This volume completes Ben Witherington's contributions to the set of Eerdmans socio-rhetorical commentaries on the New Testament.

In addition to the usual features of these commentaries, Witherington offers an innovative way of looking at Colossians, Ephesians, and Philemon as interrelated documents written at different levels of moral discourse. Colossians is first-order moral discourse (the opening gambit), Ephesians is second-order moral discourse (what one says after the opening salvo to the same audience), and Philemon is third-order moral discourse (what one says to a...

An interdisciplinary study of Acts by leading Old and New Testament and ancient history scholars.

Discusses in chronological order the New Testament evidence of what the historical Jesus did, what he said, and what those around him believed. Jesus was a complex figure and, like light shining through a prism, reflections on the man who fits no one formula have produced a variety of colours and depths of shade that cannot and should not be all blended into some monochromatic image.

Archaeologist Art West makes the discovery of a lifetime in Jerusalem finding the tombstone of Lazarus, which indicates that Jesus raised him from the dead. But before he can make public his amazing discovery, the stone is stolen, sold to the British Library, and West is implicated in an antiquities fraud that will lead to a trial. West's Jewish and Muslim friends in Jerusalem rally to support West's innocence and to help find the thief who stole the stone, but then West is shot and in critical condition in a Jerusalem hospital. Can the truth be discovered in time, and West's life be saved?...

Description: Witherington provides a much-needed introduction to the ancient art of persuasion and its use within the various New Testament documents. More than just an exploration of the use of the ancient rhetorical tools and devices, this guide introduces the reader to all that went into convincing an audience about some subject. Witherington makes the case that rhetorical criticism is a more fruitful approach to the NT epistles than the oft-employed approaches of literary and discourse criticism. Familiarity with the art of rhetoric also helps the reader explore non-epistolary genres. In...

Synopsis: In this second novel of the series, Art West seeks out the meaning of the mysterious symbolic number 666 while exploring sites in Egypt and Turkey. He discovers an inscription in southern Egypt at the Philae Temple in Aswan, which reads, "He is many men and no man, towering like the sphinx, dead and alive, but who knows what he thinks? Back from the Styx; 666." Who is this sphinx-like man? Could he be relevant to the twenty-first century? These questions lead Art to investigate possible connections between the Coptic Gospels and Coptic Orthodox beliefs. In the middle of such...