I am the director of Equipping Church Leaders-East Africa. East African church leaders (and most Christians everywhere) are interested in eschatology (the study of the “last things”). I have been fascinated by this subject for decades, particularly since I attended a church that took eschatology seriously. After a time, however, I realized that something was amiss in that pastor’s understanding of eschatology. That motivated me to study eschatology on my own and begin compiling an extensive library on the subject. While pursuing my M.Div. at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I wrote two major papers on the subject and now have written the most comprehensive synthesis on biblical eschatology currently available.
G. K. Beale, now at Reformed Theological Seminary in Dallas, TX, is probably the premier authority on the book of Revelation. His massiveThe Book of Revelation(NIGTC) is over 1100 pages long and, I believe, is without question the most scholarly and detailed treatment of Revelation currently available. Anyone who is seriously interested in the book of Revelation needs to interact with this book. Beale’s treatment of Revelation is enhanced by his deep understanding of the Old Testament (he is co-editor, with D. A. Carson, of Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament). In short, serious students of Revelation should get this book. Its depth of detail will be worth it and will lead the reader to see biblical connections not previously imagined.
This commentary series is established on the presupposition that the theological character of the New Testament documents calls for exegesis that is sensitive to theological themes as well as to the details of the historical, linguistic, and textual context. Such thorough exegetical work lies at the heart of these volumes, which contain detailed verse-by-verse commentary preceded by general comments on each section and subsection of the text.
An important aim of the NIGTC authors is to interact with the wealth of significant New Testament research published in recent articles and monographs. In this connection the authors make their own scholarly…
No matter how you read it, the Bible is a strange book. It weaves together beautiful narratives and deadly-dull genealogies; uplifting messages with passages that many today find ethically repulsive. Yet it gained an extraordinary authority, in a predominantly pre-literate society. The question of how this happened has been an intellectual and scholarly preoccupation of mine for decades, and as a professor at Brown University I seek to bring my students and readers into this very foreign world in order to open their eyes to new possibilities in the present.
I’m going to cheat here and put this book together with two others, The Jewish Annotated New Testament and The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha. Each of these three books has the biblical text; explanatory notes that include scholarly perspectives; and a lengthy set of essays by well-noted scholars. All of these parts of the Bible were written (primarily) by and for Jews in antiquity—including much of the New Testament—and these books seek to recover how they were read and functioned in antiquity.
First published in 2004, The Jewish Study Bible is a landmark, one-volume resource tailored especially for the needs of students of the Hebrew Bible. It has won acclaim from readers in all religious traditions.
The Jewish Study Bible combines the entire Hebrew Bible-in the celebrated Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation-with explanatory notes, introductory materials, and essays by leading biblical scholars on virtually every aspect of the text, the world in which it was written, its interpretation, and its role in Jewish life. The quality of scholarship, easy-to-navigate format, and vibrant supplementary features bring the ancient text to life.
Lena Einhorn is a writer and filmmaker, with a background in medicine. She has portrayed Greta Garbo’s life before the breakthrough, in the novel Blekinge Street 32, and in Nina’s Journey, she told the story of her mother, one of the last to leave the Warsaw ghetto alive. Nina’s Journey also became a feature film, written and directed by Einhorn. The book received the National Book Award of Sweden, and the film received the National Film Award for best picture and best script, as well as a number of international awards. In 2019 the critically acclaimed autobiographical novel The Thin Ice came out.
The New Testament has been portrayed as a repetitive and largely ahistorical text, except for the presence of the names of certain individuals (Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate, Jewish King Herod the Great, etc, etc). Otherwise, very little fits with known history of first-century Juda and Galilee. But when one reads this religious narrative, The New Testament, next to the narratives of Josephus—written around the same time—one starts discerning certain recurring patterns. And after a while one realizes that The New Testament is anything but boring. It is actually a fantastic text, skillfully written in layers, where the historical layer lies just beneath the surface. The New Testament is full of incomprehensible elements—unknown names just thrown into the narrative, seeming contradictions, etc—but it is in these strange elements that the clues lie. One needs, however, to have Josephus' historical texts (The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities)…
From one of our most celebrated writers on religion, a fresh, bold, and unsettling new translation of the New Testament
"The greatest achievement of Hart's translation is to restore the urgency of the original. . . . It is beautiful."-James Mumford, Standpoint
"This translation is a remarkable feat."-Lucy Beckett, Times Literary Supplement
David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New Testament in the spirit of "etsi doctrina non daretur," "as if doctrine is not given." Reproducing the texts' often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts' impenetrability…
Religion, faith, and belief are very personal things that can invoke powerful emotional and intellectual responses. Responses are shaped by social conditioning during childhood that can last a lifetime, engendering spiritual comfort or deep disturbance in adulthood. I began to question my Catholic indoctrination as I started to delve into historical accounts of early Christianity and the evils inflicted on the world under the banner of doing God’s work, politics waged by the Vatican to maintain secular power, distilling it all into something I finally felt comfortable with.
