Mark ISBN: 1418506184

Romans ISBN: 1418506117

Ruth & Esther ISBN: 1418506176

Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians poses exegetical problems of well-known difficulty. The structure and unity of the whole Epistle are in doubt, as is the meaning of many particular passages and references - for example, the identity of Paul's opponents. Dr Collange bases his solutions to these problems on a detailed study of 2,14 - 7,4. He argues that the obscurities of the Epistle can be explained by the particular circumstances of its composition; Paul's use of more primitive Christian materials gives us a measure of his own originality and genius. This book should be of interest to all New Testament scholars.