This book demonstrates that the Gospels originated from a sequential hypertextual reworking of the contents of Paul's letters and, in the case of Matthew and John, of the Acts of the Apostles. Consequently, the new quest for the historical Jesus, which takes this discovery into serious consideration, results in a rather limited reconstruction of Jesus' life. However, since such a reconstruction includes, among others, Jesus' messiahship, behaving in a way which was later interpreted as pointing to him as the Son of God, instituting the Lord's Supper, being conscious of the religious significance of his imminent death, dying on the cross, and appearing as risen from the dead to Cephas and numerous other Jewish believers, it can be reconciled with the principles of the Christian faith.

In this six-session video Bible study (DVD/digital video sold separately), Kristy Cambron invites you on a journey through the Gospel of Luke using a technique that revolutionized her time with God–Verse Mapping.

If you have a deep desire to unpack the meaning of the Scriptures you’re reading but you want to do it in a simple way–then verse mapping is for you. Verse mapping includes Hebrew/Greek word studies, finding connections in Scripture, comparing Bible translations, and learning as much as you can from your time with the Holy Spirit. And it’s even better when you do it with others as a group.

Simply put, verse mapping is getting real about studying Scripture. More than just reading a verse or passage, it’s about researching everything you can about what you’ve read to learn more about who God is and how He speaks into your life through His Word.

What if there were no barriers to your faith journey?

Take a verse mapping journey through the Gospel of Luke and experience your own story road through Scripture!

How do we know what we know about the origins of the Christian religion? Neither its founder, nor the Apostles, nor Paul left any written accounts of their movement. The witnesses' testimonies were transmitted via successive generations of copyists and historians, with the oldest surviving fragments dating to the second and third centuries - that is, to well after Jesus' death. In this innovative and important book, Markus Vinzent interrogates standard interpretations of Christian origins handed down over the centuries. He scrutinizes - in reverse order - the earliest recorded sources from the sixth to the second century, showing how the works of Greek and Latin writers reveal a good deal more about their own times and preoccupations than they do about early Christianity. In so doing, the author boldly challenges understandings of one of the most momentous social and religious movements in history, as well as its reception over time and place.

Messianism is one of the great themes in intellectual history. But for precisely this reason, because it has done so much important ideological work for the people who have written about it, the historical roots of the discourse itself have been obscured from view. What did it mean to talk about "messiahs" in the ancient world, before the idea of messianism became a philosophical juggernaut, dictating the terms for all subsequent discussion of the topic? In this book, Matthew V. Novenson gives a revisionist account of messianism in antiquity. He shows that, for the ancient Jews and Christians who used the term, a messiah was not an article of faith but a manner of speaking. It was a scriptural figure of speech, one among numerous others, useful for thinking kinds of political order: present or future, real or ideal, monarchic or theocratic, dynastic or charismatic, and other variations beside. The early Christians famously seized upon the title "messiah" (in Greek, "Christ") for their founding hero and thus molded the sense of the term in certain ways, but, Novenson shows, this is nothing other than what all ancient messiah texts do, each in its own way. If we hope to understand the ancient texts about messiahs (from Deutero-Isaiah to the Parables of Enoch, from the Qumran Community Rule to the Gospel of John, from the Pseudo-Clementines to Sefer Zerubbabel), then we must learn to think in terms not of a world-historical idea but of a language game, of so many creative reuses of an archaic Israelite idiom. In The Grammar of Messianism, Novenson demonstrates the possibility and the benefit of thinking of messianism in this way.

A critical reconsideration of the repeated use of the biblical letters of Paul. The letters of Paul have been used to support and condone a host of evils over the span of more than two millennia: racism, slavery, imperialism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, to name a few. Despite, or in some cases because of, this history, readers of Paul have felt compelled to reappropriate his letters to fit liberal or radical politics, seeking to set right the evils done in Paul's name. Starting with the language of excrement, refuse, and waste in Paul's letters, Profaning Paul looks at how Paul's "shit" is recycled and reconfigured. It asks why readers, from liberal Christians to academic biblical scholars to political theorists and philosophers, feel compelled to make Paul into a hero, mining his words for wisdom. Following the lead of feminist, queer, and minoritized scholarship, Profaning Paul asks what would happen if we stopped recycling Paul's writings. By profaning the status of his letters as sacred texts, we might open up new avenues for imagining political figurations to meet our current and coming political, economic, and ecological challenges.

