In this addition to the well-received Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (CCSS), seasoned New Testament scholar and popular speaker Peter Williamson interprets Revelation from within the living tradition of the Church for pastoral ministers, lay readers, and students alike. The seventeen-volume CCSS series, which will cover the entire New Testament, relates Scripture to Christian life today, is faithfully Catholic, and is supplemented by features designed to help readers understand the Bible more deeply and use it more effectively in teaching, preaching, evangelization, and other forms of ministry. Drawn from the best of contemporary scholarship, series volumes are keyed to the liturgical year and include an index of pastoral subjects.

The Book of Revelation can be read in various ways. Where interpretation opts not to venture beyond Revelation or approach the book as a forecast of end-time events, it typically favours either going behind the text, in search of a socio-historical context of origin to which it might refer, or else standing in front of the text and investigating the book's reception history, or its present relevance and impact. Comparatively little interpretative work has been undertaken inside the text, exploring the mechanics of how Revelation 'works', still less how its complex parts might fit together into a meaningful whole. Gordon Campbell considers Revelation to be a coherent narrative composition that draws its hearer or reader into its text-world. In Reading Revelation: A Thematic Approach, Campbell gives an innovative account of Revelation's sophisticated thematic content. Mindful of Revelation's narrative verve, or its architecture en mouvement (as Jacques Ellul once put it), Campbell plots a series of thematic trajectories through the book. On this reading, parody and parallelism fundamentally shape the whole narrative. As a first-ever integrated account of Revelation's macro-themes, Reading Revelation makes an important contribution to Revelation scholarship. In its light, the book may justifiably be seen as the 'crowning achievement' of the Scriptures.

In this volume, Lamar Williamson's commentary provides teachers, preachers, and all serious students of the Bible with an interpretation that takes serious hermeneutical responsibility for the contemporary meaning and significance of Mark's text.

Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

In Family 13 in Saint John's Gospel, Jac Perrin innovatively applies phylogenetic software to shed new light on Family 13 membership. To date, the relocation of the Pericope Adulterae from its traditional location in John 7:53 has been the sole criterion of Family 13 filiality. This book demonstrates the inadequacy of this criterion, and proposes new criteria in its stead. Nineteen potential Family 13 witnesses are analyzed by means of a sampling process developed by David Parker, identifying eight witnesses inappropriately nominated as Family 13 members. This analysis is corroborated by a complete computer assisted collation of all variant readings in all known Family 13 witnesses. Lastly, the volume offers a comprehensive stemma representing the entire Johannine corpus of ten confirmed Family witnesses in constellation.

* Based on his popular Holy Week talks, given in Canterbury Cathedral

The Accountable Animal: Justice, Justification, and Judgement offers a theological meditation on the human being as an accountable animal. Brendan Case introduces the idea of accountability, not merely as a structural feature of human institutions, but as a disposition to submit to rightly-constituted authority, whether divine or human. He relates this conception of accountability to the key themes of "justice, justification, and judgment".

It is difficult to underestimate the significance of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 within the biblical tradition. Although hell occupies a prominent position in popular Christianrhetoric today, it plays a relatively minor role in the Christian canon. The most important biblical texts that explicitly describe the fate of the dead are in the Synoptic Gospels. Yet among these passages, only the Lukan tradition is intent on explicitly describing the abode of the dead; it is the only biblical tour of hell. Hauge examines the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, uniquely the only 'parable' that is set within a supernatural context. The parables characteristically feature concrete realities of first-century Mediterranean life, but the majority of Luke 16:19-31 is narrated from the perspective of the tormented dead. This volume demonstrates that the distinctive features of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus are the result of a strategic imitation, creative transformation, and Christian transvaluation of the descent of Odysseus into the house of hades in Odyssey Book 11, the literary model par excellence of postmortem revelation in antiquity.

Originally published in 1936, this book contains the text of Charles Harold Dodd's inaugural lecture upon taking up the position of Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in New Testament studies in the interwar period in Britain and in the work of Dodd more generally.

Twenty years on from its original appearance, this ground-breaking first volume in N. T. Wright's magisterial series, 'Christian Origins and the Question of God', still stands as a major point of reference for students of the New Testament and early Christianity. This latest impression has been completely reset to make Wright's elegant and engrossing text more readable. 'The sweep of Wright's project as a whole is breathtaking. It is impossible to give a fair assessment of his achievement without sounding grandiose: no New Testament scholar since Bultmann has even attempted - let alone achieved - such an innovative and comprehensive account of New Testament history and theology.' Richard B. Hays

The Bible is the world's best-selling book - it has influenced and inspired millions through the ages. The New Testament recounts the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and follows the first Christians as they begin to spread his revolutionary message to people all around the world. The New International Version is the most popular Bible translation in modern English. It is both readable and accurate, and this edition includes shortcuts to well-known stories and people in the Bible, as well as an introductory reading plan and a selection of passages offering help and guidance.

