For thirty years, Mark as Story has introduced readers to the rhetorical and narrative skill that makes Mark so arresting and compelling a story. Rhoads, Dewey, and Michie have helped to pioneer our appreciation of the Gospels, and Mark in particular, as narratives originally created in an oral culture for oral performance. New in this edition are a revised introduction and an afterword describing the significant role Mark as Story has played in the development of narrative criticism.

As the global climate crisis worsens, many churches have sought to respond by instituting a movement to observe a liturgical season of creation. Scholars who have pioneered the connections between biblical scholarship, ecological theology, liturgy, and homiletics provide here a comprehensive resource for preaching and leading worship in this new season. Included are theological and practical introductions to observance of the season, biblical texts for its twelve Sundays in the three-year ...

With insights gleaned from thirty-two years of teaching college students, seminarians, and graduate students, David Rhoads shares how he sought to create the classroom as a community of learners ripe for transformation through dialogue. He charts his personal journey struggling to generate discussion, evoke questions, deepen conversations, and strengthen writing and oral skills. Reflections include such innovative topics as radical hospitality, the physical environment of the classroom, ov...

In 2015 a conference on "Rediscovering the Spiritual in God's Creation" was held at the Serafino winery complex in the McLaren Vale region of South Australia. The aim of the conference was not to seek consensus but to survey the landscape with a view to intentional responsible action in caring for God's creation. Delegates were challenged to recognize their own worldviews and to widen their horizons to encompass the enormity of the transcendence and immanence of God's presence in all creat...

The Bible is a perplexing book. It blends primitive beliefs with timeless truths, swings between compassionate love and ruthless violence, and forms a sympathetic heavenly father from the remains of a savage tribal god. What are we to make of it all? Petri Merenlahti takes an entertaining journey through biblical literature and returns with an original theology of imperfection. Looking at the Bible through the lenses of history, culture, literature, and psychology, he calls his readers to ...

This book interprets Mark's gospel in light of the Roman-Jewish War of 66-70 CE. Locating the authorship of Mark's gospel in rural Galilee or southern Syria after the fall of Jerusalem and the temple, and after Vespasian's enthronement as the new emperor, Kimondo argues that Mark's first hearers--people who lived through and had knowledge of the important events of the war--may have evaluated Mark's story of Jesus as a contrast to Roman imperial values. He makes an intriguing case that Jes...

This volume engages the Gospel of Matthew in full awareness of its inherently political character. Weaver situates Matthew's version of the "good news of the kingdom" squarely within the "real world" of first-century Palestine and its occupying power, the Roman Empire. The essays here focus prominently and collectively on the issues of power and violence that not only pervade the historically occupied Jewish community of first-century Palestine, but also are clearly visible throughout Matt...

In recent years, scholars have explored anew the interface between the early Christian movements and the Roman Empire. Once thought to be quietistic, the early Christian movements turn out to have been critical of the Empire and significantly counterimperial. This collection of essays in honor of Robert Brawley turns the spotlight on Luke-Acts. The soundings taken here disclose deeper anti-imperial rhetoric than previously thought. In brazen and subtle ways, Luke-Acts displays an alternati...

What's so humorous about the Bible? Quite a bit, especially if experienced with others! Nine biblical scholars explore their experiences of reading and hearing passages from the Bible and discovering humor that becomes clearer in performance. Each writer found clues in their chosen biblical text that suggested biblical authors expected an audience to respond with laughter. Performers have a powerful role in either bringing out or tamping down humor in the Bible. One audience may be more di...

The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Carrier re-examines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct. He lays out extensive research on the evidence for Jesu...

Throughout history, most Christians have believed that Adam and Eve were actual persons, of whom we are all descendants. Some Christians today, however, readily dismiss the historical consensus, arguing that those same Christians also believed the earth was the center of the universe. Understandably, there are reasons to doubt the traditional view . . . and yet rarely are those doubts humbly subjected to serious scholarship.C. John Collins invites both doubts and scholarship to the...

Derived from Tremper Longman III and Raymond B. Dillard’s widely adopted textbook, An Introduction to the Old Testament, this digital short surveys key critical and interpretive issues in Old Testament study. Attention is given to the most significant historical, archaeological, literary, and theological questions, as well as to the perspective the New Testament brings to the Old. Students of the Old Testament will find A Quick Introduction to the Old Testament t...