Drawing on the insights of ancient literary theory and practice, this book seeks to unlock the age-old puzzle of the relationship of John's gospel to the other gospels and to the early Christian church. Applying a new method to an old problem, Brodie uses a form of source analysis that takes account of the practices of ancient writers to reveal John as someone who deliberately rendered the earlier gospels into a new language. The deeply theological, and at the same time more down-to-earth voice characteristic of John is revealed to be not that of a marginal community ("the Johannine...

Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in interest in the book of Genesis - the first book of the Hebrew Bible, and a foundational text of Western culture. In this new commentary, Thomas Brodie offers a complete and accessible overview of Genesis from literary, theological, and historical standpoints. Brodie's work is organized around three main ideas. The first is that the primary subject of Genesis is human existence; the second is that Genesis' basic organizational unity is binary, or diptych. Brodie argues that the entire book is composed of diptychs - accounts which, like some...