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 ......
The Repentance of YHWH is not an attempt to recover the historical Jesus by looking through Mark's textual window, even if the things the real Jesus said and did could have inspired such a gospel. Nor is it a book on Christian origins, mining Mark for information about what the earliest followers of Jesus believed about Jesus, even though it ......
Messianism in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish Texts
An exegetical and diachronic survey of messianic texts from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition up through the first millennium CE. Jewish messianism can be traced back to the emerging Kingdom of Judah in the tenth century BCE, when it was represented by the Davidic tradition and the promise of a future heir to David's throne. From that ......
To read Romans from beginning to end, from letter opening to final doxology, is to retrace the steps of Paul. To read Romans front to back was what Paul certainly intended. But to read Romans forward may have kept the full message of Romans from being perceived. Reading forward has led readers to classify Romans as abstract and systematic ......
The publication of Richard Burridge's What Are the Gospels? in 1992 inaugurated a transformation in Gospel studies by overturning the previous consensus about Gospel uniqueness. Burridge argued convincingly for an understanding of the Gospels as biographies, a ubiquitous genre in the Graeco-Roman world. To establish this claim, Burridge compared ......
The Bible is words--it is, at the end of the day, nothing more than that. How those words have been read and understood has formed the basis of everything from private faith to public policy for two thousand years. Yet for the most part, casual readers--and even many professional interpreters, clerical and scholarly--are unaware of how culture has ......
The Origins, Inspiration, and Interpretation of Scripture
"Scripture is a spring of life-giving, life-altering truth, but when we don't understand how and why it came to us, we end up misusing it." How did we get the Bible? And why does it matter? History reveals that Scripture can be used for both life-giving and destructive purposes. Discovering the Bible's origins makes all the difference for ......
A robust theological argument against the assumption that God is male. God values women. While many Christians would readily affirm this truth, the widely held assumption that the Bible depicts a male God persists--as it has for centuries. This misperception of Christianity not only perniciously implies that men deserve an elevated place over ......
Reckoning with the hermeneutical struggle to make sense of Paul as both a historical figure and a canonical muse. Matthew Novenson has become a leading advocate for the continuing relevance of historical-critical readings of Paul even as some New Testament scholars have turned to purely theological or political approaches. In this collection of ......
