These helpful guides in the Cover to Cover series are ideal for group and individual study. Experience the reality of Bible events like never before and live through the inspiring lives of key characters in Scripture. Learn how to apply God's Word to your life as you explore seven compelling sessions and gain a new depth in your Bible knowledge.Put on God's strength, protection and power - and be able to face far more than you ever could alone In Ephesians 6, Paul portrays a soldier standing fully protected and strong in his armour. It's a well-known passage, but how do we go further than just 'knowing' the armour - how do we fully apply it to our lives The armour is of little value if it is not put on and worn intentionally. So let these words of Scripture become a reality to you and your daily life. Explore the different pieces of armour and consider how each part protects, strengthens and empowers us as we take hold of them. These seven illuminating sessions remind us how: salvations makes a vast difference in our lives we are loved, valued and forgiven by Godwe can wear the armour both personally and together as the Church Icebreakers, Bible readings, eye openers, discussion starters, personal application make this a rich resource for group or individual study.

Hace mas de cincuenta anos que el texto que publicara la escritora Sunshine Ball se usa como un libro de lectura devocional, de estudio en grupos de creyentes en la iglesia y como texto en los Institutos Biblicos. Esta es una revision que, al contar con bosquejos, tablas y graficos, hace facil el estudio apocaliptico. Si quiere una perspectiva escatologica de actualidad, no deje de leer y usar esta herramienta que nunca pasara de moda, sino hasta que el Senor venga. 'Guarda estas cosas en secreto y sella el libro hasta la hora final, pues muchos andaran de un lado a otro en busca de cualquier conocimiento.' Daniel 12:4 'Dichoso el que lee y dichosos los que escuchan las palabras de este mensaje profetico y hacen caso de lo que aqui esta escrito, porque el tiempo de su cumplimiento esta cerca.' Apocalipsis 1:3"

The Apostle Paul's Letter to the Ephesians is one of the most dynamic portions of all of Scripture. Called by one commentator "the crown and climax of Pauline theology," it issues a clarion call to all who follow the Master. With its dual focus on Christ and the Church, as well as its careful presentation of doctrine and duty, Ephesians points the way to true Christian living and victory in a sin-embattled world.

In this helpful volume, Pastor Hughes provides an engaging treatment of the major themes of Ephesians: The celebration of full redemption The mystery of a new humanity--a third race--in Christ The fullness of the Spirit for holy living The beauty of God-given roles in the home and workplace The implications of our position with Christ in the heavenly realms Resounding victory in spiritual warfare

This practical commentary on one of the most important expositions of Pauline soteriology in the New Testament will challenge and equip both pastors and students for a walk of spiritual power.

There is no doubting the legacy of Protestant Reformers and their successors. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley not only spawned specific denominational traditions, but their writings have been instrumental in forging a broadly embraced evangelical theology as well. Ben Witherington wrestles with some of the big ideas of these major traditional theological systems (sin, God's sovereignty, prophecy, grace, and the Holy Spirit), asking tough questions about their biblical foundations. Advocating a return to Protestantism's sola scriptura roots, Witherington argues that evangelicalism sometimes wrongly assumes a biblical warrant for some of its more popular beliefs. Witherington pushes the reader to engage the larger story and plot of the Bible in order to understand the crucial theological elements of Protestant belief. The Problem with Evangelical Theology casts today's evangelical belief and practice - be it Calvinistic, Wesleyan, Dispensational, or Pentecostal - in the light of its scriptural origins. Witherington offers a comprehensive description of evangelical theology while concurrently providing an insistent corrective to its departures from both tradition and text.

Steffi Fabricius approaches Pauline hamartiology from a cognitive semantic perspective and combines the conventional views on Paul's understanding of hamartia as an action, a personification, and as a power into a conceptual metaphorical network. By using the theories of conceptual metaphors and blending on biblical texts and their hermeneutical interpretation regarding fundamental-theological issues, a discussion is opened on why traditional methods are insufficient to cover hamartia extensively. The author not only reveals a revised concept of Pauline hamartia, but more importantly aims at a theological evaluation of cognitive semantics and its ontological foundation of embodied realism via relational ontology and the concept of metaphor as transfer, hoping to broaden the interdisciplinary discourse between systematic theology and cognitive linguistics.

