This collection of studies in honor of Francois Bovon highlights the rich diversity found within early expressions of Christianity as evidenced in ancient texts, traditions, symbols, and motifs. Old labels like "apocrypha" or "heresy" that for centuries have suppressed much of this evidence are removed, previous assumptions are questioned, and the old data are examined afresh along with the latest discoveries. The studies fall into six areas: ancient gospels, acts, early Christian movements, ancient interpretations, art, and manuscripts. Contributors include James Robinson, Helmut Koester,...

Kim reads the Gospel of John from a postcolonial feminist perspective as a patriarchal nationalist discourse. The author examines effects of colonialism in twentieth-century Korean cultural experience, as seen in social memory (pervasive, emotional, nonlinear experience of the collective) or oral traditions, to develop an intercontextual lens through which she examines the role of the Johannine female characters in supporting Jesus's role as a national hero and in functioning as continuers of the nation. In her unique handling of the Gospel of John, the author describes how John's resistance...

In the dynamic interchange between authors, texts, and readers that occurs during the reading process, readers are stimulated by the author to create complex inner representations of the reality presented in a text. The cognitive linguistic approach outlined in the first part of Inner Worlds offers a set of analytical tools that can be instructively applied to the book of Jonah to examine how the text presents its own reality to the reader. Retranslated with an eye to the distinct nuances in the Hebrew, the text of Jonah reveals a range of suggestive dynamic patterns that show the...

William Shiell proposes that the book of Acts was performed orally by a lector in the early church following Greco-Roman rhetorical conventions for recitation and delivery rather than directly read by an audience that was minimally literate. Shiell's study outlines the function of the lector in Greco-Roman times as a filter through which an audience would receive a text. He describes the conventions for performers' gestures, facial expressions, and vocal inflections found in material from Greco-Roman literature and art that are mirrored in the book of Acts. He examines how a reading of Acts...

In this essay collection, the authors describe the trend toward synchronic methods in biblical exegesis, or interpreting biblical texts as the result of a literary rather than a historical process, and discuss and apply fifteen specific methods to interpreting Old and New Testament texts.

What is a question? Kenneth Craig poses this query in the introductory chapter of his innovative study on the function of interrogatives in the Hebrew Bible. He describes a question as "a special literary phenomenon. A question is an opening that seeks to be closed, and its rhetorical play derives from how it disposes its energies: how it invites opening, how it imposes closure" (p. 2). Carefully analyzing texts from Genesis, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, Haggai and Zechariah, Craig demonstrates the nuanced and multifaceted ways in which the Hebrew Bible's interrogatives function to advance...

Recognized as an innovative interpreter of the Gospel of John, for decades Francis J. Moloney has approached the sacred literature in a way that attends both to the details of the text and to the several contexts that gave life to the original story. This "text and context" approach continues to enrich the reading and interpretation of the Gospel in today's world. Gospel of John: Text and Context gathers Francis Moloney's key studies on John's Gospel written over the course of his career. The three sections of the work comprise studies of Johannine history, theology, and research;...

This study examines love in John's Gospel. It attempts to answer the question in what way love in the Johannine Gospel receives its narratively-imaginative stature. John's Gospel develops a love story which is different from any other narrative. Much attention is given to the cultural contextualisation as well as to the narrative and imaginative textualisations of the various love relationships. In this, Jesus' relationship with his beloved disciple plays a central role. The study concludes that all other love relationships -- the relationship of Jesus with his father, mother, brothers and...

To deconstruct a text means to disassemble the various points of view contained within it, and to let them stand fully exposed with all their own presuppositions. When this is done, the contours of these building blocks appear so different from one another that the structural unity of the text is called into question.
Biblical scholars will sense how close this process is to familiar methods of form and source criticism. Without jargon, this study sharpens and clarifies the analytical thrust behind such methods. At the same time, it offers a fresh rendering of redaction criticism,...

By carefully analyzing the text-semantic features of the texts of Genesis 1-11, this book offers a quite new perspective on the primaeval history. The first part of the book examines Genesis 1-11, which is usually read as a creation story concerning the human being in relation to God, in which the human being falls from bad to worse. In these text-semantic studies it is shown that such is not the case, especially in the rather exciting analysis of the story of the Tower of Babel. In the second part of the book the methodological framework of these text-semantic studies is presented.