This collection of essays by leading experts in New Testament scholarship addresses core themes in the study of early Christianity. The topics addressed include text-critical issues relating to the New Testament, the historical situation in which the earliest Christian documents were composed, early Christian rituals, historical questions concerning Jesus and Paul, and the origin and development of important theological ideas in the early Church. This volume is dedicated to Henk Jan de Jonge (Emeritus Professor in the New Testament, Leiden University) in honour of his important contributions to the field of New Testament Studies.

This volume contains seventeen essays written by Eckhard J. Schnabel, written over the past 25 years. The essays focus on the realities of the work of Jesus, Paul, John, and the early church, exploring aspects of the history, missionary expansion, and theology of the early church including lexical, ethical, and ecclesiological questions. Specific subjects discussed include Jesus' silence at his trial, the introduction of foreign deities to Athens, the understanding of Rom 12:1, Paul's ethics, the meaning of baptizein, the realities of persecution, Christian identity and mission in Revelation, and singing and instrumental music in the early church.

In this book, the author draws on two original sources, on a Greek biographer, historian, and rhetorician, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as well as on Pompeian domestic art and architecture. Generally, NT scholars read texts, but Greeks and ancient Romans loved beauty. The walls and floors of their houses were decorated with thousands of colorful frescoes and mosaics, art that two millennia later is still on display in Pompeii. Christians lived and worshipped in those typical houses; relating the art to NT texts generates many intriguing new questions! What stories/myths did Greeks and Romans see every day? What were their sports, and how violent were they? Many NT scholars know as much or more Latin than they do Greek, and they therefore cite the Latin historian Livy rather than the Greek Dionysius, who wrote a century before the first Christian historian, Luke. Dionysius’ rhetoric expressed values shared across cultures, by Greeks, Romans, and Jews (e.g., by the historian—and rhetorician—Josephus), some values that Luke also shares. Dionysius makes clear that cities and ethnic groups had to praise how they treated emigrant foreigners, questions handled differently by Josephus and by Luke. This enables new interpretations of Jesus’ inaugural speech in Luke 4 and of Peter’s second Pentecost speech in Acts 10.

This book is the second of two volumes which reflect on the trend in biblical scholarship that contrasts the vision of the historical Jesus with that of the apostle Paul, on the one hand, and the vision of Paul with that of the evangelist Matthew, on the other. It argues that Jesus replaced the concept of ‘politics of holiness’ with that of ‘politics of compassion’. This means that the church as a community of Jesus-followers forms a fictive family, replacing a soteriology grounded in the biological family. God’s adoption of people as ‘God’s children’ is based on the potential of people to absorb the divine into their humanity. This truism is to be found in the visions shared by the peasant Jesus, the apostle Paul and the rabbi Matthew, as well as in creedal Christianity. The book concludes with autobiographical reflective notes, analogous to the parabolic story of the travellers to Emmaus from Jerusalem (Luke 24) and that of the African eunuch (Acts 8) on his way back from Jerusalem to Africa. The notes serve to consolidate the two volumes on Jesus, Paul and Matthew and their messages of God’s wisdom, justice and mercy.

This book introduces the reader to the discipline of biblical theology. In part one Helyer discusses the central problem of the unity of the Bible and the various options that have been proposed. He then argues for a vital connection between the testaments forming one grand story of redemptive history and one central theme, the coming kingdom of God. Part two takes up the theology of three major witnesses: Jesus, Paul, and John. In these three witnesses Helyer finds the center of New Testament thought. He emphasizes the importance of Jesus' teaching as foundational for all the other the New Testament witnesses. Without overlooking the diversity and individuality of the major witnesses, he clearly demonstrates the theological unity that binds them together and provides the key to the enduring message of Scripture.

In this New Studies in Biblical Theology volume, Historian Paul W. Barnett presents clear, careful and convincing evidence that the Christ of orthodox Christianity is the same as the Jesus of history.

Drawing upon ten years of research experience, the master scholar James D. G. Dunn presents a book on a major issue in the study of Christian origins: what were the attitudes toward Jewish law within earliest Christianity? This volume not only gathers the author's significant contributions to date but also includes new material. Divided into nine parts, it is set in the wider context of a living dialogue and debate. The introduction maps out Dunn's extensive work in Pauline and Markan studies. The final chapter, "The Theology of Galatians," serves as a summary of Dunn's current position on Paul and the law and brings the volume to a convincing conclusion.

Ben Witherington III offers a comparison and a critical assessment of the end times teachings of Jesus and Paul.

Looking at Paul’s writing through a feminist lens, this volume asks questions focused around science and philosophy. Antoinette Clark Wire specifically explores the reality of all bodies and beings in the ecosystem, not excluding whatever these beings produce, including the speed of light, the webs of spiders, and the culture of humans, so the broadest focus includes the specific. This focus could be too broad for Paul’s letters, blind as he seems to be about where food comes from, why families nurture children, or how water sustains life. Yet Wire shows the reader how he grapples again and again with the limits of his body and the threat of death and finds in Jesus’s dying and rising a way out of fear toward what he calls ‘a new creation.’

The Blackwell Companion to Paul presents a distinctive dual focus approach that encompasses both the historical Paul and the history of Paul's influence. In doing so, expert contributors successfully address the interests of students of early Christianity and those of Christian theology. Offers a complete overview of the life, writings and legacy of one of the key figures of Christianity The essays compass the major themes of Paul's life and work, as well as his impact through the centuries on theology, Church teaching, social beliefs, art, literature, and contemporary intellectual thought Edited by one of the leading figures in the field of Pauline Studies The contributors include a range of world-renowned academics