Download or read book A Theory of Character in New Testament Narrative written by Cornelis Bennema and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study in three-dimensional character reconstruction, Cornelis Bennema presents a new theory of character in the New Testament literature. Although character has been the subject of focused literary-critical study of the New Testament since the 1970s, Bennema observes that there is still no consensus regarding how character should be understood in contemporary literary theory or in biblical studies. Many New Testament scholars seem to presume that characters in Greco-Roman literature are two-dimensional,”Aristotelian”; figures, unlike the well-rounded, psychologized individuals who appear in modern fiction. They continue nevertheless to apply contemporary literary theory to characters in ancient writings. Bennema here offers a full, comprehensive, and non-reductionist theory for the analysis, classification, and evaluation of characters in the New Testament.
Download or read book Character Studies in the Gospel of Matthew written by Matthew Ryan Hauge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines a multitude of characters in Matthew's gospel and provides an in-depth look at the different approaches currently employed by scholars working with literary and reader-oriented methods. Beginning with an introduction on 'the properties of character' and the several aspects involved in the creation of person, the contributors provide a close reading of numerous characters and character types in the Gospel of Matthew. Including Mary, King Herod, John the Baptist, Jesus the Preacher, Jesus the Teacher, God the Father, the Roman Centurion, Peter, Women, Gentiles, Scribes and Pharisees, and Romans. Such close studies aid the understanding of different issues in Matthean characterization, while also charting the development of hermeneutical vistas that have developed in contemporary scholarship, resulting in a collection of exegetical character studies that are self-consciously working from a literary, narrative-critical, reader-oriented, or related methodology.
Download or read book Encountering Jesus written by Cornelis Bennema and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applying a comprehensive theory of character to the Gospel of John, Cornelis Bennema provides a fresh analysis of the characters and their responses to Jesus. While the majority of scholars view most Johannine characters as flat, Bennema demonstrates that many are complex, developing, and round. Johns broad array of characters correspond to people and their choices in real life in any culture and time. This book highlights how Johns Gospel seeks to challenge its readers about where they stand in relation to Jesus.
Download or read book Characterization in the Gospels written by David Rhoads and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines characterization in the four Gospels and in the Sayings Gospel Q. Peter in Matthew, Lazarus in John, and Jesus as Son of Man in Q are examples of the characters studied. The general approach is narrative-critical. At the same time, each contribution takes special effort to widen the scope beyond the narrated world to include the text's ideological and real-life setting as well as its effective history. New ways of doing narrative criticism are thus proposed. The concluding essay by David Rhoads delineates the development and envisions the future of narrative criticism in Gospel studies.
Download or read book The State of New Testament Studies written by Scot McKnight and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the current landscape of New Testament studies, offering readers a concise guide to contemporary discussions. Bringing together a diverse group of experts, it covers research on the most important issues in New Testament studies, including new discipline areas, making it an ideal supplemental textbook for a variety of courses on the New Testament. Michael Bird, David Capes, Greg Carey, Lynn Cohick, Dennis Edwards, Michael Gorman, and Abson Joseph are among the contributors.
Download or read book On Character Building written by John A. Darr and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide to interpreting the characters in Luke-Acts, the longest and most complex of New Testament narratives, uses the latest literary-critical theory and biblical scholarship to construct an understanding of how the characters are formed and how they function in the Lukan writings. It is the author’s contention that the reader plays an important role in character building. The author illustrates this process using three representative characters or character groups: John the Baptist, the Pharisees, and Herod the Tetrarch.
