In his letter to the Romans, Paul describes the community in Rome as 'holy ones'. This study considers Paul's language in relation to the Old Testament, particularly accounts of the events at Mount Sinai that established the nation of Israel and consecrated its people as God's holy people. Sarah Whittle illustrates how Paul reworks citations from Deuteronomy, Hosea, and Isaiah to incorporate the Gentiles into Israel's covenant-renewal texts. Analysing key passages, she further ties the covenant-making narrative to themes of sacrificed bodies and moral transformation, fulfilment of the Torah,...

This volume is the first to investigate manifestations of faith in the book of Hebrews across four dimensions: ethical, eschatological, Christological, and ecclesiological. Matthew C. Easter illustrates that two contrasting narrative identities emerge in Hebrews: the author of the epistle proclaims that we are not of timidity unto destruction, but of faith unto the preservation of the soul (Hebrews 10:39). Easter classifies the former as the default human story, which lacks faith and results inevitably in death. The latter represents the story of faith, in which one endures suffering to the...

This volume examines 1 Corinthians 1-4 within first-century politics, demonstrating the significance of Corinth's constitution to the interpretation of Paul's letter. Bradley J. Bitner shows that Paul carefully considered the Roman colonial context of Corinth, which underlay numerous ecclesial conflicts. Roman politics, however, cannot account for the entire shape of Paul's response. Bridging the Hellenism-Judaism divide that has characterized much of Pauline scholarship, Bitner argues that Paul also appropriated Jewish-biblical notions of covenant. Epigraphical and papyrological evidence...

Moving past earlier descriptions of first-century Christ groups that were based on examining the New Testament in isolation from extant sources produced by analogous cult groups throughout Mediterranean antiquity, this book engages with underexplored epigraphic and papyrological records and situates the behaviour of Paul's Corinthian ekklēsia within broader patterns of behaviour practiced by Greco-Roman associations. Richard Last's comparative analysis generates highly original contributions to our understanding of the social history of the Jesus movement: he shows that the Corinthians...

This volume investigates the cultural, political, economic, and religious conflicts that led to the historical Jesus' arrest, trial, and execution.

This work re-examines the divisive wisdom that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians. Challenging the recent consensus that the Corinthians' wisdom was rooted primarily in the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, Timothy A. Brookins offers a revisionary thesis centered on discourse similarities between the perspective of the Corinthian "wise" and the Stoic system of thought. Brookins argues that several members of the church, after hearing Paul's initial gospel message, construed that message in terms of Stoic philosophy and began promoting a kind of "Stoic-Christian" perspective that helped to...

The Book of Revelation and Early Jewish Textual Culture explores the relationship between the writing of Revelation and its early audience.

This book offers a new contribution by addressing alternative hypotheses and previously neglected evidence using transdisciplinary tools.

John's Gospel directs attention to the vision of community. Andrew Byers argues that ecclesiology is as central a Johannine concern as Christology.

This book provides a solution to one of the Bible's notorious cruxes, the identity of the speaking 'I' of Romans 7.