Like many others, my Catholic upbringing told me the Gospels were written by the apostles. I believed that for a long time … until I started to delve more deeply into the basis of my beliefs. I quickly realized that the simple fishermen Jesus supposedly had around him could not have written the gospels created in the late first to mid-second century. Nobody really knows for certain.
I asked myself, ‘How could the gospel authors provide direct quotes supposedly said by Jesus?’ Were the texts pure inventions? An elaborate collaboration between Rome and Israeli factions to promote Roman rule? The more I delved into this book, the more its pages generated further questions…and provided answers that plainly contradicted accepted Christian dogma. I had a lot of material to digest, and the process wasn’t complete.
Commencing in mid February 2004, SBS TV (Australia) will run a two–part documentary based on this title.
In this groundbreaking and controversial book, Burton Mack brilliantly exposes how the Gospels are fictional mythologies created by different communities for various purposes and are only distantly related to the actual historical Jesus.
Mack‘s innovative scholarship which boldly challenges traditional Christian understanding‘ will change the way you approach the New Testament and think about how Christianity arose.
The clarity of Mack‘s prose and the intelligent pursuit of his subject make compelling reading. Mack‘s investigation of the various…
I am a New Testament scholar, with an expertise in Pauline Theology, who has spent my working life trying to make New Testament scholarship more accessible for non-experts. After studying at Oxford University, I taught in two theological colleges before taking a few years to be a freelance writer lecturer. I am a lay theologian and have worked with most dioceses of the Church of England but now am a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral where I oversee Theology, Learning, and Art in the life of the Cathedral. I hope you enjoy reading these books that have had such a big impact on me and my thinking.
One way of opening up the world of the New Testament is through fictional accounts of life in the period; the other way is by doing a deep dive into some of the academic debates that have explored issues from this period. This is an accessible but fascinating book that explores the life, culture, and background of the New Testament and provides a vast array of interesting nuggets that will enhance your reading of the New Testament. This book opens up our imaginations by providing the information we need to imagine the world for ourselves.
What was life like for first-century Christians?
Imagine a modest-sized Roman home of a well-to-do Christian household wedged into a thickly settled quarter of Corinth. In the lingering light of a summer evening, men, women and children, merchants, working poor and slaves, a mix of races and backgrounds have assembled in the dimly lit main room are are spilling into the central courtyard. This odd assortment of gathered believers--some thirty in number--are attentive as the newly arrived and travel-weary emissary from Paul reads from the papyrus scroll he has brought from their apostolic mentor.
But if you were to be…
I have just retired after teaching 35 years in the New Testament department at Denver Seminary. I have authored, co-authored, or co-edited thirty books related to New Testament studies and more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles or chapters in multi-author books. I have learned that most of the reasons people don’t believe in part or all of the Bible is because they don’t understand it properly, so my passion is to try to rectify that. The New Testament changed my life for the better, as it has hundreds of millions of other people. I just want to help that number continue to grow.
Keener is one of the few living scholars who has actually read cover-to-cover all of the most relevant Jewish and Greco-Roman background literature to the New Testament and can speak with authority about the way the Gospels are similar to and different from other ancient biographies and histories. He addresses virtually every skeptical question, is abreast of all the scholarly trends, including those that get little press because they actually support the reliability of the Gospels. But he is no fundamentalist, insisting that we evaluate the ancient books of Scriptures by the standards of writing of their day and not ours. A soft-spoken man, who has overcome personal tragedy more than once, Keener is a good friend and amazing Christian gentleman.
Demonstrates the reliability of the canonical gospels by exploring the genre of ancient biography
The canonical gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources.
Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day. In Christobiography he explores the character of ancient biography and urges students and scholars to appreciate the gospel writers’ method and degree of accuracy in recounting the ministry of Jesus. Keener’s…
I’ve lost
track of how many times my daughter has asked me to re-read the story of
Jonah from this book.