Download or read book Satan the Heavenly Adversary of Man written by Cato Gulaker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cato Gulaker employs narrative criticism to explore where the depiction of Satan found in the Book of Revelation is positioned on the axis of two divergent roles. The literary character of Satan is commonly perceived to gradually evolve from the first divine agents in the Hebrew Bible, representing the darker sides of the divine governing of affairs (Job 1–2; Zech 3; 1 Chr 21:1; Num 22:22, 32), to the full-blown enemy of God of the post-biblical era. However, Gulaker posits that texts referring to Satan in between these two poles are not uniform and diverge considerably. This book argues for a new way of perceiving Satan in Revelation that provides a more probable reading, as it creates less narrative dissonance than the alternative of the ancient combat myth/cosmic conflict between Satan and God. From this reading emerges a subdued Satan more akin to its Hebrew Bible hypotexts and Second Temple Judaism parallels – one that fits seamlessly with the theology, cosmology and the overarching plot of the narrative itself. Gulaker explores the functions of Satan in a text written relatively late compared to the rest of the New Testament, but with strong affinities to the Hebrew Bible, concluding that Satan is characterized more as the leash, rod, and sifting device in the hand of God, than as his enemy.
Download or read book Identity Formation and the Gospel of Matthew written by Tekalign Duguma Negewo and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On Character Building written by John A. Darr and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide to interpreting the characters in Luke-Acts, the longest and most complex of New Testament narratives, uses the latest literary-critical theory and biblical scholarship to construct an understanding of how the characters are formed and how they function in the Lukan writings. It is the author’s contention that the reader plays an important role in character building. The author illustrates this process using three representative characters or character groups: John the Baptist, the Pharisees, and Herod the Tetrarch.
Download or read book Two Can Play That Game written by D. Eric Lowdermilk and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-12-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John 21 portrays seven disciples fishing all night yet catching nothing. In the morning, a shoreline stranger instructs them to recast their net. Surprisingly, the disciples fail to recognize him. After a miraculous catch and subsequent breakfast, however, there is no doubt as to who this stranger is. Jesus then questions Peter about his love and commissions him to feed Jesus' sheep. Using narrative criticism, Lowdermilk examines this recognition scene, asking, "How would a reader, well acquainted with recognition and deception as portrayed in Genesis, understand John 21?" He discards "trickster" terminology and argues that biblical recognition occurs within a context of "manipulation." After proposing a detailed taxonomy of manipulation, he ventures further and argues for patterns in Genesis where manipulators are "counter-manipulated" in a reciprocal manner, ironically similar to their own behavior, providing a transforming effect on the manipulator. These findings, plus a careful examination of Greek diminutives, inform Lowdermilk's new reading of John 21:1-19. Peter withholds his identity as a disciple in John 18 and later Jesus actively withholds his identity in ironic counter-manipulation, mirroring Peter's denials. Jesus' threefold questioning of Peter continues the haunting echoes of Peter's earlier denials. Will it result in a disciple transformed?
Download or read book David s Capacity for Compassion written by Barbara Green and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Barbara Green demonstrates how David is shown and can be read as emerging from a young naive, whose early successes grow into a tendency for actions of contempt and arrogance, of blindness and even cruelty, particularly in matters of cult. However, Green also shows that over time David moves closer to the demeanor and actions of wise compassion, more closely aligned with God. Leaving aside questions of historicity as basically undecidable Green's focus in her approach to the material is on contemporary literature. Green reads the David story in order, applying seven specific tools which she names, describes and exemplifies as she interprets the text. She also uses relevant hermeneutical theory, specifically a bridge between general hermeneutics and the specific challenges of the individual (and socially located) reader. As a result, Green argues that characters in the David narrative can proffer occasions for insight, wisdom, and compassion. Acknowledging the unlikelihood that characters like David and his peers, steeped in patriarchy and power, can be shown to learn and extend wise compassion, Green is careful to make explicit her reading strategies and offer space for dialogue and disagreement.
