Brimming with lavish, full-color photos and graphics, the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary walks you chapter by chapter through all the books of the New Testament. It’s like slipping on a set of glasses that lets you read the Bible through the eyes of a first-century reader! Discoveries await you that will snap the world of the New Testament into gripping immediacy. Things that seem mystifying, puzzling, or obscure will take on tremendous meaning when you view them in their ancient context. You’ll deepen your understanding of the teachings of Jesus. You’ll discover the close, sometimes startling interplay between God’s kingdom and the practical affairs of the church. Best of all, you’ll gain a deepened awareness of the Bible’s relevance for your life. Written in a clear, engaging style, this beautiful commentary provides a new and accessible approach that more technical expository and exegetical commentaries don’t offer. It features: • Commentary based on relevant papyri, inscriptions, archaeological discoveries, and studies of Judaism, Roman culture, Hellenism, and other features of the world of the New Testament • Hundreds of full-color photographs, color illustrations, and line drawings • Copious maps, charts, and timelines • Sidebar articles and insights • “Reflections” on the Bible’s relevance for 21st-century living

Product Description: Focused Biblical Scholarship to Teach the TextThe Teach the Text Commentary Series utilizes the best of biblical scholarship to provide the information a pastor needs to communicate the text effectively. The carefully selected preaching units and focused commentary allow pastors to quickly grasp the big idea and key themes of each passage of Scripture...read more

This landmark handbook, written by distinguished Pauline scholars, and first published in 2003, remains the first and only work to offer lucid and insightful examinations of Paul and his world in such depth. Together the two volumes that constitute the handbook in its much revised form provide a comprehensive reference resource for new testament scholars looking to understand the classical world in which Paul lived and work. Each chapter provides an overview of a particular social convention, literary of rhetorical topos, social practice, or cultural mores of the world in which Paul and his audiences were at home. In addition, the sections use carefully chosen examples to demonstrate how particularly features of Greco-Roman culture shed light on Paul's letters and on his readers' possible perception of them.For the new edition all the contributions have been fully revised to take into account the last ten years of methodological change and the helpful chapter bibliographies fully updated. Wholly new chapters cover such issues as Paul and Memory, Paul's Economics, honor and shame in Paul's writings and the Greek novel.

Product Description: This commentary on the Hebrews, the General Epistles, and Revelation, excerpted from the Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The New Testament, engages readers in the work of biblical interpretation. Contributors connect historical-critical analysis with sensitivity to current theological, cultural, and interpretive issues...read more

The 'assemblies' founded by Paul in the cities of the Mediterranean world were in many respects comparable to the synagogues of Diaspora Jews which flourished in the same locations. The comparison illuminates many features in the social formation of the first Christians, a complex and variegated process that continued through many generations of early Christianity. In these seminal essays - some previously published, some newly written - John M.G. Barclay examines aspects of the construction of early Christian identity, especially within the Pauline tradition (during and after Paul's lifetime). Treating topics as diverse as food, family, money, circumcision, constitutional theory, and ethnic stereotypes, these essays place Christian communities in close comparison with Diaspora Judaism. Adopting a broader lens, placing both Jews and Christians in the larger context of the Roman world, there are ground-breaking studies of the social boundaries between Christians and outsiders, the formation of a Christian social dialect, and early Christian attitudes to old and young, to slavery, marriage, and death, to Roman religion and the Roman Empire. Early Christian identity is shown to have been fragile, contentious, often under-defined, socially creative, and multiple in expression: in their practices, their conventions, their social attitudes and their language, the Pauline churches emerge as sometimes conformist and sometimes radically innovative. These essays both model and stimulate a programme of socio-historical research that has much fresh light to shed on the formation of early Christianity. Wissenchaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament No. 275