F. Gerald Downing explores the teachings of Paul, arguing that the development of Paul's preaching and of the Pauline Church owed a great deal to the views of the vagabond Cynic philosophers, critics of the gods and of the ethos of civic society. F. Gerald Downing examines the New Testament writings of Paul, explaining how he would have been seen, heard, perceived and understood by his culturally and ethnically diverse converts and disciples. He engages in a lucid Pauline commentary and offers some startling and ground-breaking views of Paul and his Word. Cynics, Paul and the Pauline Churches is a unique and controversial book, particularly in its endorsement of the simple and ascetic life proffered in Paul's teachings in comparison with the greedy, consumerist and self-promoting nature of today's society.

The First Edition of the New Testament is a groundbreaking book that argues that the New Testament is not the product of a centuries-long process of development. Its history, David Trobisch contends, is the history of a book--an all Greek Christian bible--published as early as the second century C.E. and intended by its editors to be read as a whole. Trobisch claims that this bible achieved wide circulation and formed the basis of all surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. Review: Dr. Trobisch has produced a thought-provoking and significant study that will surely challenge the traditional understanding of the formation of the canon....The First Edition of the New Testament could have relevance for years to come.--Faith & Mission

"Reading Jesus" is a personal journey through the fundamental Biblical stories. As celebrated author Mary Gordon ponders the intense strangeness of a deity in human form, unresolved moral ambiguities within the text, and the problem posed to her as an enlightened reader by the miracle of the Resurrection. What she rediscovers--and reinterprets with her signature candor, intelligence, and straightforwardness--is a rich store of overlapping, sometimes conflicting teachings that feel both familiar and tantalizingly elusive.

This volume presents in new English translations the scattered fragments and testimonies regarding Hermes Thrice Great that complete Brian Copenhaver's translation of the Hermetica (Cambridge, 1992). It contains the twenty-nine fragments from Stobaeus (including the famous Kore Kosmou), the Oxford and Vienna fragments (never before translated), an expanded selection of fragments from various authors (including Zosimus of Panopolis, Augustine, and Albert the Great), and testimonies about Hermes from thirty-eight authors (including Cicero, Pseudo-Manetho, the Emperor Julian, Al-Kindi, Michael Psellus, the Emerald Tablet, and Nicholas of Cusa). All translations are accompanied by introductions and notes which cite sources for further reading. These Hermetic texts will appeal to a broad array of readers interested in western esotericism including scholars of Egyptology, the New Testament, the classical world, Byzantium, medieval Islam, the Latin Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

The act of martyrdom in the worldview of the Apocalypse has been considered to be an exemplification of non-violent resistance. Paul Middleton argues here, however, that it is in fact a representation of direct participation by Christians, through their martyrdom, in divine violence against those the author of Revelation portrays as God's enemies. Middleton shows that acceptance of martyrdom is to grasp the invitation to participate in the Revelation's divine violence. Martyrs follow the model laid down by the Lamb, who was not only slain, but resurrected, glorified, and who executes judgement. The world created by the Apocalypse encourages readers to conquer the Beast through martyrdom, but also through the experience of resurrection and being appointed judges. In this role, martyrs participate in the judgement of the wicked by sharing the Lamb's power to judge. Different from eschewing violence, the conceptual world of the Apocalypse portrays God, the Lamb, and the martyrs as possessing more power, might, and violent potential than the Emperor and his armies. Middleton believes that martyrdom and violence are necessary components of the worldview of Revelation.

First published in 1951, this book forms a critique of the Two-Source Hypothesis, the theory in biblical studies that postulates the existence of a lost 'Q' Gospel. The Q theory achieved popularity through its formal completeness in explaining the presence of parallel verses in Luke and Matthew with no parallel in Mark. Yet, as Butler argues in this book, these narrative links can also be explained by a direct comparison of the third and fourth Gospels, one that avoids the necessity of a missing source. The text is highly detailed and contains numerous references to original material, together with generous additional notes. It will be of value to anyone with an interest in biblical history and theology.

Originally published in 1908, this book constitutes an exploration of the concept of 'spirit' in the New Testament. The text is divided into two parts: part one provides a synopsis of passages relating to spirit, with English explications being given beneath original Greek quotations; part two analyses the general teaching of New Testament literature in relation to the divine Spirit and its influence. The reader is thus provided with a concise document relating the position of spirit in relation to the Scriptures, together with its abiding importance for the relationship between Church and the individual. This concise, yet detailed, book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Christian theology or biblical exegesis.