First published in 2011, The Jewish Annotated New Testament was a groundbreaking work, bringing the New Testament's Jewish background to the attention of students, clergy, and general readers. In this new edition, eighty Jewish scholars bring together unparalleled scholarship to shed new light on the text. This thoroughly revised and greatly expanded second edition brings even more helpful information and new insights to the study of the New Testament. * Introductions to each New Testament book, containing guidance for reading and specific information about how the book relates to the Judaism of the period, have been revised and augmented, and in some cases newly written. * Annotations on the text-some revised, some new to this edition-provide verse-by-verse commentary. * The thirty essays from the first edition are thoroughly updated, and there are twenty-four new essays, on topics such as "Mary in Jewish Tradition,", "Christology," and "Messianic Judaism." * For Christian readers The Jewish Annotated New Testament offers a window into the first-century world of Judaism from which the New Testament springs. There are explanations of Jewish concepts such as food laws and rabbinic argumentation. It also provides a much-needed corrective to many centuries of Christian misunderstandings of the Jewish religion. * For Jewish readers, this volume provides the chance to encounter the New Testament-a text of vast importance in Western European and American culture-with no religious agenda and with guidance from Jewish experts in theology, history, and Jewish and Christian thought. It also explains Christian practices, such as the Eucharist. The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition is an essential volume that places the New Testament writings in a context that will enlighten readers of any faith or none.

While the Gospel of Mark has a longstanding reputation as having some of the simplest Greek in the New Testament, Rodney J. Decker proves that even this "simple Greek" is challenging and thought provoking. Mark 1-8 and Mark 9-16 entice readers to engage fully with the text and its intricacies. Decker provides helpful guidance regarding Mark's distinctive use of Greek and the role that verbal aspect plays in the structuring of the text. When read alongside commentaries on Mark, this handbook will encourage a further understanding of Mark's views on who Jesus was and what Jesus expects of his followers.

Jesus as Philosopher: The Philosophical Sage in the Synoptic Gospels examines the possible ways in which the authors of the Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, were inspired by contemporary philosophical traditions about the ideal philosophical sage in their description of their ideal human being, Jesus Christ. Runar M. Thorsteinsson considers the following questions: How does the author in question speak of Jesus in relation to contemporary philosophy? Do we see Jesus take on a certain 'philosophical' role in the Gospels, either by his statements and reasoning or his way of life? In what way are Jesus' words and actions analogous to that of leading philosophical figures in Graeco-Roman antiquity, according to these texts? Conversely, in what way do his words and actions differ from theirs? While Thorsteinsson discusses a number of Graeco-Roman sources, the emphasis is on the question of how these parallel texts help us better to understand the Gospel authors' perception and presentation of the character of Jesus. While the fields of theology and ethics are often intertwined in these texts, including the philosophical texts, Thorsteinsson's main focus is the ethical aspect. He argues that the Gospel authors drew in some ways on classical virtue ethics. The study concludes that the Gospel authors inherited stories and sayings of Jesus that they wanted to improve upon and recount as truthfully as possible, and they did so in part by making use of philosophical traditions about the ideal sage, especially that of Stoicism and Cynicism.

Seit sich sozialgeschichtliche Bibelauslegung in den 1970er Jahren herausgebildet hat, liegt ihr Erkenntnisinteresse und ihre spezifische Leistung in der Verortung der Texte in der antiken Lebens- und Arbeitswelt mit ihrer Lebens- und Leiderfahrung, ihren AEngsten und Hoffnungen. In den Spuren von Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza und Luise Schottroff differenziert die Autorin diese Methode aus, bezieht sie auf eine Auswahl neutestamentlicher Gleichnistexte und stellt die Fruchtbarkeit des methodischen Ansatzes unter Beweis. Die Autorin sieht sich drei Diskursen verpflichtet: der befreiungstheologischen und feministischen Hermeneutik sowie einer Theologie nach Auschwitz, die im Dialog mit dem Judentum Gestalt annehmen soll. Die untersuchten Gleichnisse decken ein breites Spektrum antiker Arbeitsverhaltnisse ab. Eine Fulle von sozialgeschichtlich relevantem Quellenmaterial wird ausgewertet und verarbeitet, und es wird die religionspadagogische Bedeutung sozialgeschichtlicher Auslegung herausgearbeitet. Das Werk enthalt ein uber 100-seitiges Verzeichnis antiker wie zeitgenoessischer Quellen und Literatur, das den derzeit wohl breitesten Fundus zum Themenbereich darstellt.

