From Mary through St. John's Gospel to Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Fr
An illuminating study of Mary as she appears in the New Testament, which also draws on Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom, to reveal the value of devotion and thinking with the heart.
This scholarly study of the Psalms retains its rigor while focusing particularly on the pastoral use of the Psalms, looking at how they may function as voices of faith in the actual life of the believing community.
This book reflects J. Christiaan Beker's experience of more than twenty years of teaching and introductory courses in New Testament. In distinction from a history-of-religions approach, he aims at allowing the theological thrust of the New Testament to become transparent for today's readers. The work pre-supposes the normative and canonical ......
This study addresses the genre and interpretation of Luke through Acts in the light of its contemporary social, literary, and ideological milieu, particularly as these elements are reflected in the Latin epics contemporary with Luke-Acts and in their famous Augustan prototype, Virgil's Aeneid. Literary evidence indicating that Virgil's works had ......
This commentary on the Pentateuch, excerpted from the Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, engages readers in the work of biblical interpretation. The Pentateuch introduces fresh perspectives and draws students, preachers, and interested readers, into the challenging work of interpretation.
Alice Laffey's rereading of the major themes of the first five books of the Bible will enable readers to gain a firm grasp of the contents of this major literary corpus. Like other volumes in this series, it will also point the way to a different reading of Scripture, one that raises today's questions-power, liberation, justice, andpreeminently ......
The Power of Equivocation reveals the complexity inherent in biblical narratives, particularly those featuring female characters, and models a way of reading that enables critical-religious interpreters to straddle their dual identities and loyalties and read the Bible critically, generously, and honestly.
In The Promise of Not-Knowing, David Fredrickson challenges readers and interpreters of the New Testament to engage the text not simply for its usefulness or practicality, but rather to explore the text with a sense of mystery, expecting and hoping to have one's world shaken by the otherness that haunts the familiar.
This concise commentary on the Prophets, excerpted from the Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, engages readers in the work of biblical interpretation. The Prophets introduces fresh perspectives and draws students, preachers, and interested readers into the challenging work of interpretation.
Female identity is fraught and fetishized, commercialized and contested--so potent a weapon in contemporary cultural warfare that a sitting US senator had no shame in asking a nominee to the Supreme Court to "define 'woman.'" But the battle over female identity is not of modern invention. Its roots are ancient. And in the Hebrew Bible, one text ......
William L. Holladay offers an illuminating and informative overview of the Psalms, chanted, sung, and recited by so great a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) through the past three thousand years.
In The So-Called Jew in Romans, nine Pauline scholars focus their attention on the rhetoric of diatribe and characterization in the opening chapters of the letter, asking what Paul means by the "so-called Jew" in Romans 2 and where else in the letter's argumentation that figure appears or is implied.
A dynamic analysis of Jesus' central proclamationScholars are agreed that the central metaphor in Jesus' proclamation was the kingdom of God. But what did that phrase mean in the first-century Palestinian world of Jesus? Since it is a political metaphor, what did Jesus envision as the political import of his message? Since this is tied to the ......
Examining the scriptural underpinnings of occult and supernaturalistic notions that survive in contemporary society, this book is based on the author's knowledge of the history of ancient Near-Eastern cultures and their mythology.
After some three millennia, why write anything further on the Ten Commandments? They have been discussed, parsed, codified, moralized, and much more. In this book, Ernst Katz discusses the Ten Commandments in terms of the evolution of human consciousness, suggesting that we need to view this ancient moral guide in whole new ways. Using the ......
A complement to the author's earlier Overtures to Biblical Theology study on prayer, this volume addresses the topic of worship as articulated in the first five books of the Bible. Rather than a history of Israelite religion, Balentine's volume examines the "vision" of worship expounded in the Torah in relation to priesthood, creation, liturgy, ......
No one can read far in the Old Testament without encountering numerous acts of violence that are sanctioned in the text and attributed to both God and humans. Over the years, these texts have been used to justify all sorts of violence: from colonizing people and justifying warfare, to sanctioning violence against women and children. For those who ......