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What does economics have to do with Christian origins? Why study such a connection? First of all, the New Testament makes many direct references to economic issues. But, second, the economy affects every other aspect of life (family, religion, community, work, health, and politics). To understand what it was like to live in a society, one must understand what the economy was doing. The study of the economy includes not only the goods and services of a society but also human labor and its control. For one, it entails the size of the pie of goods. (How prosperous was first-century Galilee?) But the study of economy also takes account of the slice of the pie that each family obtained. (How fair was the economy to each family?) Those involved in the quest for the historical Jesus have discovered that the ancient economy is a major point of dispute among various interpreters. Was the early Jesus movement a socioeconomic protest? Or was it primarily a religious reform? These two approaches understand Jesus in remarkably different ways. This volume seeks to guide readers through some of the most controversial issues raised in the last twenty years on this important topic.
In Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews Gabriella Gelardini gathers fifteen essays on Hebrews that deal with topics such as structure and intertext, sin and faith, atonement and cult, as well as space and resistance.
The New Testament is a book of great significance in Western culture yet is often inaccessible to students because the modern world differs so significantly from the ancient Mediterranean one in which it was written. It is imperative to develop a cross-cultural understanding of the values of the ancient Mediterranean society from which the New Testament arose in order to fully appreciate the documents and the communities that they represent. Dietmar Neufeld and Richard E. DeMaris bring together biblical scholars with expertise in the social sciences to develop interpretative models for understanding such values as collectivism, kinship, memory, ethnicity, and honour, and to demonstrate how to apply these models to the New Testament texts. Kinship is illuminated by analysis of the Holy Family as well as to early Christian organisations; gender through a study of Paul’s view of women; and landscape and spatiality through a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth. This book is the ideal companion to study of the New Testament.
Scholars of Hebrews have repeatedly echoed the almost proverbial saying that the book appears to its reader as a "Melchizedekian being without genealogy". For such scholars the aphorism identified prominent traits of Hebrews, its enigma, its otherness, its marginality. Although Franz Overbeck might unintentionally have stimulated such correlations, they do not represent what his dictum originally meant. Writing during the high noon of historicism in 1880, Overbeck lamented a lack of historical context, one that he had deduced on the basis of flawed presuppositions of the ideological frameworks prevalent of his time. His assertion made an impact, and consequently Hebrews was not only "othered...
The Three Pillars: How Family Politics Shaped the Earliest Church and the Gospel of Mark, examines how family relationships played a key role in the earliest Christian church. By disentangling the two disparate genealogies of Jesus, the author reconstructs the families of Joseph and Mary. Presented here for the first time is the full ancestry of Jesus' mother, Mary, who was descended from the anti-Hasmonean high priest Alcimus. The author suggests that Mary and her daughter Mary played a hitherto unrecognized role in the church's earliest leadership struggle and that a composite of these two women, not Mary Magdalene, was the basis for the Gnostic Mary of later Christian works. The author ne...
It was reported that a doctoral student at Princeton once asked Albert Einstein, “What is there left in the world for original dissertation research?” He replied by saying, “Find out about prayer. Somebody must find out about prayer.” Since Einstein’s day, a great deal has been written on the topic of prayer in general. However, relatively little has been written about prayer in John’s Farewell Discourse in particular. Therefore, this analysis not only seeks to understand the relationship between Johannine and Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Christian prayer traditions, but also seeks to discern the unique function and application of prayer as it is prescribed in the Farewell Discourse.
Reading the Bible Badly exposes how American Christians misunderstand and misuse the Bible, reading Scripture through “lenses” that distort its true character. As Americans, we often read the Bible’s stories and instruction unmindful of their historical and cultural settings, disregarding the testimony of our spiritual ancestors, and finding mostly a mirror image of our own values and selves in Scripture. Some of us insist that the Bible must be the “inerrant word of God,” historically factual in every way and doctrinally infallible, and overlook so much of what makes Scripture beautiful and relevant. Others follow a lectionary that dices and splices Scripture into bite-size morsel...
In the modern period, space has predominately been conceived of as a mere setting for human action, ontologically separate from the body. In Markan studies, the result has been the multiplication of textual geographies that hide the spatiality of Jesus’s narrativized and, thus, living body. Rather than representing Jesus’s body as replicating the spatial configurations of dominant scribal cartographic practice (including imperial practice), James B. Pendleton shows that Mark portrays Jesus’s body as a living production of space that troubles dominant maps. Against readings of Mark that argue that Jesus is either an imperial or an anti-imperial figure, Pendleton argues that Mark presents Jesus’s body, and thus his spatiality, as both inside (as an insider) and outside (as an outsider) simultaneously, in what has more commonly been theorized recently as third spatiality, or thirdspace. Rather than an imperial or anti-imperial economy of spatial production, Pendleton argues, Mark presents Jesus’s body within a both-and and more economy that is kenotic, revealing God’s own royal yet “emptying” body.
Shively T. J. Smith reconsiders what is most distinct, troubling, and potentially thrilling about the often overlooked and dismissed book of 2 Peter. Using the rhetorical strategies of nineteenth-century African American women, including Ida B. Wells, Jarena Lee, Anna Julia Cooper, and others, Smith redefines the use of biblical citations, the language of justice and righteousness, and even the matter of pseudonymity in 2 Peter. She approaches 2 Peter as an instance of Christian cultural rhetoric that forges a particular kind of community identity and behavior. This pioneering study considers how 2 Peter cultivates the kind of human relations and attitudes that speak to the values of moral people seeking justice in the past as well as today.
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