This work has established itself as a classical text in the field of New Testament studies. Written in a readable, non-technical style, it has become an indispensable textbook and reference for teachers, students, clergy, and the educated layperson interested in a scholarly treatment of the New Testament and its background in the Judaic and Greco-Roman world.

While the first American edition of this book, published more than a decade ago, was a revised translation of the German book, Einfuhrung in das Neue Testament, this second edition of the first volume of the Introduction to the New Testament is no longer dependent upon a previously published German work. The author hopes that for the student of the New Testament it is a useful introduction into the many complex aspects of the political, cultural, and religious developments that characterized the world in which early Christianity arose and by which the New Testament and other early Christian writings were shaped.

Volume one of three -- birth narratives through the Galilean ministry of Jesus.

This volume brings together studies of Ephesos--a major city in the Greco-Roman period and a primary center for the spread of Christianity into the Western world--by an international array of scholars from the fields of classics, fine arts, history of religion, New Testament, ancient Christianity, and archaeology. The studies were presented at a spring 1994 Harvard Divinity School symposium on Ephesos, focusing on the results of one hundred years of archaeological work at Ephesos by members of the Austrian Archaeological Institute.

The contributors to this volume discuss some of the most interesting and controversial results of recent investigations: the Processional Way of Artemis, the Hadrianic Olympieion and the Church of Mary, the so-called Temple of Domitian, and the heroa of Androkolos and Arsinoe.

Since very little about the Austrian excavations at Ephesos has been published in English, this volume should prove useful in introducing the archaeology of this metropolis to a wider readership.

In the early '70s, James M. Robinson (Claremont) and Helmut Koester (Harvard), both students of Bultmann, broke new ground in their Trajectories through Early Christianity . The eight essays that comprise this volume seek a wholesale redefinition of the task of New Testament studies, as well as illustrating this newly conceived task. Robinson and Koester claim that the New Testament cannot be read apart from other early Christian literature and that the regnant designation of "canon" is misleading because it obscures the essential fluidity of early Christianity. Robinson and Koester not only question the artificial limits of the New Testament as a whole, but also the utility of the most commonly accepted forms ( Gattungen ) that constitute the New Testament. In the end, even the labels "orthodoxy" and "heresy" should be abandonedaalong with an outmoded belief that orthodoxy preceded heresy and formed the center of Christianity. From its birth, Christianity was pluriform, and what later came to be known as "orthodoxy" and "heresy" were only two of many equally legitimate trajectories running through Christianity. Robinson and Koester's bold wrestling with the basic question of Christian origins proves as instructive today as it did over forty years ago: was there ever identifiable unity in early Christianity, or has diversity always been the measuring stick?