1 Peter 3:18-22 records Christ's proclamation to imprisoned spirits. Scholars from the beginning of the twentieth century through the present have read these verses through the lens of the fall of the watchers tradition first recorded in the Book of Watchers, thus reckoning these spirits as imprisoned angels. Yet contemporary scholarship has failed to acknowledge the conflation and multiplicity of the fallen angel sin and punishment myths that are found throughout early Jewish and Christian literature. Chad Pierce traces the major developments concerning the fallen angel, giant, evil spirit,...

With increasing interaction between Eastern and Western theologians, several recent biblical interpreters have characterised Paul's soteriology as theosis, or deification. In response to these affirmations, Ben C. Blackwell explores the anthropological dimension of Paul's soteriology to determine how helpful this characterisation is. Utilising the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Pauline letters, he first examines two Greek patristic interpreters of Paul - Irenaeus and Cyril of Alexandria - to clarify what deification entails and to determine which Pauline texts they used to support their...

The authors of this collection of essays focus on understandings of Jesus in various early Christian writings. Notable are several texts that examine the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels of John and Mark, as well as in the Book of Hebrews and in the letters of Paul. Other early Christian literature is represented as well, from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas to various Apocryphal Acts of Apostles and liturgical or other prayer texts, while some essays address a range of ancient literature, Christian and non-Christian. The authors of these essays examine the ways in which ancient writers...

The ransom logion, as presented in Mark 10:45/Matthew 20:28, is the only place in the synoptic gospels outside the Last Supper where Jesus gives a beneficial interpretation of his upcoming death. This fact has generated much discussion about the authenticity and scriptural background of the ransom logion in Mark and Matthew. However, no one has examined the early reception of the ransom logion, nor has anyone explored the significance of that reception for the critical study of Mark 10:45 and Matthew 20:28. In this study J. Christopher Edwards fills these lacunae by examining the reception of...

Edwin Judge's description of early Christian communities as 'scholastic communities' provides the starting point of a search for a sociological description of the Christian communities portrayed in 1 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. An original methodology uses a multi-layered exegetical approach to study every occurrence of the vocabulary of 'teaching' in the letters. The focus is on the activity of teaching (e.g., participants, method, manner, purpose, result, etc). The vocabulary represents ten semantic groupings, which shed further light on the place and practice of education in...

Using the method of literary critical analysis to read the Johannine narrative, Marianus Pale Hera underlines the profound relationship between the Johannine Christology and the Gospel's teaching on discipleship. A narrative reading of selected passages from chapters 1-12 of John (the prologue, Jesus' first disciples, the first sign at Cana, the man born blind, and the I Am sayings) indicates John's tendency to present christological teaching that leads to teaching on discipleship. The reading of these passages also identifies the elements that indicate the christological character of...