From Dove: T & T Clark Sale

A number of titles are on sale at significant discounts (at least 60%). In particular, Fred Lapham's Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha is a nice entry-level text for those unfamiliar with the wide array of apocryphal traditions in early Christianity. (I'm thinking of recommending this sale to the Director of Christian Education at my home church.)

JSNT Publications

Gibson, Jeffrey B
Temptations of Jesus in Early Christianity
(T & T Clark International, 2004)
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This study lays the groundwork necessary for establishing the validity of the thesis, proposed particulary by J.H. Yoder in his Politics of Jesus, that the early church held a selective and unified view of the nature and content of the various temptations to which Jesus was regarded as having been subjected in his lifetime. This leads to a clearer view of how the early church perceived the exigencies of its Lord's mission and message, and provides fresh insights into such prominent New Testament themes as sonship, obedience, faithfulness and discipleship. It also opens up new possibilities for firmly establishing the occasion of those New Testament writings, such as the Gospel of Mark and even the Epistle to the Hebrews, where notice of and appeal to the example of Jesus in temptation appears as a prominent feature.

Jack, Alison M
Texts Reading Texts, Sacred and Secular: Two Postmodern Perspectives
(T & T Clark International, 1999)
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The language, themes and imagery of the Bible have been rewritten into texts across time. In the Revelation of John, the Hebrew Bible echoes and is reinvented, just as in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) many explicit and implicit readings and interpretations of the Bible are offered. In Texts Reading Texts, these readings of the Bible, and the ways in which Revelation and Hogg's Confessions have themselves been read, are considered from the two postmodern perspectives of marginalization and deconstruction. By reading the two seemingly unrelated texts side by side from these perspectives, traditional readings of them both are disturbed and challenged.

Kwong, Ivan Shing Chung
Word Order of the Gospel of Luke
(T & T Clark International, 2006)
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This work studies the word order of the Gospel of Luke and some of its prominent messages with consideration of systemic functional linguistic theories. The first part of the work focuses on the relative positions of four constituents (subject, predicate, complement and circumstantial adjunct) of different types of Lukan clauses (independent, dependent, infinitival, participial and embedded clause). The result gives some unmarked (typical or common) word order patterns and some marked word order patterns of all Lukan clauses. The second part traces the foregrounded messages of the Gospel based on their related marked word order patterns incorporated with functional linguistic phenomena. The result highlights the messages of Jesus' disciples and his parents' failure in understanding him, Pilate's crime of handing over Jesus and Jesus' predictions of his future sufferings and Peter's future failure. JSNTS and Studies in New Testament Greek series

Landon, Charles
Text-Critical Study of the Epistle of Jude
(T & T Clark International, 1996)
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The author writes in the tradition of C.H. Turner, G.D. Kilpatrick and J.K. Elliott, and attempts a reconstruction of the Greek text of Jude according to the rationale of thoroughgoing eclecticism. The aims of his study are to apply an eclectic approach to the resolution of textual problems in Jude, and to determine the extent to which the text of Jude published in the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament (GNT4) is a product of the eclectic ideal. In this work, eclecticism is defined in detail, distinctions being made between eclectic generalism, rational criticism, and thoroughgoing eclecticism. Each of 95 variation units is analysed individually and the apparatus provided for each unit shows as much variation as possible in a compact form.

Lapham, Fred
Peter: the Myth, the Man, and the Writings
(T & T Clark International, 2004)
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This book critically examines all the early and important Petrine pseudepigrapha to identify a distinctive Petrine theology which, it is believed, was later swamped by the tide of western orthodoxy. Despite the diversity of the books and tractates, ranging from Jewish-Christian writings to avowedly Gnostic works, a remarkably consistent Petrine tradition does emerge; and Peter is shown essentially to be neither the impetuous, undiscerning, and even vacillating figure portrayed in the Gospels and Acts, nor the magisterial and pontifical figure of later Church tradition, but a visionary who was concerned above all to hold together both the moral and cognitive aspects of the Faith.

