Simon Peter's Denial and Jesus' Commissioning Him as His Successor in John 21:15-19


Book Description

This study uses early Jewish sources to analyze the significance of Day of Atonement and High Priest imagery in the narrative of Simon Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus. It then describes the influence of other early Jewish sources on Jesus’ commissioning his main disciple Simon Peter as his own successor in John 21:15-19. Aus relates this event to Moses’ commissioning his main disciple Joshua as his successor.




Abide and Go


Book Description

The Gospel of John would seem to be both the "spiritual Gospel" and a Gospel that promotes Christian mission. Some interpreters, however, have found John to be the product of a sectarian community that promotes a very narrow view of Christian mission and advocates neither love of neighbor nor love of enemy. In this book for both the academy and the church, Michael Gorman argues that John has a profound spirituality that is robustly missional, and that it can be summarized in the paradoxical phrase "Abide and go," from John 15. Disciples participate in the divine love and life, and therefore in the life-giving mission of God manifested in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As God's children, disciples become more and more like this missional God as they become like his Son by the work of the Spirit. This spirituality, argues Gorman, can be called missional theosis.




The Resurrection of the Messiah


Book Description

"Taking inspiration from a different interpretative tradition, the classic work of Raymond Brown on the birth and death of the Messiah, Francis Moloney has provided a comprehensive narrative reading of the resurrection stories of all four Gospels, in close association with their passion narratives, to which they are the stunning response. The book traces how the four eangelists' different telling of the resurrection stories has "narrated" the action of God for Jesus, and the action of God and Jesus for all Christians in and through the early Church's belief and experience of the resurrection of Jesus. The final chapter discusses what we can recover about the events of Easter day and, more importantly, what these events meant then, and continue to mean today." - back cover




Remorse


Book Description

Though the Christian church has a well-developed theology of Godward-facing remorse about sin, it has paid little attention to the interpersonal implications of the remorse that people feel when they wrong one another. Since the nineteenth century, important work has been done by psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, ethicists, scientists, and lawyers that has implications for the way theologians might think about remorse. This book draws on the biblical record in its ancient settings as well as on insights from contemporary scholarship to offer a new and distinctively Christian contribution to an understanding of remorse.




WealthWarn


Book Description

Like the first volume in this series (WealthWatch, Pickwick, 2011) this book attempts to do two things: (a) examine the primary socioeconomic motifs in the Bible from a comparative intertextual perspective, and (b) trace the trajectory formed by these motifs through Tanak into early Jewish and Nazarene texts. Where WealthWatch focuses on Torah, WealthWarn focuses on the single largest section of the Bible—the Prophets. Where the ancient Near Eastern texts surveyed in WealthWatch include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, and the Epic of Erra, the texts examined here include Inanna's Descent, the Babylonian Creation Epic (enūma elish), the Disappearance of Telipinu, and the Ba`al Epic. Where the Jewish texts surveyed in WealthWatch include historical and sectarian texts, the texts studied here include Ezra-Nehemiah, the Epistle of Jeremiah and Tobit. Where the Nazarene texts in WealthWatch focus on the stewardship parables found in the Gospel of Luke, the texts examined here focus on several prophetic vignettes from the Gospel of Matthew and Acts of the Apostles.




A Thematic Access-Oriented Bibliography of Jesus's Resurrection


Book Description

The keystone of Christianity is Jesus’s physical, bodily resurrection. Present-day scholars can be significantly challenged as they forage through voluminous documents on the resurrection of Jesus. The literature measures well over seven thousand sources in English-language books alone. This makes finding specific sources that are most relevant for specific scholarly purposes an arduous task. Even when a specific book is relevant, finding the parts of the book that are most relevant to the resurrection rather than other topics often requires additional effort. A Thematic Access-Oriented Bibliography of Jesus’s Resurrection addresses these challenges in several ways. First, the bibliography organizes more than seven thousand English sources into twelve main categories and then thirty-four subcategories, which are designed to help you find the most relevant literature quickly and efficiently. Embedded are pro and con arguments which support efficient access through brief annotations and then annotate the diversity and complexity of the field of religion by including sources that represent a diverse range of views: theistic (e.g., Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc.), agnostic, and nontheistic. The objective of this bibliography is to provide convenient access to relevant sources from a variety of perspectives, allowing you to browse or find the one source accurately and with ease.




Transforming Boasting of Self into Boasting in the Lord


Book Description

This book uses rhetorical analysis to illuminate one of the most fascinating and complicated speeches by Saint Paul: 2 Cor 10–13. The main problem of the speech regards Paul’s claim to be a true servant of Christ and to have the right to boast about it. Paul proves he is strong enough to be the leader of Corinth and paradoxically demonstrates that weakness should belong to the identity of an apostle. Another issue regards the legitimacy of his boasting. The egocentric boast based on the comparison with his opponents is the one that Paul calls foolish, but he is forced, nevertheless, to undertake it. The tool that ultimately enables him to transform self-aggrandizing speech into speech that is focused on Christ is his paradoxical boasting of weakness. The careful crafting of his discourse based on Christological principles ultimately speaks for qualifying it as a self-praise speech (periautologia) with a pedagogical, not defensive, purpose.




Essays in the Judaic Background of Mark 11:12–14, 20–21; 15:23; Luke 1:37; John 19:28–30; and Acts 11:28


Book Description

These five essays deal with the influence of Judaic haggadah or lore, especially in the form of “creative historiography” or “imaginative dramatization,” on four enigmatic passages in the Gospels, and one in Acts. They point to their deeper theological truths and negate the alternatives of true or false, historical or non-historical, usually applied to the narratives.




Simon, Who Is Called Peter


Book Description

When we read the Bible as a parable, as a series of object lessons told merely to prove a point, we miss something. When we treat the people within the Bible as mere "characters" in a story, we lose something incredibly important. Object lessons are clean and simple. People, on the other hand, are messy and complicated. When we look at the life of Simon Peter, we see one of the messiest people in the entire New Testament. Peter walked on water and sank into the waves. He proclaimed who Jesus was and completely missed the point. He pledged his undying devotion to Christ, and even drew a sword in defense of his Lord, and then he abandoned Jesus and denied him three times. Peter is also the rock on which Christ would build his church--the same church of which Paul says we are a part. So come. Walk with Peter. Fish with him. Follow a strange rabbi, though it might cost you everything. Walk on water, though you might sink. Go to Jerusalem, though death awaits you. Stand with Peter as God uses him to build his church, and watch that church grow.




Rabbi Moses


Book Description

This book is an exercise in the systematic recourse to anachronism as a theological-exegetical mode of apologetics. Specifically, Neusner demonstrates the capacity of the Rabbinic sages to read ideas attested in their own day as authoritative testaments to — to them — ancient times. Thus, Scripture was read as integral testimony to the contemporary scene. About a millennium — 750 B.C. E. to 350 C. E. — separates Scripture’s prophets from the later sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud. It is quite natural to recognize evidence for differences over a long period of time. Yet Judaism sees itself as a continuum and overcomes difference. The latecomers portray the ancients like themselves. “In our image, after our likeness” captures the current aspiration. The sages accommodated the later documents in their canon by finding the traits of their own time in the record of the remote past. They met the challenges to perfection that the sages brought about. Of what does the process of harmonization consist? To answer that question the author surveys the presentation of the prophets by the rabbis, beginning with Moses. To overcome the gap, Rabbinic sages turn Moses into a sage like themselves. The prophet performs wonders. The sage sets forth reasonable rulings. The conclusion expands on this account of matters to show the categorical solution that the sages adopted for themselves, and that is the happy outcome of the study.