Jesus the Jew is the primary signifier of Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism. This connection is both historical and continuous. In this book, Barbara Meyer shows how Christian memory, as largely intertwined with Jewish memory, provides a framework to examine the theological dimensions of historical Jesus research. She explores the topics that are central to the Jewishness of Jesus, such as the Christian relationship to law, and otherness as a Christological category. Through the lenses of the otherness of the Jewish Jesus for contemporary Christians, she also discusses circumcision, natality, vulnerability, and suffering in dialogue with thinkers seldom drawn into Jewish-Christian discourse, notably Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum and Adi Ophir. Meyer demonstrates how the memory of Jesus' Jewishness is a key to reconfiguring contemporary challenges to Christian thought, such as particularity and otherness, law and ethics after the Shoah, human responsibility, and divine vulnerability.

This Guide surveys the more important historical, socio-cultural, theological, and literary factors we must grapple with in understanding the two letters of Jude and Second Peter, between which there are very strong similarities. It appears that the letter of Jude was almost entirely 'plagiarized' by the letter of Second Peter. George Aichele's main approach is the method of semiotics, examining signifying mechanisms in each of the texts both independently and when they are read together. In both of the letters, Jesus Christ is called the 'master', with a Greek word that means 'slave-owner', and the authors of both books refer to themselves and other Christians as the slaves of Christ. Furthermore, both writings report situations of paranoid fear within Christian communities of their time as they picture heretical infiltrators who threaten to pervert and perhaps even destroy the community. In addition to this, in an adventurous excursion, the letter of Jude is read intertextually with the classic science fiction/horror film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel 1956), in order to explore the dynamics of paranoia.

In his sixth satire, Juvenal deplores the pastimes of Roman women, foremost of which is superstition. Speculating about how wives busy themselves while their husbands are away, the poet introduces a revolving door of visitors who include a eunuch of the eastern goddess Bellona, an impersonator of Egyptian Anubis, a Judean priestess, and Chaldean astrologers. From these religious experts women solicit services ranging from dream interpretation and purification to the coercion of lovers or wealthy acquaintances. Juvenal's catalogue captures not only the popularity of these "freelance" experts at the turn of the second century, but also their familiarity among his Roman audiences, whom he could expect to get the joke. Heidi Wendt investigates the backdrop of this enthusiasm for exotic wisdom and practices by examining the rise of self-authorized experts in religion during the first century of the Roman Empire. Unlike members of civic priesthoods and temples, freelance experts had to generate their own legitimacy, often through demonstrations of skill and learning out on the streets, in marketplaces, and at the temple gates. While historically these professionals have been studied separately from the development of modern conceptions of religion, Wendt argues that they, too, participated in a highly competitive form of religious activity from which emerged the modern-day characters not just of religious experts but specialists of philosophy, medicine, and education as well. Wendt notes affinities across this wider class of activity, but focuses on those experts who directly enlisted gods and similar beings. Over the course of the first century freelance experts grew increasingly influential, more diverse with respect to the skills or methods in which they claimed expertise, and more assorted in the ethnic coding of their wisdom and practices. Wendt argues that this class of religious activity engendered many of the innovative forms of religion that flourished in the second century, including but not limited to phenomena linked with Persian Mithras, the Egyptian gods, and the Judean Christ. The evidence for self-authorized experts in religion is abundant, but scholars of ancient Mediterranean religion have only recently begun to appreciate their impact on the Empire's changing religious landscape. At the Temple Gates integrates studies of Judaism, Christianity, mystery cults, astrology, magic, and philosophy to paint a colorful portrait of religious expertise in early Rome.

