The first three hundred years of the common era witnessed critical developments that would become foundational for Christianity itself, as well as for the societies and later history that emerged thereafter. The concept of 'ancient Christianity,' however, along with the content  that the category represents, has raised much debate. This is, in part, because within this category lie multiple forms of devotion to Jesus Christ, multiple phenomena, and multiple permutations in the formative period of Christian history. Within those multiples lie numerous contests, as varieties of Christian identity laid claim to authority and authenticity in different ways. The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity addresses these contested areas with both nuance and clarity by reviewing, synthesizing, and critically engaging recent scholarly developments. The 27 thematic chapters, specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of scholars, also offer constructive ways forward for future research.

New in the Acclaimed Paideia Commentary Series Two respected senior New Testament scholars examine cultural context and theological meaning in Philippians and Philemon in this addition to the well-received Paideia series. Paideia commentaries explore how New Testament texts form Christian readers by attending to the ancient narrative and rhetorical strategies the text employs, showing how the text shapes theological convictions and moral habits, and making judicious use of maps, photos, and sidebars in a reader-friendly format. Students, pastors, and other readers will appreciate the historical, literary, and theological insight offered in this practical commentary.

St Paul was a pivotal and controversial figure in the fledgling Jesus movement of the first century. The New Cambridge Companion to St Paul provides an invaluable entryway into the study of Paul and his letters. Composed of sixteen essays by an international team of scholars, it explores some of the key issues in the current study of his dynamic and demanding theological discourse. The volume first examines Paul's life and the first-century context in which he and his communities lived. Contributors then analyze particular writings by comparing and contrasting at least two selected letters, while thematic essays examine topics of particular importance, including how Paul read scripture, his relation to Judaism and monotheism, why his message may have been attractive to first-century audiences, how his message was elaborated in various ways in the first four centuries, and how his theological discourse might relate to contemporary theological discourse and ideological analysis today.

St Paul was a pivotal and controversial figure in the fledgling Jesus movement of the first century. The New Cambridge Companion to St Paul provides an invaluable entryway into the study of Paul and his letters. Composed of sixteen essays by an international team of scholars, it explores some of the key issues in the current study of his dynamic and demanding theological discourse. The volume first examines Paul's life and the first-century context in which he and his communities lived. Contributors then analyze particular writings by comparing and contrasting at least two selected letters, while thematic essays examine topics of particular importance, including how Paul read scripture, his relation to Judaism and monotheism, why his message may have been attractive to first-century audiences, how his message was elaborated in various ways in the first four centuries, and how his theological discourse might relate to contemporary theological discourse and ideological analysis today.

A Fascinating Glimpse into the World of the New Testament Transported two thousand years into the past, readers are introduced to Antipas, a Roman civic leader who has encountered the writings of the biblical author Luke. Luke's history sparks Antipas's interest, and they begin corresponding. While the account is fictional, the author is a highly respected New Testament scholar who weaves reliable historical information into a fascinating story, offering a fresh, engaging, and creative way to learn about the New Testament world. The first edition has been widely used in the classroom (over 30,000 copies sold). This updated edition, now with improved readability and narrative flow, will bring the social and political world of Jesus and his first followers to life for many more students of the Bible.

In these volumes, Timothy Brookins and Bruce Longenecker provide a foundational analysis of the Greek text of 1 Corinthians. Distinguished by the detailed yet comprehensive attention paid to the Greek text, 1 Corinthians is a convenient pedagogical and reference tool that explains the form and syntax of the biblical text, offers guidance for deciding between competing semantic analyses, engages important text-critical questions, and addresses questions relating to the Greek text that are frequently overlooked or ignored by standard commentaries. Beyond serving as a succinct and accessible analytic key, 1 Corinthians also reflects the most recent advances in scholarship on Greek grammar and linguistics. By filling the gap between popular and technical commentaries, these handbooks become indispensable tools for anyone committed to a deep reading of the biblical text.

