Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today
Includes text and notes, taking advantage of studies of sexual ethics and, where appropriate, criticizing them. This book also includes a chapter that engages the presumed "ethic of creation". It also contains a chapter on sex which is rewritten and offers a positive statement of a New Testament sexual ethic.
The Apostle, His Readers, and the Fate of the Jews
In this book, Sarah Emanuel, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, argues that Paul was not a universalist. Instead, Emanuel shows that, stemming from his Hellenistic Jewish worldview, Paul understood Jews as needing to maintain the law in Christ and gentiles as needing to abstain from the law in Christ. Both groups, in other words, needed to ......
Narrative Traditions in Hellenistic Reading Culture
The gospels weren’t unique in antiquity for retelling the same story. Ancient readers possessed a specific vocabulary for describing works that revisited familiar narrative territory.
Restoring the Mediterranean Context to the Apostle
A collaborative project, this work introduces a burgeoning new approach to the study of Paul, which contextualizes the pagans' apostle within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean religion (so-called "paganism"). The anthology assembles cutting-edge essays from both senior and rising scholars, whose contributions collectively demonstrate how ......
From the late first century to the end of late antiquity, three rival traditions-pagan, Jewish, and Christian-found themselves at odds over one issue in particular: the nature of the relationship between divine reality and the material world. In this context, the Evangelist John constructed his bios of Jesus as a narrative apologia addressed ......
To read a passage repeatedly, to examine its ambiguities, to probe its place in a larger text, to reflect on its relationship to other texts by the same author and its place within the canon of Scripture-all of these are acts of committed relationship. As in all committed relationships, the desire to understand is rightly characterized as love. ......
The concept of natural law-universal moral knowledge-is often associated with Stoic philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, or the medieval Jewish rabbis. But Jews in the Second Temple period had their own model of natural, interpreting the story of Adam and Eve so as to associate the primordial pair with "wisdom," "law," or "commandment." In this ......
Scholars today tend to view the birth narratives of Jesus as substantially less reliable than the rest of the canonical Gospel accounts. Indeed, many recent studies of the historical Jesus pass over his birth altogether or provide only scant commentary. A primary reason for this skepticism is intent oriented: ancient birth narratives (so the ......
Tradition, Identity, and Christianity's Mother Tongue
Aramaic, one of the great international languages of antiquity, left an indelible mark on the New Testament. Jesus and his first followers knew it because for centuries Aramaic had been a primary means of communication in the Middle East, and it remained current long after their time. Usage of Aramaic within Jesus' movement, initially with or ......
