This chapter shows the Jewish context of the New Testament and discusses the implications of the fact that while these writings are primarily Jewish, they have become Christian scripture. The documents highlight continuities and discontinuities between Judaism and Christianity, including themes found throughout the Documentary History, such as covenant and the identity of the people of Israel.

This chapter shows the Jewish context of the New Testament and discusses the implications of the fact that while these writings are primarily Jewish, they have become Christian scripture. The documents highlight continuities and discontinuities between Judaism and Christianity, including themes found throughout the Documentary History, such as covenant and the identity of the people of Israel.

Chapter 5 turns, at last, to the more conventional resource for Christian ethics, namely the Bible. It looks specifically at the way that teleios and teleioö (adjective and verb) are used thrice each in Matthew, in Paul and in Pauline letters, but most frequently in Hebrews where Jesus is seen as being perfect and without sin and in the Septuagint variously depicting human, and more occasionally divine, perfection.

This chapter evaluates the landscape of Pauline studies, demonstrating the need for reevaluation of Paul’s understanding of the relationship between Israel, the Jews, and the non-Jewish individuals receiving the spirit through Paul’s ministry. Contrary to many modern readings, Paul’s gospel is not systematically opposed to “legalism” or “ethnocentrism,” and his treatment of (former) gentiles as descendants not only of Abraham but of Israel begs explanation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the composition and interpretive capacity of the recipients of Paul’s letters and a discussion of key terms in the Pauline letters.

The final chapter looks, necessarily in brief, at the afterlife of Proverbs, first outside the canon, notably in Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon and second in relation to wisdom finds at Qumran. Beyond that, its place at key stages in the history of interpretation is discussed. In theological terms, the figure of Woman Wisdom and her influence on the theology of the Christian church is of particular interest, from the New Testament to the thought of the early church fathers and beyond.

The distribution of loanwords between papyri, inscriptions, and literature is investigated: more appear in literature than in other sources, but papyri have the highest density of Latinisms. Local and regional loanwords existed, and these can be seen not only in papyri and inscriptions, but also in literature, which preserves traces of loanwords specific to the city of Rome. Special attention is paid to the New Testament (especially Acts of the Apostles), Atticising writers (especially Athenaeus and Lucian), the Edict of Diocletian, Roman historians, medical writers (especially Galen), Hesychius, the antiquarian John Lydus, and texts on Roman law (especially Theophilus Antecessor, the Scholia Sinaitica, and Modestinus).

While many accounts of early Christianity see the early Church as a pacifist movement, closely following Jesus’ non-retaliatory teaching, this chapter argues that there is a more ambiguous relationship to violence in the first three centuries of the Christian movement, including military service. Aside from the violent rhetoric in the eschatological parables of Jesus, Christians appropriated the violence of the Hebrew Bible to shape negative views of outsiders, which in turn prepared the way from actualised violence in the post-Constantine era.

Irenaeus as the mastermind of the canonicl collection, later known as the New Testament, creates the foundation for the later picture of a chronological development from Jesus and his disciples through the first bishops and the institutionalization of the Church. However, he himself hardly relates to these writings as historical evidence, but rather engages in an anti-heretical use of some of them to endorse church orthodoxy. It is this apostolic foundation that provides the rule of truth against which he sees the heretics struggeling, driven by evil forces in an apocalyptic scenario.

Irenaeus’ view is condensed in the collection that he brought together, combining the Book of Acts with the so-called Catholic Letters (= the Praxapostolos). Placed after the four Gospels, it endorses a neatless development from Jesus and his early followers through the early days of growth of the church in its emancipation from its Jewish beginnings. With Paul’s letters in a revised version that was made to fit the Gospels and the Praxapostolos this fiction of a continuous, rapid and Spirit-guided growth was linked to the success-story of the Church in contra-distinction to the miseries and decline of the Jewish community and the vain attempts at undermining the Church by the develish heretics.

Examines the Museum of the Bible as a site of pilgrimage that generates affective responses from visitors through immersive and interactive exhibits. Through its evangelical presentation of Jesus and sacralization of landscapes special to white evangelicals in the United States today, the museum works through a variety of media to conscript visitors into Christian supersessionism and Christian Zionism.