It is commonplace that postmodern thought has problematized the concept of the self. This poses a particularly sharp problem for Christian theologians, for whom the idea of the person as a Christian self must be central. In this book John Meech addresses this problem by means of a theological hermeneutics that brings together cutting edge scholarship in biblical interpretation and constructive theology. The book comprises three major parts. In the first, Meech reflects on St. Paul's construal of Christian identity in light of what has become known as the "new paradigm" in Pauline studies. This movement, identified with N.T. Wright, James Dunn, and Terence Donaldson, stresses the communal aspects of Paul's thought and his narrative understanding of the self. In the second part, Meech offers a pivotal analysis of Rudolf Bultmann's phenomenology of the self and its impact on his demythologizing interpretation of Paul's writings. In the third part, Meech engages Paul Ricoeur's late work, Oneself as Another, as a guide to the postmodern problem of selfhood and as a heuristic resource for interpreting Paul's writings. He does not restrict himself to a textual treatment of Ricoeur's work on selfhood and narrative, nor does he stop at an abstract reflection on its significance for theology. Instead he explores in considerable detail the contributions and implications of Ricoeur's later writings for biblical hermeneutics and theology. Investigating the unthematized hints about community presupposed in Ricoeur's work, Meech reconfigures his ontology of the self as an ontology of the self in community. Finally, he correlates Paul's communal understanding of the "I" with this ontology, articulating a self that is constituted in community but not reduced to a mere locus of community. He argues that the community posited in his study can be understood as the community of the living and dead in Christ.

Examines the figure of Paul within both the book of Acts and the Pauline writings.

Salvation is often thought to be an all-or-nothing matter: you are either saved or damned. In the ancient world some figures, including Paul the Apostle, John of Patmos, Hermas, the Sethians, and the Valentinians, did not think this way, however. For them, there were multiple levels of salvation. Examining the reasons and implications for why these important thinkers believed that salvation comes in degrees, Heavenly Stories offers a fresh perspective on ancient thinking about responsibility, especially as it intersects with concerns such as genealogy and determinism. It shows why Jews and Christians of various kinds—some eventually declared orthodox, others heretical—correlated ethics and soteriology and argued over how this should be done. By constructing a difference between a lower and higher level of salvation, ancient authors devised soteriological hierarchies that could account for ethical imperfections and social differentiation between their communities and outsiders, as well as reinforce idealized portrayals of conduct among members of their own groups. Alexander Kocar asks how these thinkers identified and described these ethical and social differences among people; what commitments motivated them to make such distinctions; what were the social effects of different salvific categories and ethical standards; and what impact did hierarchically structured soteriologies have on notions of ethical responsibility? His findings have repercussions for the study of ancient ethics (especially free will and responsibility), our understanding of orthodoxy and heresy, and scholarly debates surrounding the origins of Christianity as a movement that allegedly transcends ethnic boundaries.

This volume makes a significant contribution to the important—often contentious—debate over Paul’s understanding of and attitude toward the Mosaic law. Sixteen outstanding New Testament scholars examine in depth the key passages in the letters of Paul that deal with the Jewish law, striving to find common ground on a wide range of exegetical and theological disputes. Their work not only provides a clearer view of the issues involved but also draws together the differing interpretive approaches currently applied to this pivotal topic of study. The essays by Lichtenberger, Hengel, Kertelge, Hofius, and Hubner are available here for the first time in English.

The Covenant in Judaism and Paul deals with biblical and intertestamental uses of covenant and related rituals, challenging the view that baptism replaces circumcision, since baptism is entry into the new covenant, and showing that ritual boundaries are replaced or redefined since identity has changed. The investigation uses social categories, “identity” as a term that offers an explanation for a group's selfunderstanding and “boundary” as a term for entry rite of affirmation marker. Part A looks at the Old Testament background to aspects of the covenant. Part B examines covenant identity and rituals in Palestinian Judaism as featured in Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, the Damascus Document, and the Community Rule. It includes a brief analysis of the baptism administered by John the Baptist. Part C analyses Paul's views on covenant, circumcision, and baptism against this background.

Americans and the Birth of Israel tells the dramatic story of how a ragtag group of Americans of all religions worked, often in secret and facing the possibility of arrest and imprisonment, to make sure that after the Holocaust a refuge for Jews would be born. It is a story that is not well-known but deserves to be. The book tells the story of how Americans raised money, gathered munitions, ships, and planes, rescued Holocaust survivors and sneaked them past the British patrols, helped Israel prepare militarily, engaged in dramatic political efforts in Washington and the United Nations to secure Israeli statehood, participated in cultural activities to support the Zionist cause, and in other ways made a decisive difference in allowing Israel to be born. From well-known figures like Golda Meir to little-known individuals, Americans and the Birth of Israel brings these compelling stories to light and explores the complex relationship between the United States and Israel historically and today.

