Although scholarship has noted the thematic importance of peace in Ephesians, few have examined its political character in a sustained manner throughout the entire letter. This book addresses this lacuna, comparing Ephesians with Colossians, Greek political texts, Dio Chrysostom's Orations, and the Confucian Four Books in order to ascertain the rhetorical and political nature of its topos of peace. Through comparison with analogous documents both within and without its cultural milieu, this study shows that Ephesians can be read as a politico-religious letter "concerning...

This volume is the product of an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Texas at Austin. Specialists in the study of inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, coins, tombs, pottery, and texts collaborate to produce new portraits of religion and society in the ancient city of Corinth. The studies focus on groups like the early Roman colonists, the Augustales (priests of Augustus), or the Pauline house churches; on specific cults such as those of Asklepios, Demeter, or the Sacred Spring; on media (e.g., coins, or burial inscriptions); or on the monuments and populations of nearby...

In God and Grace in Philo and Paul, Orrey McFarland examines how Philo of Alexandria and the Apostle Paul understood divine grace. While scholars have occasionally observed that Philo and Paul both speak about God's generosity, such work has often placed the two theologians in either strong continuity or stark discontinuity without probing into the theological logic that animates the particularities of their thought. By contrast, McFarland sets Philo and Paul in conversation and argues that both could speak of divine gifts emphatically and in formally similar ways while making...

In Public Reading in Early Christianity: Lectors, Manuscripts, and Sound in the Oral Delivery of John 1-4 Dan Nasselqvist investigates the oral delivery of New Testament writings in early Christian communities of the first two centuries C.E. He examines the role of lectors and public reading in the Greek and Roman world as well as in early Christianity. Nasselqvist introduces a method of sound analysis, which utilizes the correspondence between composition and delivery in ancient literary writings to retrieve information about oral delivery from the sound structures of the text being...

In The Adaptable Jesus of the Fourth Gospel, Jason S. Sturdevant argues that the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as an adaptable teacher, who accommodates to different people in various ways to a singular end, to bring each to faith. In the same way, the Logos accommodates to humanity via the incarnation. Adaptability serves as both an interpersonal and universal category. Early Christian interpretations of John, especially that of John Chrysostom, describe the Jesus of John by echoing characterizations of the ideal Greco-Roman pedagogue, adapting to his diverse students. By looking to...

This study considers the "I am" sayings in the Gospel of John, interpreted in the context of their reception in late antiquity. It takes an intertextual approach, considering both inner-biblical parallels and extra-biblical texts, which have been much neglected in recent Johannine scholarship. A comparative analysis of the "I am" formula is complemented by the consideration of the metaphors of the predicative "I am" words, focussing particularly on the use of "bread," "light" and "vine" and the context of these metaphors in the Gospel of John and elsewhere. This discussion demonstrates that...

In the fourth century C.E. some Christians paraphrased the stories about Jesus' life in the style of classical epics. Imitating the genre of centos, they stitched together lines taken either from Homer (Greek) or Virgil (Latin). They thus created new texts out of the classical epics, while they still remained fully within the confines of their style and vocabulary. It is the aim of this study to put these attempts into a historical and rhetorical context. Why did some Christians rewrite the Gospel stories in this way, and what came out of this? On the basis of these Christian centos, it is...

Entering the debate about the development of Christology among Jesus' earliest followers, this volume critiques both the traditional evolutionary view that posited an elementary early Jewish Christology that developed in complexity as it was increasingly Hellenized and the more recent attempt to see a full-orbed Christology both as early and as Jewish, not Hellenistic, in its categories. It contends that during the first 100 years Jesus' followers employed four models from their milieu, Jewish and Greco-Roman, both to understand and to communicate their Christologies. These models were...

Scholars often explain Hebrews' relative silence regarding Jesus' resurrection by emphasizing the author's appeal to Yom Kippur's two key moments--the sacrificial slaughter and the high priest's presentation of blood in the holy of holies--in his distinctive portrayal of Jesus' death and heavenly exaltation. The writer's depiction of Jesus as the high priest whose blood effected ultimate atonement appears to be modeled upon these two moments. Such a typology discourages discrete reflection on Jesus' resurrection. Drawing on contemporary studies of Jewish sacrifice (which note that blood...

Recent research on the text of the Psalms and Gospels in Greek and in certain versions, principally Coptic, Georgian and Armenian, reveals common characteristics when attempting to separate later editions of a text from its earliest forms. The essays in this collection give concrete examples of the issues involved and suggested explanations for textual changes. Les versions anciennes de la Bible ont un interet majeur dans la mesure ou elles traduisent un modele qui n'est pas celui des traductions modernes et conservent ainsi des formes textuelles disparues, souvent tres anciennes. C'est en...