In these volumes, Timothy Brookins and Bruce Longenecker provide a foundational analysis of the Greek text of 1 Corinthians. Distinguished by the detailed yet comprehensive attention paid to the Greek text, 1 Corinthians is a convenient pedagogical and reference tool that explains the form and syntax of the biblical text, offers guidance for deciding between competing semantic analyses, engages important text-critical questions, and addresses questions relating to the Greek text that are frequently overlooked or ignored by standard commentaries. Beyond serving as a succinct and accessible analytic key, 1 Corinthians also reflects the most recent advances in scholarship on Greek grammar and linguistics. By filling the gap between popular and technical commentaries, these handbooks become indispensable tools for anyone committed to a deep reading of the biblical text.

Through a twist of fate, the eruption that destroyed Pompeii in 79 CE also preserved a wealth of evidence about the town, buried for centuries in volcanic ash. Since the town's excavations in the eighteenth century, archaeologists have disputed the evidence that might attest the presence of Christians in Pompeii before the eruption. Now, Bruce W. Longenecker reviews that evidence, in comparison with other possible evidence of first-century Christian presence elsewhere, and reaches the conclusion that there were indeed Christians living in the doomed town. Illustrated with maps, charts, photographs, and line drawings depicting artefacts from the town, The Crosses of Pompeii presents an elegant case for their presence. Longenecker's arguments require dramatic changes to our understanding of the early history of Christianity.

This book brings together, for the first time, the relevant material evidence demonstrating Christian use of the cross prior to Constantine. Bruce W. Longenecker upends a longstanding consensus that the cross was not a Christian symbol until Constantine appropriated it to consolidate his power in the fourth century. Longenecker presents a wide variety of artifacts from across the Mediterranean basin that testify to the use of the cross as a visual symbol by some pre-Constantinian Christians. Those artifacts interlock with literary witnesses from the same period to provide a consistent and robust portrait of the cross as a pre-Constantinian symbol of Christian devotion. The material record of the pre-Constantinian period illustrates that Constantine did not invent the cross as a symbol of Christian faith,- for an impressive number of Christians before Constantine's reign, the cross served as a visual symbol of commitment to a living deity in a dangerous world.

Synopsis: In this refreshingly unique book, Bruce Longenecker demonstrates that reading Luke's narrative is richly enhanced through attentiveness to what is tantalizingly left out of the Lukan narrative. In Hearing the Silence, the reader is invited to delve deeply into literary and theological dimensions of the Lukan narrative through an exploration of Jesus' strangely under-narrated "escape" in Luke 4:30. The options for interpreting the mechanics of that curious event are brought into dramatic relief by Longenecker's survey of the scene's reconstruction in Jesus-novels and Jesus-films, in which a variety of strategies have been employed to iron out the scene's narrative oddity. Against their backdrop, Longenecker's own constructive proposals bring the reader into direct contact with some of the most significant features of the Lukan Gospel and worldview. Endorsements: "'But the dog did not bark ' Sherlock noted. Now Bruce Longenecker, with a similar steely detective-like resolve, explores one of the most perplexing silences in the Gospel of Luke. Specifically, what actually happened to Jesus on the edge of a hill in Nazareth, that he was able to walk away scot free from an angry mob? With literary sensitivity, Longenecker demonstrates how the silence of details actually speaks volumes . . . God is at work to reveal the liberating power of the kingdom of God by preserving the messianic deliverer in the midst of evil. An engaging read " --Michael Bird Professor of Theology and Bible, Crossway College, Brisbane, Australia Author of Colossians and Philemon: A New Covenant Commentary (Cascade, 2009) "This is an entertaining book with a serious point. Longenecker takes his readers on a captivating journey from the absurd to the sublime. Focusing on a single 'gap' in the text of Luke's Gospel, he starts with novelistic attempts at filling it (the absurd) and ends with deft reflections on how Luke crafts a narrative Christology (the sublime). With this highly innovative approach, Longenecker deepens our appreciation of Luke's Gospel, while also bearing testimony to the mystery of Christ." --George Hunsinger Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary Editor of Thy Word Is Truth: Barth on Scripture (2012) "Longenecker proposes a 'christological arc' for hearing Luke's narrative as a whole: the one who undergoes the eucatastrophic 'escape' from the enraged townsfolk of Nazareth and is 'taken up' by divine custody from his death by his nation to fill out the greater, overarching blessing to Israel and the nations. The author's wit and imagination for filling in the 'gap' of Luke 4:30 through the . . . 'arc' of Psalm 91 outsmarts even the most creative Jesus novelists . . . in making sense of Jesus' mysterious 'passing through their midst'--stimulating, provocative, a delight to read " --David P. Moessner A. A. Bradford Chair of Religion for Biblical Studies, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth Author Biography: Bruce W. Longenecker is Professor of New Testament and the W. W. Melton Chair of Religion in the Department of Religion at Baylor University, Texas.

