Description: Twenty-two essays, written by top scholars in the fields of early Christianity and Judaism, focus on methodological issues, earliest Christianity in its Judaic setting, Gospel studies, and history and meaning in later Christianity. These essays honor Bruce Chilton, recognizing his seminal contribution to the study of earliest Christianity in its Judaic setting. Chilton's scholarship has established innovative approaches to reconstructing the life of Jesus, a Jew whose religious ideology developed and therefore must be understood within the Judaism of the first centuries. Following upon Chilton's approaches and insights, the essays collected here illustrate the centrality of the literatures of early Judaism to the critical exegesis of the New Testament and other writings of early Christianity.
Brief description:
Alan Avery-Peck is Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Craig A. Evans is the John Bisagno Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins at Houston Baptist University in Texas. He is the author of several books on Jesus and the Gospels and the Jewish setting of early Christianity.
Jacob Neusner is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History and Theology of Judaism and Senior Fellow, Institute of Advanced Theology, at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.