Jean Bottero, one of the world's leading figures in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, approaches the Bible as an astounding variety of documents that reveal much of their time of origin, historical events, and climates of thought.
Kelly turns to the infancy narratives to see what the New Testament says about the Nativity. He also reveals that Christmas celebrations, cards, pageants, and crches are often combinations and embellishments of the gospel narratives.
In this groundbreaking book, Michael Gorman asks why there is no theory or model of the atonement called the "new-covenant" model, since this understanding of the atonement is likely the earliest in the Christian tradition, going back to Jesus himself. Gorman argues that most models of the atonement over-emphasize the penultimate purposes of Jesus' death and the "mechanics" of the atonement, rather than its ultimate purpose: to create a transformed, Spirit-filled people of God. The New Testament's various atonement metaphors are part of a remarkably coherent picture of Jesus' death as that which brings about the new covenant (and thus the new community) promised by the prophets, which is also the covenant of peace. Gorman therefore proposes a new model of the atonement that is really not new at all--the new-covenant model. He argues that this is not merely an ancient model in need of rediscovery, but also a more comprehensive, integrated, participatory, communal, and missional model than any of the major models in the tradition. Life in this new covenant, Gorman argues, is a life of communal and individual participation in Jesus' faithful, loving, peacemaking death. Written for both academics and church leaders, this book will challenge all who read it to re-think and re-articulate the meaning of Christ's death for us.
How and when did Jesus and the Spirit come to be regarded as fully God? The Birth of the Trinity offers a new historical approach by exploring the way in which first- and second-century Christians read the Old Testament in order to differentiate the one God as multiple persons. The earliest Christians felt they could metaphorically 'overhear' divine conversations between Father, Son, and Spirit when reading the Old Testament. When these snatches of dialogue are connected and joined, they form a narrative about the unfolding interior divine life as understood by the nascent church. What emerges is not a static portrait of the triune God, but a developing story of divine persons enacting mutual esteem, voiced praise, collaborative strategy, and self-sacrificial love. The presence of divine dialogue in the New Testament and early Christian literature shows that, contrary to the claims of James Dunn and Bart Ehrman (among others), the earliest Christology was the highest Christology, as Jesus was identified as a divine person through Old Testament interpretation.
The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.
Many are saying that the prevailing paradigm of New Testament origins is going nowhere. In its place, Brodie's stunning book invites us to suspend all 'knowledge' we already have about the history of the New Testament's development, and to be willing to entertain the following thesis. Everything hinges on Proto-Luke, a history of Jesus using the Elijah-Elisha narrative as its model, which survives in 10 chapters of Luke and 15 of Acts. Mark then uses Proto-Luke, transposing its Acts material back into the life of Jesus. Matthew deuteronomizes Mark, John improves on the discourses of Matthew. Luke-Acts spells out the story at length. Add the Pauline corpus, the descendant of Deuteronomy via the Matthean logia, and the New Testament is virtually complete. This is a totalizing theory, an explanation of everything, and its critics will be numerous. But even they will be hugely intrigued, and have to admit that Brodie's myriads of challenging observations about literary affinities demand an answer.
The world is filled with messages for women about pregnancy. Popular books and well-meaning family and friends offer unsolicited advice about what to expect and how to stay healthy—sometimes resulting in joy and excitement but other times leading to discouragement and fear. The Bible, too, has a lot to say about childbirth—offering real hope that nothing in this world can match. In Labor with Hope, Gloria Furman helps women see topics such as pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, birth pain, and new life in the framework of the larger biblical narrative, infusing cosmic meaning into their personal experience by exploring how they point to eternal realities. Women will see that only Christ can provide the strength they desperately need in order to labor with hope.
The first comprehensive account to explore the beginnings of early Christian history writing, tracing its origin to the Gospel of Mark and Luke-Acts When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Christian literary memory. In this eye-opening new study, Eve-Marie Becker explores the diverse ways in which history was written according to the Hellenistic literary tradition, focusing specifically on the time during which the New Testament writings came into being: from the mid-first century until the early second century CE. While acknowledging cases of historical awareness in other New Testament writings, Becker traces the origins of this historiographical approach to the Gospel of Mark and Luke-Acts. Offering a bold new framework, Becker shows how the earliest Christian writings shaped “Christian” thinking and writing about history.
In this compelling study of the birth and infancy of Jesus, Robert Miller separates fact from fiction in the gospel narratives and relates them to stories about the miraculous births of Israelite heroes and of Greek and Roman sons of God. Born Divine analyzes the Christian claim that the birth and childhood of Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. The historical and theological dimensions of the virgin birth tradition are discussed with honesty and insight. This wide-ranging book also presents additional infancy gospels from the second century through the Middle Ages.
Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.