Peter is a fascinating character in all four canonical gospels, not only as a literary figure in each of the gospels respectively, but also when looked at from an intertextual perspective. This book examines how Peter is rewritten for each of the gospels, positing that the different portrayals of this crucial figure reflect not only the theological priorities of each gospel author, but also their attitude towards their predecessors. Rewriting Peter as an Intertextual Character in the Canonical Gospels is the first critical study of the canonical gospels which is based on Markan priority, Luke's use of Mark and Matthew, and John's use of all three synoptic gospels. Through a selection of close readings, Damgaard both provides a new critical portrait of Peter and proposes a new theory of source and redaction in the gospels. In the last thirty years there has been an increasing appreciation of the gospels' literary design and of the gospel writers as authors and innovators rather than merely compilers and transmitters. However, literary critics have tended to read each gospel individually as if they were written for isolated communities. This book reconsiders the relationship between the gospels, arguing that the works were composed for a general audience and that the writers were bold and creative interpreters of the tradition they inherited from earlier gospel sources. Damgaard's view that the gospel authors were familiar with the work of their predecessors, and that the divergences between their narratives were deliberate, sheds new light on their intentions and has a tremendous impact on our understanding of the gospels.

A critical reconsideration of the repeated use of the biblical letters of Paul. The letters of Paul have been used to support and condone a host of evils over the span of more than two millennia: racism, slavery, imperialism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, to name a few. Despite, or in some cases because of, this history, readers of Paul have felt compelled to reappropriate his letters to fit liberal or radical politics, seeking to set right the evils done in Paul's name. Starting with the language of excrement, refuse, and waste in Paul's letters, Profaning Paul looks at how Paul's "shit" is recycled and reconfigured. It asks why readers, from liberal Christians to academic biblical scholars to political theorists and philosophers, feel compelled to make Paul into a hero, mining his words for wisdom. Following the lead of feminist, queer, and minoritized scholarship, Profaning Paul asks what would happen if we stopped recycling Paul's writings. By profaning the status of his letters as sacred texts, we might open up new avenues for imagining political figurations to meet our current and coming political, economic, and ecological challenges.

The publication in 1881 of The New Testament in the Original Greek, by the Cambridge scholars Brooke Foss Westcott (1825 1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828 1892), marked the culmination of twenty-eight years of work and revolutionised the theory and methods of New Testament textual criticism. The editors broke with tradition and reconstructed a critical text based on the third-century uncial manuscripts Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, paving the way for future editions. Westcott and Hort's claim to reconstruct the 'original text' may seem extravagant today; but according to Bruce Metzger theirs was the 'most noteworthy critical edition of the Greek Testament ever produced by British scholarship'. This second volume contains the reconstructed text. Readings that the editors thought were possible contenders for the original are printed in the margin; other readings, judged to be of value but appearing later, are given in the appendix.

Published posthumously in 1893, Frederick Scrivener's Adversaria Critica Sacra remains a volume of key importance to biblical scholars today, representing Scrivener's remarkable accuracy in his study and collation of manuscripts. During an age when many manuscripts were being newly discovered, and New Testament textual criticism was a rapidly developing field, Scrivener's collations played an important role in highlighting and making available the many different readings in existence. The book presents sixty-three manuscripts containing all or part of the Greek New Testament, including twenty which contain the Gospels in whole or in part, fifteen Lectionaries (Greek Church Lesson-books), five copies of Acts and the Catholic Epistles, and ten which are collations of the earliest printed editions of the Greek New Testament. Scrivener provides an informative general account of each manuscript, and an estimate of their respective critical values.

This book introduces the concept "ordinary African readers' hermeneutics" in a study of the reception of the Bible in postcolonial Africa. It looks beyond the scholarly and official church-based material to the way in which the Bible, and discourses on or from the Bible, are utilized within a wide range of diverse contexts. The author shows that "ordinary readers" can and did engage in meaningful and liberating hermeneutics. Using the Agikuyu's encounter with the Bible as an example, he demonstrates that what colonial discourses commonly circulated about Africans were not always the "truth", but mere "representations" that were hardly able to fix African identities, as they were often characterized by certain ambivalences, anxieties and contradictions. The hybridized Biblical texts, readings and interpretations generated through retrieval and incorporation of the defunct pre-colonial past created interstices that became sites for assimilation, questioning and resistance. The book explores how Africans employed "allusion" as a valid method of interpretation, showing how the critical principle of interpretation lies not in the Bible itself, but in the community of readers willing to cultivate dialogical imagination in order to articulate their vision. The author proposes an African hermeneutical theory, which involves the fusion of both the "scholarly" and the "ordinary" readers in the task of biblical interpretation within a specific socio-cultural context.

