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A Psycho-Spiritual View on the Message of Jesus in the Gospels

Ezekiel has often been called ¿the prophet of the spirit¿ because of his surpassing use of the word ¿¿¿, ¿spirit¿. The main argument of this book is that Ezekiel¿s ¿spirit¿ motif conveys a polysemous symbolism which, nonetheless, accentuates an overarching leitmotiv. Ezekiel¿s ¿spirit¿ symbolism signifies a paradigm shift in ancient Israelite visualization of divine presence in Israel: from visible phenomena and experiences, mediated through rituals at cultic shrines in Israel, to an omnipresence that is not necessarily mediated through cultus. Moreover, author Samuel W. Muindi posits that the African Pentecostal ¿en-spirited¿ worldview is an apt hermeneutical lens for understanding Ezekielian ¿spirit¿ symbolism. The experiences of the Ezekielian exilic community prefigure dynamic equivalents in African communities. As such, Ezekielian ¿spirit¿ symbolism critically informs the African Pentecostal ¿en-spirited¿ worldview while the latter illumines Ezekielian ¿spirit¿ symbolism.This book is aimed at students of Biblical theology and others who wish to enrich their understanding of hermeneutics as well as Biblical pneumatology as an ¿en-spirited¿ worldview.

The Jewish temple continues to be a topic of considerable interest among Jews and Christians alike in spite of its being absent for nearly two millennia. This book examines the temple in the book of Revelation, which is where Jewish temple motifs find their scriptural culmination. Working from a backgrounds perspective, Dr. Briggs first traces various temple themes through the Old Testament and demonstrates how they were utilized in Revelation. He then explores the concept of temple in a number of noncanonical Jewish writings, assessing the degree to which sources other than the Old Testament influenced the Apocalypse's temple symbolism.

This book is an analysis of inner-biblical exegesis which ordinarily involves examination of the intertextual relationship between two texts within the biblical corpus. The direction of dependence between texts of this kind is not as important in the present study as the direction in which these texts were meant to be read by those who gave them their final shape.

Peace and Peacemaking in Paul and the Greco-Roman World compares the Apostle Paul's understanding of peace with various conceptions of peace in the Greco-Roman thought world of the first century. The author seeks to clarify how the Greeks defined peace and then to show how their conception of war and peace established the ethos that ultimately defined them as a people.

Liberation from Empire investigates the phenomenon of demonic possession and exorcism in the Gospel of Mark. The Marcan narrator writes from an anti-imperialistic point of view with allusions to, yet never directly addressing, the Roman Empire.

The key to a balanced and accurate understanding of the book of Ecclesiastes lies in the inter-dependent relationships between the prominent motifs within the book. An Analysis of the Inter-Dependency of the Prominent Motifs Within the Book of Qohelet explores this dynamic.

In fact, the Gospel of Matthew was the most Jewish of the Synoptic Gospels, and Matthew's paradigm was the needed transition for understanding the role of the new community post-70 AD. This book examines how Matthew used Jewish concepts as paradigmatic utterances for the Matthean community.

Contends the New Testament quotations from the Twelve presuppose knowledge of the larger whole and cannot be understood correctly apart from awareness of the compositional strategy of the Twelve.

Attempts to link common messianic issues found in some Dead Sea Scrolls with the "Gospel of John". These messianic issues are studied in relation to the political situation facing the Johannine community in dealing with the Roman empire. This book is designed to deal intelligently with that difficult era in Christian history.

A Biblical Theology of Gerassapience

Axis of Glory

From John of Apamea to Mark's Gospel: Two Dialogues with Thomasios: A Hermeneutical Reading of Horao, Blepo, and Theoreo combines two theological fields of investigation. The first is related to the Patristic theology of Eastern Syrian Christianity and the second resides in the field of Biblical theology.

This book takes a narrative-critical approach to the meaning and function of debate in the Gospel of Mary.

This landmark study of the literary relationship between the gospel of John and the synoptic gospels presents compelling evidence for the existence of a written pre-canonical Alpha gospel that contained almost all of the main episodes in the adult life of Jesus and which became the written source for the core biography of Jesus in all four gospels.

Ancient Near Eastern Literature and the Hebrew Scriptures About the Fatherhood of God discusses some of the main «father-god» concepts of the people of the Ancient Near East, then examines the eighteen occurrences of God¿s fatherhood specifically mentioned in Hebrew Scripture. From these sources, the book develops a theology of God¿s fatherhood that honors both ancient and modern scrutiny. Although many studies have explored the subject of the fatherhood of God ¿ mostly from the perspective of nonbiblical disciplines, and through the lens of Greco-Roman mythology ¿ this book takes into account the wealth of material from the ancient Near East, the birthplace of the Hebrew Scriptures.

This book breaks fresh ground in the interpretation of the Apocalypse with an interdisciplinary methodology called aural-performance criticism that assesses how the first-century audience would have heard the Apocalypse.

The (Im)Polite Jesus is an informed, focused, deep and creative analysis of the topic of (im)politeness applied to Jesus in Matthew's Gospel with in-depth conclusions and analysis about the Matthean Jesus' (im)politeness.

In this book, Hye Kyung Park examines the functions and roles of the women who appear in the Elijah and Elisha narratives. This book elaborates upon the critical meaning of women's voices through a close interpretation of the roles and functions attributed to women in 1 Kings 17:8-24; 2 Kings 4:8-37, 5, and 8:1-6.

This book investigates the Matthean use of bread and the breaking of bread in light of cognitive conceptual metaphor, which are not only intertwined within Matthew's narrative plots but also function to represent Matthew's communal identity and ideological vision.

For hundreds of years, scholars have debated the meaning of Jesus' central theological term, the 'kingdom of God'. Most of the argument has focused on its assumed eschatological connotations and Jesus' adherence or deviation from these ideas. Within the North American context, the debate is dominated by the work of Norman Perrin, whose classification of the kingdom of God as a myth-evoking symbol remains one of the fundamental assumptions of scholarship. According to Perrin, Jesus' understanding of the kingdom of God is founded upon the myth of God acting as king on behalf of Israel as described in the Hebrew Bible. Moving Beyond Symbol and Myth challenges Perrin's classification, and advocates the reclassification of the kingdom of God as metaphor. Drawing upon insights from the cognitive theory of metaphor, this study examines all the occurrences of the 'God is king' metaphor within the literary context of the Hebrew Bible. Based on this review, it is proposed that the 'God is king' metaphor functions as a true metaphor with a range of expressions and meanings. It is employed within a variety of texts and conveys images of God as the covenantal sovereign of Israel; God as the eternal suzerain of the world, and God as the king of the disadvantaged. The interaction of the semantic fields of divinity and human kingship evoke a range of metaphoric expressions that are utilized throughout the history of the Hebrew Bible in response to differing socio-historical contexts and within a range of rhetorical strategies. It is this diversity inherent in the 'God is king' metaphor that is the foundation for the diversified expressions of the kingdom of God associated with the historical Jesus and early Christianity.

Canaan to Corinth

Tracks the mystery of narratives in the Hebrew Bible and their allusions to Sinai laws by highlighting intertextual allusions created by verbal resonances. This title suggests that most of Genesis was composed during or after the Babylonian exile, after the codification of most Sinai laws, which Genesis protagonists consistently violate.