While New Testament scholars generally agree that the concept of righteousness occupies an important place in the Gospel of Matthew, there is no scholarly consensus as to the meaning and function of this concept. The author of this study contends that this lack of agreement is largely due to the fact that the wrong background literature (i.e. the Old Testament and the letters of Paul) has been posited as governing Matthaean usage. It is only when Matthaean usage is viewed in terms of the world of thought reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Tannaitic literature that it becomes...

This is the second edition of a work which first appeared in 1979. The first edition gave an interpretation of Paul's Letters to the Galatians which proceeded along the following lines: firstly, Paul's opponents at Galatia were Jewish Christians who believed that Gentiles had to accept the Law in order to be saved; secondly, that Paul first revealed his noncircumcision gospel to James, Cephas and John at the Jerusalem Conference; thirdly, Paul's view of justification by faith was seen in terms of Christ keeping faith with Abraham's promise that all nations would be blessed; and fourthly, that...

This is the only book-length treatment of the protreptic character of Paul's Letter to the Romans.

The so-called "Antioch Incident"--the confrontation between the apostles Peter and Paul recorded in Galatians 2.11-21--continues to be a source of controversy in scholarly as well as popular estimations of the emerging early church. This innovative interpretation of the event argues that the central issue at stake in Antioch--whether the Torah or Jesus Christ determines who are the people of God--gains great clarity and force when viewed in relation to a form of Judaism knows as Maccabean martyr theology.

Studies what kind of person could have produced the mysterious document known today as the Epistle to the Hebrews?

Luke's Acts of the Apostles is the only documentation available on the birth of Christianity, despite the author's vigorously disputed reliability as a historian. Daniel Marguerat avoids this true/false quagmire by establishing his evaluation of Luke's talent as an historian within the framework of ancient historiography (the rules of ancient historians and narrative criticism). His study portrays Luke as a skillful and sound theologian, and provides an original approach to the classic themes of Lucan theology.

Judaean society in the first century did not conform to the stereotypical 'Mediterranean honour culture', in that it lacked a significant gentile population and was dominated by a powerful religious elite. Timothy Ling argues that this demands a new social-scientific approach to the Gospel and Letters of John that moves away from the accepted 'sectarian' interpretation. He attributes their distinctiveness instead to their roots in Jesus' Judaean ministry, as contrasted with the Galilean ministry that has attracted much recent study. In particular, Ling contends that the numerous references to...

In this 2006 text, Daniel M. Gurtner examines the meaning of the rending of the veil at the death of Jesus in Matthew 27:51a by considering the functions of the veil in the Old Testament and its symbolism in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Gurtner incorporates these elements into a compositional exegesis of the rending text in Matthew. He concludes that the rending of the veil is an apocalyptic assertion like the opening of heaven revealing, in part, end-time images drawn from Ezekiel 37. Moreover, when the veil is torn Matthew depicts the cessation of its function, articulating the...

The last generation of gospel scholarship has considered the reconstruction and analysis of the audience behind the gospels as paradigmatic. The key hermeneutical template for reading the gospels has been the quest for the community that each gospel represents. This scholarly consensus regarding the audience of the gospels has been reconsidered. Using as a test case one of the most entrenched gospels, Edward Klink explores the evidence for the audience behind the Gospel of John. This study challenges the prevailing gospel paradigm by examining the community construct and its functional...

How did Paul determine ethical and theological truth? Were all believers expected to be able to 'discern the spirits' (1 Corinthians 12.10)? This study shows that discernment must be understood against the backdrop of an extensive hermeneutic, by which Paul inherently relates ethical and theological knowledge. Understanding the will of God requires noetic and existential transformation, in short, the 'renewal of the mind' (Romans 12.2). Munzinger argues that Paul implies a process of inspiration in which the Spirit sharpens the discerning functions of the mind because the believer is...