Books in the John Phillips Commentary Series are designed to provide pastors, Sunday school teachers, and students of the Scripture with doctrinally sound interpretation that emphasizes the practical application of Bible truth. Working from the familiar King James Version, Dr. Phillips not only provides helpful commentary on the text, but also includes detailed outlines and numerous illustrations and quotations. Anyone wanting to explore the meaning of God's Word in greater depth--for personal spiritual growth or as a resource for preaching and teaching--will welcome the guidance and insights of this respected series.

Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875) was a Cornish-born Biblical scholar who travelled to major libraries all over Europe in order to study ancient manuscripts. Biblical textual criticism was a burgeoning new field in the mid-nineteenth century, with leading scholars including Lachmann and Tischendorf in Germany and Tregelles' contemporaries Scrivener, Westcott and Hort in England all working towards the ideal of a more authoritative Greek New Testament text than had previously been available. This volume contains the short Volumes 5 (1870) and 6 (1872) of Tregelles' edition (the Epistles continued, and Revelation), which the author had originally intended to publish together, along with the posthumous Volume 7 (1879) containing Prolegomena (compiled by F. J. A. Hort and A. W. Streane from earlier publications by Tregelles), and additional collations of parts of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. The Greek text is accompanied by Jerome's Latin Vulgate and a full textual apparatus.

Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875) was a Cornish-born Biblical scholar who travelled to major libraries all over Europe to study ancient manuscripts. Biblical textual criticism was a burgeoning new field in the mid-nineteenth century, with leading scholars including Lachmann and Tischendorf in Germany and Tregelles' contemporaries Scrivener, Westcott and Hort in England all working towards the ideal of a more authoritative Greek New Testament text than had previously been available. Tregelles begins Volume 1 (1857) of his seven-volume edition with an explanation of his editorial principles and a description of the many manuscripts consulted, whether whole codices or separate leaves. This volume contains the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. As well as the Greek text, each page has Jerome's Latin Vulgate text in the right margin, indications of manuscripts used and Biblical cross-references in the left margin, and a full textual apparatus at the foot.

Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875) was a Cornish-born Biblical scholar who travelled to major libraries all over Europe in order to study ancient manuscripts. Biblical textual criticism was a burgeoning new field in the mid-nineteenth century, with leading scholars including Lachmann and Tischendorf in Germany and Tregelles' contemporaries Scrivener, Westcott and Hort in England all working towards the ideal of a more authoritative Greek New Testament text than had previously been available. Volume 3 (1865) of Tregelles' landmark seven-volume edition begins with a description of the many manuscripts consulted. This volume contains the Acts of the Apostles and the Catholic epistles. As well as the Greek text, each page has Jerome's Latin Vulgate text in the right margin, indications of manuscripts used and Biblical cross-references in the left margin, and a full textual apparatus at the foot.

Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875) was a Cornish-born Biblical scholar who travelled to major libraries all over Europe in order to study ancient manuscripts. Biblical textual criticism was a burgeoning new field in the mid-nineteenth century, with leading scholars including Lachmann and Tischendorf in Germany and Tregelles' contemporaries Scrivener, Westcott and Hort in England all working towards the ideal of a more authoritative Greek New Testament text than had previously been available. Volume 4 (1869) of Tregelles' landmark seven-volume edition begins with a description of the many manuscripts consulted. This volume contains Romans to 2 Thessalonians (ending at chapter 3 verse 3, with the remaining pages appearing in Volume 5). As well as the Greek text, each page has Jerome's Latin Vulgate text in the right margin, indications of manuscripts used and Biblical cross-references in the left margin, and a full textual apparatus at the foot.

In Marriage Gifts and Social Change in Ancient Palestine, T. M. Lemos traces changes in the marriage customs of ancient Palestine over the course of several hundred years. The most important of these changes was a shift in emphasis from bridewealth to dowry, the latter of which clearly predominated in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Whereas previous scholarship has often attributed these shifts to the influence of foreign groups, Lemos connects them instead with a transformation that occurred in Palestine s social structure during the very same period. In the early Iron Age, Israel was a kinship-based society with a subsistence economy, but as the centuries passed, it became increasingly complex and developed marked divisions between rich and poor. At the same time, the importance of its kinship groups waned greatly. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that draws heavily on anthropological research, cultural theory, archaeological evidence, and historical-critical methods, Lemos posits that shifts in marriage customs were directly related to these wider social changes.