New Testament Textual and Literary Criticism

This broadly adopted textbook weds literary and historical approaches to focus on the New Testament's structure and meaning. Anatomy of the New Testament is systematic, critical, and reliable in its scope and content. This seventh edition has been revised throughout, to take account of current trends in scholarship and to discuss important interpretative issues, such as the Gospel of Thomas. Each chapter includes two new features: Have You Learned It? offering questions for analysis and synthesis; What Do They Mean? presenting definitions of key terms to enhance student comprehension and critical thinking.

This volume places the New Testament letters squarely in the middle of all the important letter corpora of antiquity. Chapters cover the basic letter formula, papyrus and postal delivery, non-literary and diplomatic correspondence, Greek and Latin literary letters, epistolary theory, letters in early Judaism, and all the letters of the New Testament. Part I of each chapter surveys each corpus, followed by detailed exegetical examples in Part II. Comprehensive bibliographies and 54 exercises with answers suit this guide to student and scholar alike.

The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament is a detailed introduction to the New Testament, written by more than 40 scholars from a variety of Christian denominations. Treats the 27 books and letters of the New Testament systematically, beginning with a review of current issues and concluding with an annotated bibliography Considers the historical, social and cultural contexts in which the New Testament was produced, exploring relevant linguistic and textual issues An international contributor list of over 40 scholars represent wide field expertise and a variety of Christian denominations Distinctive features include a unified treatment of Luke through Acts, articles on the canonical Gospels, and a discussion of the apocryphal New Testament

Hellenistic Judaism and New Testament interpretation: an introductory essay / Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts -- Hellenistic Jewish social contexts for Christian origins. Hellenism and Biblical canons: is there a connection? / Lee Martin McDonald -- Glorifying the present through the past: Herod the Great and his Jewish royal predecessors / Adam Kolman Marshak -- Beyond covenant nomism: revisiting Palestinian Judaism in light of pseudo-Philo's Biblical antiquities / Preston M. Sprinkle -- Resurrection and immortality in Hellenistic Judaism: navigating the conceptual boundaries / C.D. Elledge -- The spirit in second temple Jewish monotheism and the origins of early Christology / Andrew W. Pitts and Seth Pollinger -- The ethnic context of Paul's letters / Christopher D. Stanley -- Is Saul of Tarsus also among the prophets? Paul's calling as prophetic divine commissioning / Tony Costa -- Monotheism and philosophy: notes on the concept of God in Philo and Paul (Romans 1:18-21) / Peter Frick -- Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism divide? The case of Pauline anthropology in Romans 7 and 2 Corinthians 4-5 / Emma Wasserman -- Hellenistic Jewish literary and religious contexts for Christian origins. Was John the Baptist a member of the Qumran community? Once more / Stanley E. Porter -- The temple attitudes of John and Qumran in the light of Hellenistic Judaism / Wally V. Cirafesi -- Rhetoric and the art of persuasion in the Wisdom of Solomon/ Leo G. Perdue.
Dialectics: philosophical and Talmudic / Jacob Neusner -- Ancient science fiction: journeys into space and visions of the world in Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman literature of antiquity / Catherine Hezser -- Luke, Josephus, and self-definition: the genre of Luke-Acts and its relationship to apologetic historiography and collected biography / Sean A. Adams -- Rivers, springs, and wells of living water: metaphorical transformation in the Johannine corpus / Beth M. Stovell -- Martyr theology in Hellenistic Judaism and Paul's conception of Jesus' death in Romans 3:21-26 / Jarvis J. Williams -- Torah instruction, discussion, and prophecy in first-century synagogues / Carl Mosser -- On the trail of Trypho: two fragmentary Jewish-Christian dialogues from the ancient church / William Varner.

These essays explore the Jewish background to central issues in the New Testament --letter and spirit, prophecy and law, forgiveness, the accounts of Jesus' "trial(s)", evidence required for legal/theological claims, the shepherding images, disinheritance, and teachings on marriage and divorce.

