Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography

Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography
Author: Lutz Doering
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2012
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9783161522369

The author provides the most extensive analysis available of ancient Jewish letter writing from the Persian period until the early rabbinic literature. In addition, he demonstrates the significance of Jewish letters for the development of early Christian letter writing.

The Urban World and the First Christians

The Urban World and the First Christians
Author: Steve Walton
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2017-09-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1467449032

In the tradition of The First Urban Christians by Wayne Meeks, this book explores the relationship between the earliest Christians and the city environment. Experts in classics, early Christianity, and human geography analyze the growth, development, and self-understanding of the early Christian movement in urban settings. The book's contributors first look at how the urban physical, cultural, and social environments of the ancient Mediterranean basin affected the ways in which early Christianity progressed. They then turn to how the earliest Christians thought and theologized in their engagement with cities. With a rich variety of expertise and scholarship, The Urban World and the First Christians is an important contribution to the understanding of early Christianity.

The Letter to the Colossians

The Letter to the Colossians
Author: Scot McKnight
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2018-02-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1467447064

The Letter to the Colossians offers a compelling vision of the Christian life; its claims transcend religion and bring politics, culture, spirituality, power, ethnicity, and more into play. Delving deeply into the message of Colossians, this exegetical and theological commentary by Scot McKnight will be welcomed by preachers, teachers, and students everywhere.

Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell

Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell
Author: Meghan Henning
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2014-11-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9783161529634

Meghan Henning explores the rhetorical function of the early Christian concept of hell, drawing connections to Greek and Roman systems of education, and examining texts from the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Latin literature, the New Testament, early Christian apocalypses and patristic authors.

Jewish Paideia

Jewish Paideia
Author: Jason M. Zurawski
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 621
Release: 2023-10-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506481787

Jewish Paideia investigates diverse self-reflections on what it meant to be Jewish in Hellenistic and early Roman Diaspora communities by examining depictions of ideal Jewish education, or paideia, in the literature of the period. Education offers a unique and unexplored vantage point for understanding the internal constructing of Jewish identity in progress, as it provides key insight into the most determinative constituents of Jewish ethics and culture and into how questions of "Jewishness" were reimagined under dynamic and varied cultural and political circumstances. Within the elite intellectual circles of the ancient Mediterranean world, individual and communal identity, not unlike today, was inextricably bound to education. Depictions of ideal Jewish education become for us windows into a discourse of identity as it happened. By exploring how Jewish writers utilized paideia as a means of forming, reshaping, and deploying unique portraits of Jewish identity, this volume fills a significant lacuna in the study of ancient Judaism and the Jewish people. It also provides meaningful comparanda for Classicists and necessary background for later developments of Late Antique Jewish and Christian pedagogy. The diverse ways in which education was construed directly reflect how authors sought to internally understand and externally portray the Jewish community. Education offers keen insight into how the ancestral past became a contested site, how "the other" was utilized as a foil for reinforcing the image of the in-group, how empire and colonization impacted understandings of the Jewish people within broader society, and how Jewish law functioned to connect community members across space and time. Paideia, therefore, provides the researcher unparalleled access to Jewish self-reflections during this important period of history and to questions that have been central to developing a greater understanding of the Jewish people within the ancient Mediterranean world.

The Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas
Author: Benjamin G. Wright
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2015-09-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110431491

The Letter of Aristeas has been an object modern scholarly interest since the seventeenth century. It is best known for containing the earliest version of the translation of the Hebrew Law into Greek, and this story accounts for much of the scholarly attention paid to the work. Yet, this legend only takes up a small percentage of the work. Looking at Aristeas as a whole, the work reveals an author who has acquired a Greek education and employs both Jewish and Greek sources in his work, and he has produced a Greek book. Even though Aristeas has garnered scholarly attention, no fully fledged commentary has been written on it. The works of R. Tramontano, M. Hadas and others, often referred to as commentaries, only contain text and annotated notes. This volume fills the gap in the scholarship on Aristeas by providing a full, paragraph-by-paragraph commentary, containing a new translation, text-critical notes, general commentary, and notes on specific words, phrases and ideas.

Paul's Witness to Formative Early Christian Instruction

Paul's Witness to Formative Early Christian Instruction
Author: Benjamin A. Edsall
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9783161530487

Benjamin A. Edsall re-opens the old quest for the preaching and teaching of the early Church through a new approach that draws on ancient communication practices. Given that ancient communicators relied explicitly on what they presumed their interlocutors to know, the author reconstructs early Christian instruction through Pauline appeals to previous knowledge, both explicit and implicit.

The Letter to Philemon

The Letter to Philemon
Author: Scot McKnight
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1467448761

The Academy of Parish Clergy’s 2018 Top Five Reference Books for Parish Ministry Paul's letter to Philemon carries a strong message of breaking down social barriers and establishing new realities of conduct and fellowship. It is also a disturbing text that has been used to justify slavery. Though brief, Philemon requires close scrutiny. In this commentary Scot McKnight offers careful textual analysis of Philemon and brings the practice of modern slavery into conversation with the ancient text. Too often, McKnight says, studies of this short letter gloss over the issue of slavery—an issue that must be recognized and dealt with if Christians are to read Philemon faithfully. Pastors and scholars will find in this volume the insight they need to preach and teach this controversial book in meaningful new ways.

1 and 2 Thessalonians

1 and 2 Thessalonians
Author: Nijay K. Gupta
Publisher: Zondervan Academic
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0310518725

The study of Paul's Thessalonian letters is enjoying fresh interest today. These texts are considered by many to be amongst the earliest extant Christian documents. They are included in conversations about early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. New insights are coming from examination of the religious, socio-cultural, and political contexts of Roman Thessalonica. And, looking back, these letters have played an important role in the development of Christian eschatology. This volumes serves as an up-to-date guide to these academic discussions and debates and much more. This volume on 1 and 2 Thessalonians in the Zondervan Critical Introductions to the New Testament series offers a volume-length engagement with subjects that normally only receive short treatments in biblical commentaries or in New Testament Introductions. This volume addresses: Authorship Date Audience Socio-Historical Context Genre Purpose Integrity Textual History Greek Style Structure Argument Other Critical Issues Main Interpretive Issues Reception into the Canon Selected History of Interpretation Bibliography