Alan J. Avery-Peck - Böcker

Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies is a multivolume series that seeks to introduce key ancient texts that form the cultural, historical, and literary context for the study of the New Testament.Each volume will feature introductory essays to the corpus, followed by articles on the relevant texts. Each article will address introductory matters, provenance, summary of content, interpretive issues, key passages for New Testament studies and their significance.Neither too technical to be used by students nor too thin on interpretive information to be useful for serious study of the New Testament, this series provides a much-needed resource for understanding the New Testament in its first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman context. Produced by an international team of leading experts in each corpus, Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies stands to become the standard resource for both scholars and students.Volumes include:Apocrypha and the SeptuagintOld Testament PseudepigraphaThe Dead Sea ScrollsThe Apostolic FathersPhilo and JosephusGreco-Roman LiteratureTargums and Early Rabbinic LiteratureGnostic LiteratureNew Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

The late Karl-Johan Illman was a professor of Biblical and Judaic studies at Abo Akademi University in Åbo/Turku, Finland. A beloved and respected figure in the Judeo-Christian dialogue and an accomplished scholar of Judaism, he is remembered in this memorial volume by leading scholars of Biblical and Judaic studies in Europe and North America.

Free-standing ideas form systems when random facts coalescing in a set of abstract propositions can be shown logically to cohere. We know that that is so when ideas intersect and can be shown to accommodate new problems and generate answers to fresh questions. The system exhibits its cogency by fixing upon one thing and saying it in many ways. That emerges when the evidence of a particular conception of the social order turns out to concern itself with a generative question and to recapitulate an answer that is repeated many times over. In that way the writings that in theory form a system of the social order signal their logic by what they deem self-evident. The essays address writings of formative Judaism in the time of the Mishnah and the Talmud, the first six centuries of the Common Era, and formative Christianity in the first six centuries of the Common Era. They take up a common program of categories and consequent convictions: where Judaism and Christianity intersected. This seeks not just random points of agreement but fundamental structural congruence: the confluence of systems. That inquiry concerns shared organizing categories of religion and ethics of the two faiths. What concerns us is how Scriptures held in common produced a single construction of history and a common view of culture and society.