Books in the Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series series

For the author of the fourth Gospel, there is neither a Christless church nor a churchless Christ. Though John's Gospel has been widely understood as ambivalent toward the idea of 'church', Andrew Byers argues that ecclesiology is as central a Johannine concern as Christology. Rather than focusing on the community behind the text, John's Gospel directs attention to the vision of community prescribed within the text, which is presented as a 'narrative ecclesiology' by which the concept of 'church' gradually unfolds throughout the Gospel's sequence. The theme of oneness functions within this script and draws on the theological language of the Shema, a centerpiece of early Jewish theology and social identity. To be 'one' with this 'one God' and his 'one Shepherd' involves the believers' corporate participation within the divine family. Such participation requires an ontological transformation that warrants an ecclesial identity expressed by the bold assertion found in Jesus' citation of Psalm 82: 'you are gods'.

This study is an attempt to show how proverbial or aphoristic sayings played an important role in the early formulation of the sayings of Jesus by the church. Small collections of aphoristic sayings can be detected in the sayings tradition known as 'Q'.

Dr Collange provides solutions to these problems on a detailed study of 2,14 - 7,4. He argues that the obscurities of the Epistle can be explained by the particular circumstances of its composition; Paul's use of more primitive Christian materials gives us a measure of his own originality and genius. This book should be of interest to all New Testament scholars.

A study of the communal worship and private prayers of the early Christian Church, in particular the intercessory prayer passages in Paul's seven epistles. Professor Wiles is concerned to discover what these prayers reveal about Paul's ministry and his apostolic strategy.

Dr Pryke tests syntactically unusual features from the text of St Mark's Gospel to see if they are mainly source material or redactional. Appendixes include further analyse and a complete redactional Greek text. Dr Pryke's methods and conclusions will be of great interest to those concerned with linguistic studies of New Testament texts.

This book offers a thesis about the interests underlying the Epistle. Dr Hughes argues that the major concern of the author has been to achieve a theological understanding of the relationship between the now out-moded forms and institutions of Old Testament worship and those of the distinctively new (yet not unrelated) Christian faith in which he now finds himself.

Dr McDonald studies the fundamental structures and procedures of Christian communication. He explores what lies behind each of them as well as the way they are used by Jesus and the early Church. Both kerygmatic and didactic features are found in all of these structures.

This study first examines the concept of the Son of man against its Jewish background and then details the most important Son of man sayings attributed to Jesus in the first three Gospels. The book concludes that some of the sayings originated not in the creative thought of early Christians but in the preaching of Jesus himself.

The New Testament narratives reporting the resuscitation of dead persons by Jesus and Peter are discussed in detail in this monograph, and their theology is examined. His analysis leads the author to the hypothesis that neither Jesus nor Peter in fact brought the dead to life.

St Paul and his contemporaries - so runs a commonly accepted scholarly opinion - inhabited a world believed to be dominated by hostile superhuman powers, of whom Jews and Gentiles alike liked in fear. Dr Carr concludes that the notion of mighty forces of evil ranged against man was not part of the earliest Christian understanding of the world and the gospel.

The purpose of this study is to investigate and compare the basic structures of Matthew's and Paul's ethics, rather than to deal in detail with their teaching on specific moral issues. Dr Mohrlang discusses their perspectives and gives special attention to the question of ethical motivation.

It has often been suggested that Luke's two volumes were written as an apology for Christianity, to demonstrate to the Roman authorities that the new faith was not a dangerous and subversive innovation. From an investigation of Luke - Acts, particularly the trials of Jesus and Paul.

The theme of law in Luke's Gospel has rarely been discussed, and then only tangentially in studies concerned with recovering Jesus' view of the law. The evidence of Acts has received considerably more attention, but almost always in the context of a comparison with Paul's view of the law or a reconstruction of the historical events which lie behind the narrative of Acts.

This examination of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Letters of Paul finds that, in both these bodies of literature, religious self-understanding is expressed in terms of the concept of purity so important to primitive religion and earlier Judaism. Dr Newton contradicts the view held by most scholars that the traditional Jewish attitude to purity had no place in Christianity.

This book is novel in its questioning of the adequacy of interpreting Paul from the perspective of the Reformation and in its application of sociological methods to the New Testament.

This study provides an analysis and commentary on Josephus' description of the Essenes in the light of the new material from Qumran. A fresh translation is provided alongside the Greek text of the passages in Josephus, as well as a full commentary on the major passages in which he describes this group.

In this detailed analysis Dr Schramm challenges suggestions, from recent research, that Luke's exclusive source for his Markan tradition was Mark's Gospel, and points out that Luke also drew on other oral or written traditions. He concludes that modifications to his main source should not be regarded as evidence of Luke's own theology.

The author claims that development can be traced since we have not only letters from Paul himself, but also the Pastoral epistles from the beginning of the second century, as well as Ephesians and Colossians, writings which are characteristic of the ambiguous period following the disappearance of the earliest authorities.

This critically acclaimed book redresses faith through a thorough exegetical and literary study of all the references to faith in Mark's composition.

In this second edition of a work which first appeared in 1979, Professor Howard brings the original discussion of Paul's Letter to the Galatians into line with recent scholarship and his present thinking on the issues it raises.

The aim of this book is to illuminate the manner in which Mark understood Jesus' death. In this new edition, Professor Best looks at the Gospel as a continuous story, and by examining the general sweep of the narrative he attempts to show how Mark saw Jesus' death both as an atonement for sin and as creative of the new community of the Church.

The aim of this study is to show that the Evangelists, to an extent hitherto unrecognised, wrote narratives which set out to distinguish Jesus's time from their own.

A careful examination of the way Paul and other ancient authors handled the wording of their explicit quotations.

This study focuses on the way the Letter to the Hebrews explains the Christian doctrine of salvation by means of sacrificial symbols drawn from the Old Testament. Theories about the nature of sacrifice are taken from the work of social anthropologists to show the underlying meaning of these symbols.

In the process of exploring the full implications of Luke's preface, Loveday Alexander puts forward the innovative thesis that Luke followed the prefaces of the 'scientific' tradition in the Greaco-Roman world, rather than the conventions of the literati.

This book argues that an account of the life and character of Jesus formed an integral part of the early church's preaching. Against many modern scholars, Dr Stanton seeks to show that interest in the life of Jesus was not a late development within primitive Christianity.

Garrick Allen brings the Book of Revelation into the broader context of early Jewish literature. He touches on several areas of scholarly inquiry in biblical studies, including modes of literary production, the use of allusions, practices of exegesis and early engagements with the Book of Revelation.

The book will be of interest to all scholars and students within the fields of biblical studies and theology. It offers a fresh and satisfying solution to the notorious crux of Romans 7 - the identity of the 'I' - and contributes to our understanding of both the apostle Paul's thought and of Christian theology.

This book offers a new contribution to an important debate by comprehensively addressing alternative hypotheses regarding the origin of divine Christology, the evidence of widespread agreement among the earliest Christians concerning the divinity of Christ, and issues related to whether Jesus' intention was falsified.

We are used to the idea of people believing in Christ, but did the early church consider that Jesus also had faith in God? This book evaluates the evidence for the early church's interest in Jesus as a man of faith, and traces its development through the first four Christian centuries.