New Testament theology, maintains Donald Guthrie, centers on Jesus Christ--his person, work and mission--and is unified by repeated emphasis on the fulfillment of Old Testament promise, community, the Spirit and the future hope. An extended introduction surveys the history, nature and method of New Testament theology and sets forth the distinctive of Guthrie's synthetic approach. Guthrie then examines New Testament thought under the thematic headings of God, man and his world, Christology, the mission of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Christian life, the church, the future, the New Testament approach to ethics, and Scripture. Within each chapter he explores the synoptic Gospels, the Johannine literature, Acts, Paul, Hebrews, the remaining Epistles and Revelation. Marked by scholarly rigor and thoroughness, this volume is a standard reference and text, reflecting mature conservative scholarship at its best

Publishers Weekly starred review. Academy of Parish Clergy Reference Book of the Year IVP Readers' Choice Award A New Testament in English by Native North Americans for Native North Americans and All English-Speaking Peoples Many First Nations tribes communicate with the cultural and linguistic thought patterns found in their original tongues. The First Nations Version (FNV) recounts the Creator's Story-the Christian Scriptures-following the tradition of Native storytellers' oral cultures. This way of speaking, with its simple yet profound beauty and rich cultural idioms, still resonates in the hearts of First Nations people. The FNV is a dynamic equivalence translation of the New Testament that captures the simplicity, clarity, and beauty of Native storytellers in English, while remaining faithful to the original language of the Bible. The culmination of a rigorous five-year translation process, this new Bible translation is a collaboration between organizations like OneBook and Wycliffe Associates, Indigenous North Americans from over twenty-five different tribes, and a translation council that consisted of twelve Native North American elders, pastors, young adults, and men and women from different tribes and diverse geographic locations. Whether you are Native or not, you will experience the Scriptures in a fresh and new way. Read these sample passages to get a taste of what you'll find inside: "The Great Spirit loves this world of human beings so deeply he gave us his Son-the only Son who fully represents him. All who trust in him and his way will not come to a bad end, but will have the life of the world to come that never fades-full of beauty and harmony. Creator did not send his Son to decide against the people of this world, but to set them free from the worthless ways of the world." John 3:16-17 "Love is patient and kind. Love is never jealous. It does not brag or boast. It is not puffed up or big-headed. Love does not act in shameful ways, nor does it care only about itself. It is not hot-headed, nor does it keep track of wrongs done to it. Love is not happy with lies and injustice, but truth makes its heart glad. Love keeps walking even when carrying a heavy load. Love keeps trusting, never loses hope, and stands firm in hard times. The road of love has no end." 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

Valuable tools for study or scholarship. Taking a telescopic view of the Bible, Exploring the Old Testament Book by Book and Exploring the New Testament Book by Book enable readers to see the big picture behind this Book of books, to see how the various parts of Scripture relate to one another. These volumes from gifted expositor John Phillips teaches the importance of taking a few steps back from Scripture in order to gain fresh insight into the message, meaning, and art of the Bible.

The Fourth Gospel is deeply shaped by its remarkably high Christology. It depicts the earthly Jesus, the incarnate one, as fully divine. This unrelenting Christology has led interpreters, both ancient and modern, to questionthe historical value of John's Gospel. For many, the Gospel is just theology. It is to the vexed relationship between history and theology that JArg Frey turns in Theology and History in the Fourth Gospel . John's theological obsession with Christology might suggestthat history counts for little in the Gospel. But, as Frey argues, the Gospel's clear andcentralclaim is that John narrates the story of Jesus of Nazareth, his ministry, and his death, as "factual," and that this narrated "history" is foundational for the Christian message.Frey tracesthe Gospel's use of the available historical tradition by chiefly drawing from Mark and the Johanninecommunity. Even if the Gospel ofJohn used this receivedwitness in a remarkably free manner,replotting and renarrating traditional episodes and even creatively staging new episodes, Frey contends thatthe historical life and person ofJesus remain central to John's enterprise. In the end, Frey warns that Johannine interpretation will miss the intention of the Gospel and the interpretive perspective of the evangelist if it remains preoccupiedmerely withquestions ofhistorical accuracy. The interpretivegoalis to "let John be John," and, as Frey shows, readers will always yield to the priority of theology over history in the Fourth Gospel. In John's telling of the Christ story, the significance of history lies precisely in its disclosure of theological meaning, just as the significance of the historical Jesus is only understood in the theological language of Christology.