Wealth, Wages, and the Wealthy

Raymond F. Collins is a Roman Catholic priest and a New Testament scholar. Most of his academic career was spent at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, the world’s oldest Catholic university, and at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he taught and served as the dean of the School of Religious Studies. Among his twenty books are major commentaries on Paul’s First and Second Letters to the Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus.

"Collins has opened doors in the Scriptures that reveal texts that are rarely explored, and even more rarely, explored fully and together. Yet these texts are central to Jesus' teachings. Living as we do in a culture dominated by greed, it is countercultural to be consistently generous, and, even more so, to be radically generous, but that is precisely the lifestyle to which the Gospel calls us. Collins presents each of these texts, explains their meaning in the historical context in which they were first produced, and briefly, at the end of each chapter, exposes our deafness. The Gospel has the power to transform us, and Collins' exegetical study can help to facilitate that transformation. Every Roman Catholic, every Christian, should read this book."Alice L. Laffey, Professor Emerita, College of the Holy Cross

• Contents List of Abbreviations   ixPreface   xiiiChapter 1:  Paul   1Chapter 2:  Paul’s Letters   16Chapter 3:  Mark   68Chapter 4:  Matthew   95Chapter 5:  Luke   139Chapter 6:  Acts   189Chapter 7:  The Deutero-Pauline Texts   214Chapter 8:  The Catholic Epistles   243Chapter 9:  The Johannine Corpus   271Concluding Thoughts   287Bibliography of Scriptural Commentaries   307Bibliography   313Scripture Index   325Index of Classical, Jewish, and Patristic Sources   337Index of Modern Authors   341Index of Topics   345