"While Peter, Paul, and increasingly also James have dominated New Tesatment scholarship, Joseph Barnabas, the Levite from Cyprus, has received comparatively little attention. This study seeks to relieve Joseph Barnabas of this undeserved obscurity and give him due recognition as a founding member of the Christian church, pioneer of the mission to the Gentiles, and patron of the apostle Paul."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Acts is the sequel to Luke's gospel and tells the story of Jesus's followers during the 30 years after his death. It describes how the 12 apostles, formerly Jesus's disciples, spread the message of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean against a background of persecution. With an introduction by P.D. James
Noted New Testament scholar Bauckham challenges the prevailing assumption the accounts of Jesus circulated as "anonymous community traditions," instead asserting that they were transmitted in the name of the original eyewitness.
Jenny Read-Heimerdinger explores the characters of Luke-Acts in order to situate them in the Jewish world to which they belong. Through a close reading of the Greek text, she argues that Luke emerges as a person thoroughly steeped in a Jewish view of Scripture, familiar with a range of associated oral traditions; and that taking account of the Jewish features allows new insights into the way that the author situates events and characters firmly within the history of Israel, before the Church was a separate institution or religion. Read-Heimerdinger proposes that such a view of his work implies an addressee capable of understanding what he received and that one eminently qualified candidate is Theophilus, the high priest in Jerusalem 37-41 and brother-in-law of Caiaphas. The Jewish perspective of Luke's two volumes is more visible in forms of the text not used for modern translations, notably that of Codex Bezae and the early versions, which are rejected by the editors of the Greek New Testament on which translations are based. Read-Heimerdinger draws on the analysis of the variants of the Greek text analysed in her previous Luke in his Own Words (2022), in a manner more accessible to readers unfamiliar with Greek. The variant readings make use of a sophisticated knowledge of Jewish exegetical techniques that would generally be discarded by later generations of Christians but which are increasingly being recognized by NT scholars, in line with Jewish historical studies of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Seeing the characters of Luke-Acts through Theophilus' eyes brings exciting insights and a fresh understanding of the author's message.
His book is a comparison of the message of Acts transmitted by Codex Bezae with that of the more familiar Alexandrian text, represented by Codex Vaticanus. For each section of Acts, there is a side by side translation of the Bezan and Alexandrian manuscripts, followed by a critical apparatus and, finally, a commentary that explores the differences in the message of the two texts. It is concluded that the Bezan text, with its interest in internal Jewish affairs and its focus on the struggles of the early disciples to free themselves from their traditional Jewish expectations and to achieve, despite their mistakes, a more accurate understanding of their master's teaching, is the earlier of the two texts.
History of Scituate, Massachusetts, From Its First Settlement to 1831 by Samuel Deane, first published in 1831, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.
Although none of the author-editors of the four canonical gospels walked with Jesus, embedded clues point to written source materials emanating from disciples who did: particularly the found Gospel of Thomas, the lost Gospel of Q1 and an inferred lost Gospel of Early John. While used and changed radically by the later evangelists, especially Mark and John, embedded source elements permit a surprising new reconstruction of the life of Jesus. After his crucifixion by the Romans, three divergent streams of belief represented by Judas Thomas the Twin, James brother of Jesus, and Paul of Tarsus progressed and collided, culminating in the scriptural ascendancy of the Pauline viewpoint following the Roman-Jewish War. For more information and a detailed summary of the book, visit www.christianbeginningsrevisited.com
In Christian Origins and Hellenistic Judaism, Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts assemble an international team of scholars whose work has focused on reconstructing the social matrix for earliest Christianity through reference to Hellenistic Judaism and its literary forms. Each essay moves forward the current understanding of how primitive Christianity situated itself in relation to evolving Greco-Roman Jewish culture. Some essays focus on configuring the social context for the origins of the Jesus movement and beyond, while others assess the literary relation between early Christian and Hellenistic Jewish texts.
The first Gentile who accepted Jesus in Antioch of Syria became a problem for the young church. The mother church in Jerusalem was not equipped to handle a non-Jew, either doctrinally or emotionally, yet everything was changing! Barnabas had no trouble adjusting to the new circumstances, but the leaders in Jerusalem could never fully accept the differences of the New Covenant. Gentiles were forced to face the question, "Must I become a Jew in order to be saved?" This became a controversy which troubled Paul's entire ministry. The advocates who stirred it up were called "Some men who came from James." We will see how Paul responded to the question, "How Jewish must the Church be?" Peter, Barnabas, James (the brother of Jesus), and Paul will be seen like never before. T. DEERING MANNING was ordained to the ministry in 1951. He holds the Bachelor's degree from Atlanta Christian College; and Master's degree from ZOE University. He also has received honorary doctorates in Christian Education, Literature, and Philosophy in Theology. He has served churches in Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. He currently serves as Associate Pastor of Morningstar Family Church, U.S. representative for Revival of East Slavic Land, and Bible Professor at North Florida Theological Seminary. He is married to Beverly Anne Meares of South Carolina, and they have lived in Florida for more than thirty five years. Other writings include EYE WITNESSES OF HIS MAJESTY (Xulon Press), NOT BY MIGHT NOR POWER (history of Victory Christian Center), and BIBLICAL DISCIPLESHIP (a study of Biblical Leadership).
