In this clearly written introduction to the latter half of the New Testament, Lewis Donelson begins by asking, if we read this text in this way, what voices do we hear? Such a reading strategy requires historical imagination because the documents are separated from us by time, space, language, and culture. It also requires making these texts conversation partners in our understanding about God and ourselves.

By employing analyses of the literary structure of ancient pseudepigraphical letters and of the logical structure of ethical argument, Lewis R. Donelson discovers in the Pastoral Epistles a consistent theological ethic which has cosmological and cultic grounding. First, an investigation of Greco-Roman religious pseudepigraphical letters identifies those literary patterns which determine the form of argumentation in the Pastoral Epistles. Second, an investigation of the structure of ethical argument produces categories for organizing and analyzing the apparently disorganized arguments in these...

By employing analyses of the literary structure of ancient pseudepigraphical letters and of the logical structure of ethical argument, this study discovers in the Pastoral Epistles a consistent theological ethic that has cosmological and cultic grounding. First, an investigation of Greco-Roman religious pseudepigraphical letters identifies those literary patterns that determine the form of argumentation in the Pastoral Epistles. Second, an investigation of the structure of ethical argument produces categories for organizing and analyzing the apparently disorganized arguments in these letters....