Generations of students have known G.B. Caird as a penetrating and lucid guide to the many questions and problems posed by modern biblical study. His brillant commentaries on St Luke, the Book of Revelation, and St Paul's Prison Epistles, as well as his other studies on theology and the Bible, have won for him a place among the twentieth century's foremost biblical scholars. This new and masterly presentation of New Testament theology, completed and edited since the author's death by Professor L.D. Hurst, takes the unique step of setting up an imaginary debate amongst the various authors of the New Testament themselves. As central concepts (predestination, sin, atonement, the church, sacrament, ethics, eschatology, and christology) are discussed' between such figures as Luke, Paul, John, and the author of Hebrews, the work moves to its climax with a presentation of the theology of Jesus himself. The result provides a particularly fresh and illuminating picture of the ideas at the heart of Christianity, deserving a place on the shelf of every serious pastor, theologian, and student of the Bible. This book is intended for scholars and advanced students of New Testament theology.

This is a new and masterly presentation of New Testament theology by one of the leading religious scholars of this century. It takes the unique step of setting up an imaginary dialogue on the central concepts of the Christian faith between the various authors of the New Testament themselves - thus capturing in a particularly fresh and lucid way the differing approaches and attempts of these first Christians to explore and elucidate their faith. The climax of the book deals with the theology of Jesus.

Communication through language is an important area of study and has been examined by specialists from a variety of disciplines. Caird, Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis of Holy Scripture at Oxford, has written an exceptional and well-organized compilation of the best of such study, both past and present. He has provided invaluable guidance for the study and understanding of the Bible by explaining how verbal messages are formed, what they "say" in writing, and how they are to be understood.Drawing upon the results of modern linguistic and communications scholarship, and upon the still valid methods of rhetorical and exegetical study, Caird provides a synthesis for hermeneutics. Beginning with the uses and abuses of language, Caird goes on to discuss the nature and structure of meaning, the relations between Hebrew idiom and biblical thought, and the problems of translation, discussions which form the opening or "general" section of the book. The central section is entitled "metaphor," under which Caird treats literal and non-literal meanings (and valid distinctions between them), comparative language in metaphors, similes, and anthropomorphisms, concluding with a treatment of linguistic awareness. Finally, he devotes a section to language in relation to history, to myth, and to eschatology.