The Acts of the Apostles, Narrative, and History
Rubén René Dupertuis
The Acts of the Apostles offers a kind of sequel to Gospel of Luke, telling the story of the spread of the Jesus movement through the activities of key leaders, beginning in Jerusalem, ...
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Adam and Eve
Peter C. Bouteneff
Adam and Eve, who barely appear in the Bible after they are introduced in the book of Genesis, serve a short but important list of functions within early Christian writing. They represent ...
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Adam and the Making of Masculinity
Eric Thurman
The narrative(s) in Genesis 1–3 is a foundational text for Western discourse on gender and sexuality. To date, studies of biblical masculinities have virtually ignored the biblical first ...
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American Bible Bindings and Formats
Seth Perry
This chapter offers an overview of the history and historiography of some of the nonverbal aspects of American Bibles, focusing on format, bindings, and paper. These features of Bibles have ...
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The American Children’s Bible
Russell W. Dalton
Children’s Bibles have been among the most popular and influential types of religious publications in the United States, providing many Americans with their first formative experiences of ...
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Ancient Versions and Textual Transmission of the Old Testament
Gerard J. Norton
This article first gives a schematic outline of the history of the Hebrew text in four stages. It then presents the elements that readers will meet in modern editions of that text. These ...
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Anglican Interpretations of Scripture: Can Scriptural Reasoning Provide a Way Forward?
Kathy Grieb
This chapter considers the future of Anglicanism especially in the light of the interpretation of Scripture. It considers a recent instance of impasse and suggests a possible way forward. ...
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Animating the Bible’s Animals
Ken Stone
This chapter discusses the potential relevance of interdisciplinary animal studies for biblical interpretation. The story of Jacob and his family in Genesis 25–32 is examined from the ...
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Apocalyptic Literature
Christopher Rowland
The term ‘apocalypse’ denotes a particular literary type found in the literature of ancient Judaism, characterized by claims to offer visions or other disclosures of divine mysteries ...
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The Apocryphal Mary in Early Christian Art
Robin M. Jensen
Early Christian visual representations of the Virgin Mary include episodes from the apocryphal Protevangelium of James and Pseudo-Matthew and constitute some of the earliest known artistic ...
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Apocryphal Texts about Other Characters in the Canonical Gospels
Charlotte Touati and Claire Clivaz
This chapter focuses on characters that may be considered to play secondary or minor roles in canonical gospels, but are often prominent figures in non-canonical texts: Mary the mother of ...
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Apologetics
Mark Edwards
In Greek forensic usage, an ‘apology’ (apologia) is a formal speech on behalf of the defendant. The first surviving works to bear this title professed to be records of the speech delivered ...
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Archaeology and the Pauline Letters
Cavan Concannon
Archaeological materials and research have long informed the study of the Pauline letters. These materials have typically been used to provide a ‘background’ to Paul’s writings, to solve ...
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Augustine and Pelagius on the Epistle to the Romans
Mark Edwards
Perhaps no scriptural passage has divided the church so bitterly, or so often, as the ninth article of the Epistle to the Romans. Predestinarian readings take two forms, one of which ...
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Authors, Books, and Readers in the Ancient World
Alan Millard
This article discusses authorship, books, and readers in Old Testament and New Testament times. In the Old Testament world, authorship is necessarily admitted in letters, and related to ...
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Becoming Israel in the Wilderness of Numbers
Adriane Leveen
Numbers describes the building of an Israelite collective in the wilderness. A fledgling people struggle mightily to form themselves into a unity but are overcome by their own complaints, ...
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The Bible and American LGBT Interpretation
Teresa J. Hornsby
This chapter gives an overview of the roots of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual/transgendered (LGBT) interpretation in the United States. Much of this hermeneutic is tied to various ...
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The Bible and Art
Kristin Schwain
An artwork picturing biblical subject matter is never a straightforward depiction of a scriptural text. It is a visual translation of it, shaped by available models of interpretation, the ...
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