Let's face it. Just the word exegesis puts some of us on edge. We are excited about learning to interpret the Bible, but the thought of exegetical method evokes a chill. Some textbooks on exegesis do nothing to overcome these apprehensions. The language is dense. The concepts are hard. And the expectations are way too high. However, the skills that we need to learn are ones that a minister of the gospel will use every week. Exegesis provides the process for listening, for hearing the biblical text as if you were an ordinary intelligent person listening to a letter from Paul or a Gospel of Mark in first-century Corinth or Ephesus or Antioch. This book by Richard Erickson will help you learn this skill. Thoroughly accessible to students, it clearly introduces the essential methods of interpreting the New Testament, giving students a solid grasp of basic skills while encouraging practice and holding out manageable goals and expectations. Numerous helps and illustrations clarify, summarize and illuminate the principles. And a wealth of exercises tied to each chapter are available on the web. This is a book distinguished not so much bywhat it covers as by how: it removes the "fear factor" of exegesis. There are many guides to New Testament exegesis, but this one is the most accessible--and fun

About the Contributor(s): Birger Olsson is Professor Emeritus at Lund University in Sweden. He is the author of numerous works on text-linguistic analysis and on the Johannine literature, including Structure and Meaning in the Fourth Gospel: A Text-Linguistic Analysis of John 2:1-11 and 4:1-42 (1974). The current volume was originally published in Swedish as part of the Kommentar till Nya Testamentet, for which Olsson also wrote the volume on 1 Peter.