Rethinking Revelation And Redaction

This study advances our understanding of the nature and purpose of the rewriting of Scripture in Second Temple Judaism through a comparative analysis of the compositional methods and interpretive goals of the five 4QReworked Pentateuch manuscripts (4Q158, 364–367).

This insightful work examines the variety of ways that collective memory, oral tradition, history, and history writing intersect. Integral to all this are the ways in which ancient Israel was shaped by the monarchy, the Babylonian exile, and the dispersions of Judeans and the ways in which Israel conceptualized and interacted with the divine-Yahweh as well as other deities.

In recent years there has been a tendency among certain scholars to claim that little can be known about pre-exilic Israel, because the Old Testament was only compiled in the post-exilic period (for example Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson, Neils Peter Lemche). One scholar (Lemche) has even claimed that the Old Testament is a Hellenistic work. The purpose of this book is to argue that this is an extreme and untenable position and that, though much of the Old Testament was indeed edited in the exilic or post-exilic period, many of the underlying sources used go back to the pre-exilic period. When critically analyzed these sources can shed much light on the pre-exilic period. This important work is the product of a team of seventeen international scholars, no fewer than five of whom are Fellows of the British Academy. None of the chapters has previously been published.

This volume presents the main lectures given at the XVIIIth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (Leiden, August 2004). They are representative of the main trends and progress of current biblical research.

This book presents a new model for understanding the christological relationship between Luke 1-2 and the rest of Luke-Acts.

This paradigm-shifting study is the first book-length investigation into the compositional dates of the New Testament to be published in over forty years. It argues that, with the notable exception of the undisputed Pauline Epistles, most New Testament texts were composed twenty to thirty years earlier than is typically supposed by contemporary biblical scholars. What emerges is a revised view of how quickly early Christians produced what became the seminal texts for their new movement.

In this courageous work Michael Crosby offers a trenchant analysis of mandatory celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church. He shows how the imposition of celibacy has now revealed a deeper issue: the abuse of power as well as the abuse of women and homosexuals in the Church. Crosby asserts that: --to argue that the present discipline of mandatory celibacy is based on the New Testament is a misuse of scripture; --imposed celibacy continues to be used as a means of maintaining clerical control through fear and intimidation; --a religious system demanding celibacy exposes a deeper control: the abuse of power endemic throughout the system; --while difficult to live out even when freely chosen, enforced celibacy can result in dysfunctional behaviors at all levels. Integrating his personal experience as a celibate and cleric with biblical exegesis, historical study and the behavioral sciences, Crosby believes that: --healthy celibacy demands intimacy with God and others; --a healthy church will reorder its current power dynamics in a way that mitigates sexual abuse; --this will once again reveal Roman Catholicism to be a religion with an inspiring model of evangelical life and witness. This updated revision of Crosby's award-winning 'Celibacy: Means of Control or Mandate of the Heart?' also addresses the abuse of power in the Catholic Church by those male, clerical celibates who control it. He convincingly points the way to a Church that will be--with all its ministers--healthier and holier.