Gerd Theissen describes the emergence of the New Testament canon out of the wide variety of early Christian literature, drawing on Max Weber's discussion of the evolution of religious organizations. Theissen describes a series of phases in the life of the early Christian movement: the charismatic, the "pseudepigraphic," the "functional," and the "canonical."

The words, phrases, and stories of the New Testament permeate the English language. Indeed, this relatively small group of twenty-seven works, written during the height of the Roman Empire, not only helped create and sustain a vast world religion, but also have been integral to the larger cultural dynamics of the West, above and beyond particular religious expressions. Looking at the New Testament through the lens of literary study, Kyle Keefer offers an engrossing exploration of this revered religious text as a work of literature, but also keeps in focus its theological ramifications. Unique among books that examine the Bible as literature, this brilliantly compact introduction offers an intriguing double-edged look at this universal text--a religiously informed literary analysis. The book first explores the major sections of the New Testament--the gospels, Paul's letters, and Revelation--as individual literary documents. Keefer shows how, in such familiar stories as the parable of the Good Samaritan, a literary analysis can uncover an unexpected complexity to what seems a simple, straightforward tale. At the conclusion of the book, Keefer steps back and asks questions about the New Testament as a whole. He reveals that whether read as a single document or as a collection of works, the New Testament presents readers with a wide variety of forms and viewpoints, and a literary exploration helps bring this richness to light. A fascinating investigation of the New Testament as a classic literary work, this Very Short Introduction uses a literary framework--plot, character, narrative arc, genre--to illuminate the language, structure, and the crafting of this venerable text.

This volume in the Library of Early Christianity examines the literary techniques that were common during the development of the New Testament, and how these techniques influenced Scripture.

The Library of Early Christianity is a series of eight outstanding books exploring the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts in which the New Testament developed.

Resourcing New Testament Studies includes fifteen essays, contributed by twenty, internationally known scholars, including representatives from North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. These colleagues joined together to honor David Laird Dungan, Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose impressive teaching, research, and publishing career has now spanned over four decades.Opening 'Part I. In Honor of David L. Dungan,' is a lively and revealing 'Cooperative Essay on a Collaborative Scholar,' composed by five of Dungan's colleagues; three, from the University of Tennessee; a fourth, from the editorial team with Dungan for The International Bible Commentary; and the fifth, Dungan's friend from childhood and co-author of their popular Sourcebook for the Study of the Gospels. Part I concludes with a full bibliography of Dungan's published work. Subsequent Parts of the volume focus on three themes, each reflecting some aspect of Dungan's own work, 'Part II. The Synoptic Problem;' 'Part III. Jesus, the Gospels and Acts' and 'Part IV. Canon, Theology and Ethics.'Contributors to this Festschrift include David R. Cartlidge, Robert A. Derrenbacker, Jr., William R. Farmer, David Noel Freedman with Henry Innes MacAdam, Albert Fuchs, Birger Gerhardsson, Jan Lambrecht, Adrian Leske, David E. Linge, Sean McEvenue, Ralph V. Norman, Samuel Oyin Obogunrin, Charles H. Reynolds, Hans-Hartmut Schroeder, Joseph B. Tyson, William O. Walker, Jr., and the three co-editors, Allan J. McNicol, David B. Peabody and J. Samuel Subramanian.

In this study in three-dimensional character reconstruction, Cornelis Bennema presents a new theory of character in the New Testament literature. Although character has been the subject of focused literary-critical study of the New Testament since the 1970s, Bennema observes that there is still no consensus regarding how character should be understood in contemporary literary theory or in biblical studies. Many New Testament scholars seem to presume that characters in Greco-Roman literature are two-dimensional,"Aristotelian"; figures, unlike the well-rounded, psychologized individuals who appear in modern fiction. They continue nevertheless to apply contemporary literary theory to characters in ancient writings. Bennema here offers a full, comprehensive, and non-reductionist theory for the analysis, classification, and evaluation of characters in the New Testament.