Download or read book The Gospels as Stories written by Jeannine K. Brown and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular writer and teacher Jeannine Brown shows how a narrative approach illuminates each of the Gospels, helping readers see the overarching stories. This book offers a corrective to tendencies to read the Gospels piecemeal, one story at a time. It is filled with numerous examples and visual aids that show how narrative criticism brings the text to life, making it an ideal supplementary textbook for courses on the Gospels. Readers will gain hands-on tools and perspectives to interpret the Gospels as whole stories.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative written by Danna Fewell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprised of contributions from scholars across the globe, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative is a state-of-the-art anthology, offering critical treatments of both the Bible's narratives and topics related to the Bible's narrative constructions. The Handbook covers the Bible's narrative literature, from Genesis to Revelation, providing concise overviews of literary-critical scholarship as well as innovative readings of individual narratives informed by a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks. The volume as a whole combines literary sensitivities with the traditional historical and sociological questions of biblical criticism and puts biblical studies into intentional conversation with other disciplines in the humanities. It reframes biblical literature in a way that highlights its aesthetic characteristics, its ethical and religious appeal, its organic qualities as communal literature, its witness to various forms of social and political negotiation, and its uncanny power to affect readers and hearers across disparate time-frames and global communities.
Download or read book Character Studies and the Gospel of Mark written by Matthew Ryan Hauge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Characters in the Second Gospel are analysed and an in-depth look at different approaches currently employed by scholars working with literary and reader-oriented methods of analysis is provided. The first section consists of essays on method/theory, and the second consists of seven exegetical character studies using a literary or reader-oriented method. All contributors work from a literary, narrative-critical, reader-oriented, or related methodology. The book summarizes the state of the discussion and examines obstacles to arriving at a comprehensive theory of character in the Second Gospel. Specific contributions include analyses of the representation of women, God, Jesus, Satan, Gentiles, and the Roman authorities of Mark's Gospel. This work is both an exploration of theories of character, and a study in the application of those theories.
Download or read book Reading Acts Theologically written by Steve Walton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Walton has consistently focused his research and scholarship upon the theological perspective of Acts, while considering the book's nature and focus, its portrait of the early Christian communities and their mission in the culturally varied first-century world, and its major theological themes. Walton now collects several of his key essays into an expansive and coherent perspective, bringing together studies published over nearly two decades during his time of study and reflection in the process of writing the Word Biblical Commentary on Acts. The collection begins with an exploration of what 'reading Acts theologically' means, the divine perspective of Acts, and how Luke theologizes through narrative. Walton presents analyses covering the nature of the early Church and the main terms used by the communities; the believers' sharing of possessions; early Christian attitudes to the Jewish temple; decision-making among the earliest Christians; and the church's engagement with the Roman empire and its representatives. This volume studies theological themes in Acts such as Jesus' role as a character in the text while also located in heaven, and the cosmology and anthropology communicated by Acts, thus providing a new reflection on the early Christian understanding of God, Jesus and humanity.
Download or read book Characters and Characterization in Luke Acts written by Frank Dicken and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like all skilful authors, the composer of the biblical books of Luke and Acts understood that a good story requires more than a gripping plot - a persuasive narrative also needs well-portrayed, plot-enhancing characters. This book brings together a set of new essays examining characters and characterization in those books from a variety of methodological perspectives. The essays illustrate how narratological, sociolinguistic, reader-response, feminist, redaction, reception historical, and comparative literature approaches can be fruitfully applied to the question of Luke's techniques of characterization. Theoretical and methodological discussions are complemented with case studies of specific Lukan characters. Together, the essays reflect the understanding that while many of the literary techniques involved in characterization attest a certain universality, each writer also brings his or her own unique perspective and talent to the portrayal and use of characters, with the result that analysis of a writer's characters and style of characterization can enhance appreciation of that writer's work.
Download or read book Between Script and Scripture Performance Criticism and Mark s Characterization of the Disciples written by Zach Preston Eberhart and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-25 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reimagines the first-century reception of the Gospel of Mark within a reconstructed (yet hypothetical) performance event. In particular, it considers the disciples' character and characterization through the lens of performance criticism. Questions concerning the characterization of the disciples have been relatively one-sided in New Testament scholarship, in favor of their negative characterization. This project demonstrates why such assumptions need not be necessary when we (re-)consider the oral/aural milieu in which the Gospel of Mark was first composed and received by its earliest audiences.