There are twenty-seven books in the traditional New Testament, but the early-Christian community was far more vibrant than that small number might lead you to think. In fact, many more scriptures were written and were just as important as the New Testament in shaping early-Christian communities and beliefs. Over the past century, many of those texts that were lost have been found and translated, yet they are rarely read in contemporary churches; they are discussed mainly by scholars or within a context only of gnostic gospels. In A New New Testament Hal Taussig seeks to change that.

Scholars largely agree that the NT term a oemysteriona is a terminus technicus, originating from Daniel. This project traces the word in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other sectors of Judaism. Like Daniel, the term consistently retains eschatological connotations. The monograph then examines how mystery functions within 1 Corinthians and seeks to explain why the term is often employed. The apocalyptic term concerns the Messiah reigning in the midst of defeat, eschatological revelations and tongues, charismatic exegesis, and the transformation of believers into the image of the last Adam.

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's reputation as a recognized expert on the Corinthian correspondence has been built on the original solutions he has offered to perennial problems. Brought together for the first time in one volume, each of the twelve articles anthologised here deals with a complex aspect of interpretation for 2 Corinthians. Whether addressing the interpretation of a particular passage, the question of co-authorship, or the relation of the epistle to other texts, Murphy-O'Connor presents his evidence in a characteristically clear and incisive style.
A newly written 'reception history' has been appended to each article to bring the collection up to date with the latest research on the epistle.
This is a companion volume to Keys to First Corinthians, also available from Oxford University Press.

The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament is a detailed introduction to the New Testament, written by more than 40 scholars from a variety of Christian denominations. Treats the 27 books and letters of the New Testament systematically, beginning with a review of current issues and concluding with an annotated bibliography Considers the historical, social and cultural contexts in which the New Testament was produced, exploring relevant linguistic and textual issues An international contributor list of over 40 scholars represent wide field expertise and a variety of Christian denominations Distinctive features include a unified treatment of Luke through Acts, articles on the canonical Gospels, and a discussion of the apocryphal New Testament

At the end of several of his letters the apostle Paul claims to be penning a summary and farewell greeting in his own hand: 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Philemon, cf. Colossians, 2 Thessalonians. Paul's claims raise some interesting questions about his letter-writing practices. Did he write any complete letters himself, or did he always dictate to a scribe? How much did his scribes contribute to the composition of his letters? Did Paul make the effort to proofread and correct what he had dictated? What was the purpose of Paul's autographic subscriptions? What was Paul's purpose in calling attention to their autographic nature? Why did Paul write in large letters in the subscription of his letter to the Galatians? Why did he call attention to this peculiarity of his handwriting? A good source of answers to these questions can be found among the primary documents that have survived from around the time of Paul, a large number of which have been discovered over the past two centuries and in fact continue to be discovered to this day. From around the time of Paul there are extant several dozen letters from the caves and refuges in the desert of eastern Judaea (in Hebrew, Aramaic, Nabataean, Greek, and Latin), several hundred from the remains of a Roman military camp in Vindolanda in northern England (in Latin), and several thousand from the sands of Middle and Upper Egypt (in Greek, Latin, and Egyptian Demotic). Reece has examined almost all these documents, many of them unpublished and rarely read, with special attention to their handwriting styles, in order to shed some light on these technical aspects of Paul's letter-writing conventions.

Jenny Read-Heimerdinger examines the language of Luke-Acts, exploring aspects of Luke's use of Greek that traditional approaches have not generally accounted for previously. Drawing on contemporary developments in linguistics - broadly referred to as 'discourse analysis' - Read-Heimerdinger emphasises that paying close attention to the context of language is vital to understanding the reasons behind an author's choices. Read-Heimerdinger applies the tools of discourse analysis to several features of Luke's Greek - such as variation in word order, the use of the article and fine distinctions between synonyms - in order to demonstrate how principles that govern their use subsequently affect exegesis. In addition, she makes suggestions to account for manuscript variation, which in turn have an impact on the editorial choices of Nestle-Aland's Greek New Testament.