This volume brings together numerous publications that range across the New Testament canon and encompass a variety of forms, from thematic essay to commentary, from close exegesis to homily. All these studies highlight Paul Meyer's characteristic attention to detail, skilled argument, and engaging prose. The New Testament Library offers authoritative commentary on every book and major aspect of the New Testament, as well as classic volumes of scholarship. The commentaries in this series provide fresh translations based on the best available ancient manuscripts, offer critical portrayals of the historical world in which the books were created, pay careful attention to their literary design, and present a theologically perceptive exposition of the text.

David Moessner proposes a new understanding of the relation of Luke’s second volume to his Gospel to open up a whole new reading of Luke’s foundational contribution to the New Testament. For postmodern readers who find Acts a ‘generic outlier,’ dangling tenuously somewhere between the ‘mainland’ of the evangelists and the ‘Peloponnese’ of Paul—diffused and confused and shunted to the backwaters of the New Testament by these signature corpora—Moessner plunges his readers into the hermeneutical atmosphere of Greek narrative poetics and elaboration of multi-volume works to inhale the rhetorical swells that animate Luke’s first readers in their engagement of his narrative. In this collection of twelve of his essays, re-contextualized and re-organized into five major topical movements, Moessner showcases multiple Hellenistic texts and rhetorical tropes to spotlight the various signals Luke provides his readers of the multiple ways his Acts will follow "all that Jesus began to do and to teach" (Acts 1:1) and, consequently, bring coherence to this dominant block of the New Testament that has long been split apart. By collapsing the world of Jesus into the words and deeds of his followers, Luke re-configures the significance of Israel’s "Christ" and the "Reign" of Israel’s God for all peoples and places to create a new account of ‘Gospel Acts,’ discrete and distinctively different than the "narrative" of the "many" (Luke 1:1). Luke the Historian of Israel’s Legacy combines what no analysis of the Lukan writings has previously accomplished, integrating seamlessly two ‘generically-estranged’ volumes into one new whole from the intent of the one composer. For Luke is the Hellenistic historian and simultaneously ‘biblical’ theologian who arranges the one "plan of God" read from the script of the Jewish scriptures—parts and whole, severally and together—as the saving ‘script’ for the whole world through Israel’s suffering and raised up "Christ," Jesus of Nazareth. In the introductions to each major theme of the essays, this noted scholar of the Lukan writings offers an epitome of the main features of Luke’s theological ‘thought,’ and, in a final Conclusions chapter, weaves together a comprehensive synthesis of this new reading of the whole.

The story of Paul's visit to the city of Athens with its speech delivered before the Areopagus council is one of the best-known and most-celebrated passages of the Acts of the Apostles. Being the only complete example of an apostolic address to "pure pagans" recorded, it has consistently attracted the attention of historians, biblical scholars, theologians, missionaries, apologists, artists, and believers over the centuries. Interpretations of the pericope are many and variegated, with opinions ranging from deeming the speech to be a foreign body in the New Testament to acclaiming it as the ideal model of translation of the Christian kerygma into a foreign idiom. At the heart of the debate is whether the various parts of the speech must be understood as Hellenistic or biblical in nature--or both. Paul Against the Idols defends and develops an integrated contextual study of the episode. Reading the story in its Lukan theological, intertextual, narrative, linguistic, and historical context enables an interpretation that accounts for its apparent ambivalence. This book thus contributes to the ongoing hermeneutical and exegetical scholarly discussions surrounding this locus classicus and suggests ways in which it can contribute to a Christian theology of religions and missiology.

This book challenges a popular and influential thesis in Lukan scholarship presented by the Tubingen School: Paul is a rival of Peter and Paul is an anti-Jewish apostle. Consequently, he is solely an apostle to Gentiles in Acts. Through a narrative-critical method, Wenxi Zhang studies Paul's inaugural speech in Antioch of Pisidia and its literary function in relation to Paul's missionary activity among Jews in Acts. He concludes (1) that this inaugural sermon functions as an interpretative key to understand the narrative of Paul's missionary activity among his fellow Jews; and (2) that Paul is not anti-Jewish. He remains a faithful Jew who proclaims to his fellow Jews the fulfillment of God's promise to David in Jesus' resurrection. Consequently, Acts is not anti-Jewish document.