This thorough manual for advanced students and their supervisors and anyone researching or writing on the Gospel of Mark is the opening volume in an important new series of Guides to Advanced Biblical Research. Together with an essay on the current state of research and a discussion of the future of Markan study, it provides a chrestomathy of samples of Markan research together with a review of recent dissertations and a full, annotated bibliography.

The world to which the Gospel of Mark introduces its reader is a world of conflicts and suspense, enigmas and secrets, questions and overturning of evidence, irony and surprise. Its principal actor, Jesus, is perplexing in the extreme. He is evidently so for the religious authorities who oppose him, but also for his disciples, who shift from incomprehension to opposition and flight. Questions of meaning, life and death, good and evil are continually broached. This narrative is a subtle invitation to enter into a new world, that of the coming Reign of God, in which the first are last and whoever wants to save his life must lose it. This commentary on the Gospel of Mark has been enthusiastically reviewed in the French edition as one of the best current commentaries on Mark. As a narrative critical commentary, it favors an interpretation of the Gospel that tries to grasp the dynamic of the text taken as a whole. Even if the technical vocabulary of narrative analysis is not used, and the main results of the historical-critical criticism, particularly those of redaction criticism, are not neglected, as the notes will reveal, it is narrative criticism that guides the proceedings.

The author has gone back to the original biblical sources to compose a gospel for his own modern audience to convey to them his vision of Jesus and Jesus' message. The first part is the gospel text, and the second part is an interview with the author about his choices in composing this work.

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.

Did Jesus claim to be God? Without question. And he did so repeatedly. That’s why John, a member of the “inner circle” of the disciples, wrote his own account of Jesus’ time on earth. A Forty-Day Study of John’s Gospel answers the question, “Who exactly is Jesus?” and shows how the works and words of Jesus validate his claim that he is God the Son. Other books in this series include A Forty-Day Study of the Biblical Story, volumes one and two; A Forty-Day Study of the Book of Hebrews; and A Forty-Day Study on Sin, Salvation, and Sanctification.

Although consistently overlooked or dismissed, John 8.6, 8 in the Pericope Adulterae is the only place in canonical or non-canonical Jesus tradition that portrays Jesus as writing. After establishing that John 8.6, 8 is indeed a claim that Jesus could write, this book offers a new interpretation and transmission history of the Pericope Adulterae. Not only did the pericope’s interpolator place the story in John’s Gospel in order to highlight the claim that Jesus could write, but he did so at John 7.53–8.11 as a result of carefully reading the Johannine narrative. The final chapter of the book proposes a plausible socio-historical context for the insertion of the story.