The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1981, volume 2, contains messages given by Brother Witness Lee on November 2 through December 11, 1981. From December 23, 1981, through January 2, 1982, Brother Lee spoke twenty-eight messages that were published in Life-study of 1 Corinthians. The Life-study messages are not included in The Collected Works of Witness Lee. From the last week in October until the end of November, 1981, Brother Lee traveled to Seoul, South Korea; Hong Kong; Taipei, Taiwan; and Tokyo, Japan. He returned to Anaheim and ministered there until the end of the year. The contents of this volume are divided into two sections, as follows: 1. Twenty-eight messages given in Hong Kong and in Taipei, Taiwan, on November 2 through 24. These messages were translated from Chinese and are included in this volume under the title The History and Revelation of the Lord's Recovery. 2. A message given in Anaheim, California, on December 11. This message is included in this volume under the title The Center of Paul's Completing Ministry.

The Gospel Working Up offers a history of three generations of Baptist and Methodist clergymen in nineteenth-century Virginia, and through them of the congregations and communities in which they lived and worked. Schweiger examines the religious experience both before and after the Civil War, showing how Southern Protestantism became an instrument of spiritual, moral, material, and cultural progress.

The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1932-1949, volume 2, contains personal notes and messages given by Brother Witness Lee in 1936 through 1949. Historical information concerning Brother Lee's travels and the content of his ministry during this period can be found in the general preface that appears at the beginning of The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1932-1949, volume 1. The contents of this volume are divided into five sections, as follows: 1. A collection of message outlines, personal notes, and diaries written in 1936 through 1949. They are included in this volume under the title Witness Lee's Personal Notes and Diaries. 2. Five articles written in 1947. These articles were published in the periodical Words of Grace and are included in this volume under the same title. 3. Sixty-two messages given in 1947 and 1948 during the resumption of Watchmen Nee's ministry. These messages were previously published together with messages given by Watchman Nee in a book entitled Messages Given during the Resumption of Watchman Nee's Ministry. The messages given by Witness Lee are included in this volume under the title Speakings Given during the Resumption of Watchman Nee's Ministry. 4. Seven articles that were published in the periodical entitled The Way from August 1 through October 1, 1948. These articles are included in this volume under the same title. 5. Five articles published in the periodical The Ministers in July through November 1948. These articles were previously published in The Collected Works of Watchman Nee, volume 55, and are included in this volume under the same title.

This volume combines some of the leading voices on the composition and collection of early Christian gospels in order to analyze Tatian's Diatessaron. The rapid rise and sudden suppression of the Diatessaron has raised numerous questions about the nature and intent of this second-century composition. It has been claimed as both a vindication of the fourfold gospel's early canonical status and as an argument for the canon's on-going fluidity; it has been touted as both a premiere witness to the earliest recoverable gospel text and as an early corrupting influence on that text. Collectively, these essays provide the greatest advance in Diatessaronic scholarship in a quarter of a century. The contributors explore numerous questions: did Tatian intend to supplement or supplant the fourfold gospel? How many were his sources and how free was he with their text? How do we identify a Diatessaronic witness? Is it legitimate to use Tatian's Diatessaron as a source in New Testament textual criticism? Is a reconstruction of the Diatessaron still possible? These queries in turn contribute to the question of what the Diatessaron signifies with respect to the broader context of gospel writing, and what this can tell us about how the writing, rewriting and reception of gospel material functioned in the first and second centuries and beyond.

These essays explore the reconception of the Gospels as first-century compositions of sound performed for audiences by storytellers rather than the anachronistic picture of a series of texts read by individual readers. The new paradigm implicit in these initial experiments is based on the recent realization that the majority of persons—85 to 95 percent—were illiterate and experienced the Jesus stories as members of audiences. Either from memory or from memorized manuscripts, the evangelists performed the Gospels as an evening’s entertainment of two to four hours. The audiences were predominantly addressed as Hellenistic Judeans who lived in the aftermath of the Roman-Jewish war. When heard whole, the Gospels were vivid experiences of the central character of Jesus. These studies of audience address and the interactions between first-century storytellers and audiences reveal a dynamic performance literature that functioned as scripts for an ever-expanding network of storytelling proclamations whose envisioned horizon was the whole world. When the Gospels were told at one time from beginning to end, they invited the listeners to move from being peripherally interested or initially opposed to Jesus to identifying themselves as disciples of Jesus and believers in him as the Messiah.