The Book Of Revelation And The Visual Culture Of Asia Minor

Comparing the verbal images of the book of Revelation to the visual rhetoric and images of Asia Minor, Andrew R. Guffey argues that Revelation is to be "seen" and not just read. By engaging Revelation as a visual text, Guffey reinserts it into the visual culture of early Christianity.

A major scholarly collaboration exploring vivid visual rhetoric in the New Testament From Jesus’s miraculous walk on water to the graphic horrors of hell, New Testament authors make vivid and unforgettable images appear before their audience’s eyes. In the past decade, scholarship on early Christian use of ancient rhetorical techniques has flourished. One focus of rhetorical criticism of the New Testament has been the function of ekphrasis, or vivid visual description. In this landmark collection, leading New Testament scholars come together to probe the purpose and import of ekphrasis in early Christian literature. The research in this collection explores the relationship between vivid rhetoric and genre, taking into account technical features, authorial intent, and audience response. Specific topics include: • The New Testament’s rhetoric compared against Greco-Roman rhetorical handbooks • Juxtaposition between vivid and non-vivid rhetoric • The use of energeia in John’s Gospel to draw upon the reader’s multiple senses • Aesthetics and the grotesque in Revelation • The use of travelogue to create a virtual journey for the audience • Vivid rhetoric in early martyr literature Vivid Rhetoric and Visual Persuasion is a must-read for scholars of early Christianity and rhetorical criticism. Readers will find this collection indispensable in understanding a complex feature of the New Testament in its historical context. Contributors Contributors Bart B. Bruehler, Diane Fruchtman, Meghan Henning, Martina Kepper, Susanne Luther, Harry O. Maier, Gudrun Nassauer, Nils Neumann, Vernon K. Robbins, Gary S. Selby, Aldo Tagliabue, Sunny Kuan-Hui Wang, Annette Weissenrieder, Robyn J. Whitaker

Robyn. J. Whitaker interprets the Book of Revelation within the context of ancient rhetoric and religion. She argues that the author of Revelation uses a popular rhetorical tool, ekphrasis, to paint word-pictures of God that compete with material images to both critique image-making and simultaneously make an absent God present.

Karl Barth was an eminently conversational theologian, and with the Internet revolution, we live today in an eminently conversational age. Being the proceedings of the 2010 Karl Barth Blog Conference, Karl Barth in Conversation brings these two factors together in order to advance the dialogue about Barth's theology and extend the online conversation to new audiences. With conversation partners ranging from Wesley to Žižek, from Schleiermacher to Jenson, from Hauerwas to the Coen brothers, this volume opens up exciting new horizons for exploring Barth's immense contribution to church and world. The contributors, who represent a young new generation of academic theologians, bring a fresh perspective to a topic--the theology of Karl Barth--that often seems to have exhausted its range of possibilities. This book proves that there is still a great deal of uncharted territory in the field of Barth studies. Today, more than forty years since the Swiss theologian's death, the conversation is as lively as ever.

While commentaries continue to be published on the book of Revelation, few, if any, attempt to interpret the Apocalypse in light of the political, historical, and cultural setting of John's original audience. The purpose of Seven Congregations in a Roman Crucible is to provide fresh and illuminating exegesis of Revelation that takes seriously ancient literary and archaeological evidences. This book seeks to bring the reader into the world of John's Apocalypse with pictures of numerous sites and artifacts from the first and early second centuries AD. Moreover, the book also attempts to interpret John and his message through the lens of the Jewish prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, and other pertinent Second Temple works. Thus John stands in the prophetic heritage of Israel in his attempt to challenge, threaten, admonish, and praise the seven churches of Roman Asia whose members are suffering at the hands of the idolatrous Graeco-Roman culture in which they reside.

The interpretation of the Apocalypse is explored through various methods including historical, literary, and social analysis, in combination with such reading strategies as process, postcolonial, and religion studies perspectives. Shows how diverse methods produce divergent readings of a text. Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

Archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, and historical research is used to illuminate the meaning and function of temples in both Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures. This evidence is then brought into a dialogue with a literary analysis of how the temple functions as a symbol in Revelation.

"The study of the reciprocal relationship between the Bible and popular culture has blossomed in the past few decades, and the time seems ripe for a broadly-conceived work that assesses the current state of the field, offers examples of work in that field, and suggests directions for further study. This Handbook includes a wide range of topics organized under several broad themes, including biblical characters and themes in popular culture; the Bible in popular cultural genres; "lived" examples; and a concluding section in which we take stock of methodologies like Reception History and the impact of the field on teaching and publishing. These topics are all addressed by focusing on specific examples from film, television, comics, music, literature, video games, science fiction, material culture, museums, and theme parks, to name a few. This book represents a major contribution to the field by some of its leading practitioners, and will be a key resource for the future development of the study of Bible and American popular culture"--