Combining historical, exegetical, and theological interests, Bruce Longenecker here dispels the widespread notion that Paul had little or no concern for the poor. Longnecker's analysis of Greco-Roman poverty provides the backdrop for a compelling presentation of the importance of care for the poor within Paul's theology and the Jesus-groups he had established. Along the way, Longenecker calls into question a variety of interpretive paradigms -- such as Steven J. Friesen's 2004 poverty scale -- and offers a fresh vision in which Paul's theological resources are shown to be both historically significant and theologically challenging.

Engaging Economics exposes economic dimensions of the theology of the early Jesus movement, as reflected both in the texts of the New Testament and in the reception of those texts within the patristic era. Under these two considerations, the contributors demonstrate that an economic dimension was an integral component of this early movement and indicate how, in later centuries, that economic dimension was either further developed or ignored altogether.

This beautifully designed, full-color textbook introduces the Roman background of the New Testament by immersing students in the life and culture of the thriving first-century towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which act as showpieces of the world into which the early Christian movement was spreading. Bruce Longenecker, a leading scholar of the ancient world of the New Testament, discusses first-century artifacts in relation to the life stories of people from the Roman world. The book includes discussion questions, maps, and 175 color photographs. Additional resources are available through Textbook eSources.

Are Paul's letters undergirded and informed by key narratives, and does a heightened awareness of those narratives help us to gain a richer and more rounded understanding of Paul's theology? The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an increasing interest in the narrative features of Paul's thought. A variety of studies since that period have advanced "story" as an integral and generative ingredient in Paul's theological formulations. In this book, a team of leading Pauline scholars assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a narrative approach, looking in detail at its application to particular Pauline texts.

Understanding associations in the Greco-Roman world enhances the study of the rise of early Christianity-whether at the micro-level of interpreting particular texts or at the macro-level of assessing the spread of Christ-devotion in the pre-Constantinian era. The twenty-five contributions contained within Greco-Roman Associations, Deities, and Early Christianity enlarge our perspectives on the extent to which Greco-Roman associations bring features of Christian origins into relief. Thematic studies include associational social reputation; women in associations; deities and devotion; financial strategies of group maintenance; care for the poor; varieties of group identity; refinements of terminological and conceptual apparatus; funerary practices; occupational groups; and the alleged role of Christianity in the demise of associations. Studies of particular phenomena include 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, Paul's Collection, Hebrews, a late first-century Christian family, 1 Clement, and Clement of Alexandria. While the essays cover a wide spectrum of topics, they retain a clear focus on aspects of corporate life within ancient associations as comparanda for the study of early Christ-groups within their social milieu. These essays, all kept to a disciplined length, represent the work of impressive scholars from a range of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international contexts. The volume's symposium of voices and lively scholarly exchange productively expand current conversations about Greco-Roman associations, deities, and early Christianity.