Richard Horsley provides a sure guide for first time readers of Mark's Gospel and, at the very same time, induces those more familiar with Mark to take a fresh look at this Gospel. From tracing the plot and sub-plot in Mark to exploring how the Gospel was first heard (as oral performance), Horsely tackles old questions from new angles. Horsely consistently and judiciously uses sociological categories and method to help readers see how Mark's Jesus challenged the dominant order of his day.

This commentary highlights both the socio-political context of 1 Corinthians and the clash of significantly different religious viewpoints represented by Paul and the congregation he had founded in Corinth. In particular, Richard Horsley shows that this letter provides a window through which one may view the tension between the Corinthians' interest in cultivating individual spirituality and the apostle's concern for building up a social-religious community devoted to the common advantage, for the flourishing both of personal dignity and a humanizing solidarity.

From this engrossing portrait of first-century Palestine, Jesus emerges as the catalyst of nonviolent social revolution that anticipates the renewal of Israel. This fascinating analysis opens up a new perspective of the Roman-dominated Jewish Palestine of Jesus' time, viewing it as an "imperial situation" in which individual acts of violence were responses to institutionalized repression and injustice. Richard A. Horsley reveals the fiercely nationalistic Zealots as largely the fabrication of historians and exposes the erroneous view of Jesus as the sober prophet of nonviolence. In claiming...

Set against the backdrop of Roman imperial history, this book demonstrates how the quest for the kingdom of God by Jesus, Paul and the earliest churches should be understood as both a spiritual journey and a political response to mindless acts of violence and injustice that characterized the kings of men.

Building on his earlier studies of Jesus, Galilee, and the social upheavals in Roman Palestine, Horsley focuses his attention on how Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God relates to Roman and Herodian power politics. In addition he examines how modern ideologies relate to Jesus' proclamation.

Here is a challenge to New Testament scholars to engage in a fresh analysis of Q. The authors argue that recent American study of Q has been dominated by those trained in form-criticism and oriented to Hellenistic rather than Judean culture, resulting in the extreme atomization of the Q sayings and reconstructions of Jesus and his first followers as Cynics, and in the de-politicization and de-judaization of the Q materials and Jesus.>

A provocative analysis of interrelated issues running through Paul's letters including Paul's views on the Roman Empire, on the politics of Israel, and politics and the church.>

Description: Examining each of the major sections of 1 Corinthians, Horsley probes the disagreement Paul had with those claiming special spiritual status. The conflicts over what constitute wisdom, knowledge, and spirituality cut to the core of what Paul was trying to accomplish in his communities. Horsley moves the debate from the history of religions background to the Hellenistic Jewish religiosity of the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo of Alexandria. Endorsements: ""In these landmark essays, gathered together here for the first time, Richard Horsley combines a close reading of the language...