It does a great job of presenting Biblical history
in a simplified way for kids to understand, and showing how the Old
Testament points forward to Jesus. The art style is dynamic and every now
and then you have to turn it 90 degrees to see something like Goliath
towering over teeny-tiny David.
If you are a parent, grandparent, pastor, or teacher looking for a way to teach the children in your life about God's "Never Stopping, Never Giving up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love," look no further than The Jesus Storybook Bible.
What makes The Jesus Storybook Bible different from every other Kids' Bible?
While other Kids' Bibles contain stories from the Old and New Testaments, The Jesus Storybook Bible tells the Story beneath all the stories in the Bible, pointing to Jesus as our Savior. From the Old Testament through the New Testament, as the Story unfolds, children will clearly see…
I am a New Testament scholar, with an expertise in Pauline Theology, who has spent my working life trying to make New Testament scholarship more accessible for non-experts. After studying at Oxford University, I taught in two theological colleges before taking a few years to be a freelance writer lecturer. I am a lay theologian and have worked with most dioceses of the Church of England but now am a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral where I oversee Theology, Learning, and Art in the life of the Cathedral. I hope you enjoy reading these books that have had such a big impact on me and my thinking.
This is a book that captured my imagination about thirty years ago. It uses New Testament scholarship to reconstruct and imagine what it might have been like to live in Judah and Galilee at the time of Jesus but never to have met him in person—hence the title the Shadow of the Galilean. It was the first book I’d come across that used scholarship to imagine what it was actually like to live then. I’ve been thinking about that book ever since and it was what inspired me to write my book.
First published in 1987 by Fortress Press, this 20th anniversary edition of this classic bestseller includes a new Afterword from the author. Here, in narrative form, is an account of the activity of Jesus of Nazareth, scrupulously constructed so that it does not undercut the insights of New Testament scholarship. What makes it different from other such attempts is that Jesus never actually appears. What we find everywhere is his shadow, his effect.
Such an approach avoids the usual pitfalls of the genre and lends this story attributed to a fictitious narrator an attraction, freshness, and power all its own.…
Given my adolescent preoccupation with fundamentalist Christianity and its fixation upon Jesus as one’s “personal savior,” it was important to me, once I discovered that some doubted the historical accuracy of the gospels, to defend them. But the more I did so, the greater my doubts became. I found my former confidence untenable, and was pretty steamed about it, but I retained my fascination with the question!
This immensely learned expert in Old and New Testament, as well as Jewish and Christian history, shows how various items in the gospels make the best, most natural sense as clues that Jesus was first remembered as something like a Hasidic saint.
A very eye-opening rereading of the gospels through Jewish eyes. This book taught me some crucial things about the original meaning of the phrase “the son of man” and many other things.
And by the way, his name is pronounced “Ver-MESH.”
In this, Geza Vermes' best known book, there emerges perhaps the closest portrayal that we have of a genuinely historical Jesus. Freed from the weight and onus of Christian doctrine or Jewish animus, Jesus here appears as a vividly human, yet profoundly misunderstood, figure, thoroughly grounded and contextualised within the extraordinary intellectual and cultural cross currents of his day. Jesus the Jew is a remarkable portrait by a brilliant scholar writing at the height of his powers, informed by insights from the New Testament, Jewish literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls alike.
Given my adolescent preoccupation with fundamentalist Christianity and its fixation upon Jesus as one’s “personal savior,” it was important to me, once I discovered that some doubted the historical accuracy of the gospels, to defend them. But the more I did so, the greater my doubts became. I found my former confidence untenable, and was pretty steamed about it, but I retained my fascination with the question!
This seminal work from the 19th century remains the most eagle-eyed analysis of the four gospels.
It demonstrated the absurdity and futility of all attempts to vindicate the Jesus stories as genuine history by showing their legendary character. I have learned more about historical-critical methodology from this one book than from all others, and I have pretty much read them all.
The German theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) published his highly controversial The Life of Jesus in three volumes between 1835 and 1836. This translation, by George Eliot, is based on the fourth German edition (1840). In this work Strauss applied strict historical method to the New Testament gospel narratives and caused scandal across the Protestant world by concluding that all miraculous elements were mythical and ahistorical. Volume 3 applies modern historical criticism to 'de-mythologize' the narratives of the transfiguration, Jesus' final journey into Jerusalem, the passion, the death, and the resurrection; and investigates the historicity of Jesus' enemies. The volume…