Newport, Kenneth G C
Sources and Sitz im Leben of Matthew 23
(T & T Clark International, 1995)
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Matthew 23 presents the New Testament scholar with many problems. Not the least of these is the unequivocal acceptance of Pharisaic authority in vv. 2-3. In the same chapter the tithing of mint, dill and cummin is affirmed (v. 23) and the altar is said still to sanctify the gift (v. 19). This material seems out of place within the broader context of Matthew's Gospel. This study examines the origin and function of such material and argues that the bulk of the chapter (vv. 2-31) is formed from a single unified source and cannot be explained in terms of Matthew's editing of Q, M and Markan material. The focus of the criticism found in these verses is that the Pharisees are too slack: they strain gnats but swallow camels (v. 24), they 'say but do not do' (v. 4). To this unified source material, however, the evangelist has added his own (vv. 32-39) and by it launches an attack not just upon the Pharisees and scribes, but 'Jerusalem' and her children as a whole. Matthew therefore both heightens the polemic and extends its range.

Related to Gnosticism and New Testament Apocrypha

Franzmann, Majella
Jesus in the Manichaean Writings
(T & T Clark International, 2003)
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Manichaeism was a dualistic religious system with Christian, Gnostic and pagan elements, founded in Persia in the third century by Manes. This is the first full-length study of the Manichaean Jesus, since the publication of several major Manichaean texts such as the Homilies, Psalm Book and Kephalaia in the 1930s and 1940s. A knowledge of Manichaean Christology is important for any understanding of the development of Christologies in the early cen-turies CE, whether within mainstream Christianity or within associated het-erodox groups. This book undertakes a comprehensive study of six distinct figures of Jesus that can be found in both Eastern and Western Manichaean lit-erature. Previous partial studies of Manichaean Christology have tended to restrict their focus to texts from either Eastern or Western traditions alone. Majella Franzmann argues that a single Manichaean Jesus can be discerned behind the many different representations to be found.

Lapham, Fred
Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha
(T & T Clark International, 2003)
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This book is a readable and analytical survey of those important but little-known Christian documents of the second and third centuries which are collectively referred to as the New Testament Apocrypha, and is intended to serve both as an introductory guide for interested clergy and laity, but also as a useful reference for thos pursuing higher research. Questions of the manufacture of the codices, the transmission of the texts, the discovery of the lost and hidden books, and of the classification of the documents are considered, and the books are placed and critically examined in their geographical and social setting.

Logan, Alastair H B A J M Wedderburn (eds)
New Testament and Gnosis
(T & T Clark International, 2004)
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This collection of essays commemorates two important events. The first if the retirement of Professor Robert Wilson, the leading British authority on the subject of Gnosis and Gnosticism and a foremost international scholar in this field, from the Chair of Biblical Criticism in the University of St. Andrews and from the Editorship of New Testament Studies in the autumn of 1983. The second is the recent appearance, both in facsimile form and in English translation, of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Some of these have become well known in various ways since their discovery in 1945-6, but it is only very recently that the complete corpus of material has been made generally available. Thus it is only now that we can begin to assess its significance both for our understanding of this area of early Church history and in particular for the question of the relationship between Gnosis and Gnosticism and the New Testament.

By John K. Riches

Riches, John K
Conflicting Mythologies: Identity Formations in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark
(T & T Clark International, 2000)
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A cultural anthropological interpretation of Mark and Matthew which examines the formation of early Christian identity, world view and ethos. John Riches examines notions of sacred space and ethnicity. He shows how group identity emerged in the form of a dynamic process of reshaping traditional Jewish symbols and motifs, such as descent, kinship and circumcision, and interweaving them with early Christian traditions about Jesus. He also argues that the Evangelists were influenced by two opposing cosmologies, which accounts for the diversity of senses of identity which flow from the two narratives.
Contents
Preface Abbreviations 1 Identity and Change 2 Jewish Identity in the World of the Mediterranean Cities: Themes and Variations 3 Sight to the Blind 4 The Remaking of Sacred Space 5 Conflicting World-Views in Mark's Christology 6 Church of Disciples 7 Matthew and the Remaking of Sacred Space 8 Cosmology and Christology in Matthew 9 New Worlds and New Identities: The Gospels of Mark and Matthew and the Beginning of Christianity Bibliography Index of biblical references and ancient sources Index of modern authors Index of subjects