Heirs Of The Reunited Church

The work establishes the relative and absolute chronology of Paul's life. It demonstrates that Paul went to Jerusalem only two times after his conversion. The second visit, which was planned in Rom and described retrospectively in Gal, ended up with the Antiochene conflict. The following Eucharistic schism within early Christianity has lasted for at least a century after Paul's death in AD 49. The so-called Pastoral Letters, which are in fact ethopoeic, confirm this state of matters. The history of the Pauline mission, as it was described in the Acts of the Apostles, is a result of sixfold hypertextual reworking of Gal 1:17-2:14; Rom 15:25-32 with the use of other Pauline and post-Pauline texts. Luke irenically described the history of early Christianity as a history of the reunited Church.

The study analyses the current state of research on the synoptic problem and proves that the Synoptic Gospels were written in the Mark, Luke, Matthew order of direct literary dependence. Moreover, the work demonstrates that the Synoptic Gospels are results of systematic, sequential, hypertextual reworking of the contents of the Pauline letters. Accordingly, the so-called 'Q source' turns out to be an invention of nineteenth-century scholars with their Romantic hermeneutic presuppositions. Demonstration of the fact that the Gospels are not records of the activity of the historical Jesus but that they narratively illustrate the identity of Christ as it has been revealed in the person and life of Paul the Apostle will certainly have major consequences for the whole Christian theology.

The work analyses the current state of research on the problem of the relationship of the Fourth Gospel to the Synoptic Gospels. It proves that the Fourth Gospel, which was written c. AD 140-150, is a result of systematic, sequential, hypertextual reworking of the Acts of the Apostles with the use of the Synoptic Gospels, more than ten other early Christian writings, Jewish sacred Scriptures, and Josephus' works. The work also demonstrates that the character of the 'disciple whom Jesus loved' functions in the Fourth Gospel as a narrative embodiment of all generations of the Pauline, post-Pauline, and post-Lukan Gentile Christian Church. These features of the Fourth Gospel imply that it was intended to crown and at the same time close the canon of the New Testament writings.

When Queen Salote of Tonga attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London in 1953, she was greeted as the tallest queen of the smallest kingdom and gained universal admiration for her natural dignity and the warmth of her personality. This account of Queen Salote's life and times is more than a biography, for it also describes the politics and social structure of a small kingdom that was a world in microcosm.

When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left three highly intelligent children to succeed him in turn, to be followed, if their lines failed, by the descendants of his sister, Mary Tudor. Picking up from the point that The Six Wives of Henry VIII left off, Children of England covers the period up to Elizabeth's ascension to the throne in 1558. Making use of a huge variety of contemporary sources, Alison Weir brings to life one of the most extraordinary periods of English history, when each of Henry's heirs was potentially the tool of powerful political or religious figures, and when the realm was seething with intrigue and turbulent change. 'Recounted with her usual lively thoroughness by Alison Weir, my favourite Tudor historian' Philippa Gregory

The far-reaching social and intellectual changes in the United States since the Civil War have had a definite effect upon the religious thought of American churches. In this volume, a distinguished scholar and theologian has undertaken an inductive study of theological issues in one of the major denominations, the Presbyterian church in the United States of America. Since this church was in the thick of the social and intellectual ferment that changed the living and thinking habits of Americans, much that transpired in it finds broad parallels in other leading American churches. Thus, the story of the Presbyterian church is, in essence, a kind of theological barometer of American history. Avoiding sweeping generalizations, Lefferts A. Loetscher briefly traces the history of the Presbyterian church from its founding by New England Puritans on Long Island in the 1640s to the disruption of 1837 and the "wedding day" of Old School and New School Presbyterians in 1870, following the reunion of 1869. From this point, he examines in detail the development of the church, analyzing the controversies that occurred over the years, interpreting the various theological issues that led to disputes.