E. Bruce Brooks - Böcker

The first volume of the scholarly journal Warring States Papers. Includes leading research from scholars around the world, including Stephen C. Angle, E. Bruce Brooks, A. Taeko Brooks, Scott Cook, Robert Eno, Chris Fraser, Paul Goldin, Dennis Grafflin, Eric Henry, Manyul Im, John V. Lombardi, David Nivison, Dan Robins, Karen Turner, Keith Yoder, and the late Gilbert Mattos. The journal subjects centre on classical Sinology, but also include the philological and historical study of texts from other traditions, including classical India and Greece, with special emphasis on the New Testament.

The Bible contains many doublets: conflicting accounts of the same event. These are a challenge to faith: if the Bible is the Word of God, how can it differ from itself? It was proposed that the first five books of the Old Testament were formed from combining four source texts, each of them without contradictions. But scholars have argued endlessly over the details, and in any case, there are doublets in the other books of the Bible. How to deal with all of them?This book regards the Bible as words of men about God, and sees the doublets as evidence of growth over time, as an early opinion is superseded by a later one. On this view, the doublets are not the problem, they are the answer: they show the growth of doctrine and opinion as the Biblical centuries pass.That approach is supplemented by a new statistical test of stylistic difference, which can suggest, on objective grounds, which Biblical passages might be, and which could not be, by the same writer. Both Canaanite and Hebrew traditions are noticed, and tendencies common to all the antiquities, such as urbanization, law, and the new legal status of women, are given due attention.

Jesus and After uses extracts from Biblical and other writings to outline the birth and early development of the Jesus sect of Judaism - its early simplicity, its later growth, and its separation from its Jewish parent. Besides its focus on the past, this book offers suggestions for the future of both religions.The book shows how these writings fit together chronologically, and how, together, they give a sense of the evolution of Christian thinking, from the death of Jesus in the year 30 to the trials of Christians under Pliny in 110. It has the scholar in view, but it also speaks to the concerns of modern Christians who are uncertain about some traditional church doctrines, and who may be interested to find that those doctrines are not original to Christianity, but are instead part of its later development.

This volume offers a concise overview of the classical period. Between an introductory chapter on the preceding centuries and a concluding chapter on the Chin Dynasty, six topical chapters—The Economy, The State, The Serving Elite, War and Peace, The People, and Transcendence—give a multifaceted sense of the classical period proper. Each chapter includes one or more ""methodological moments,"" which suggest how the textual problems have been solved, and 500 translated passages let the period speak with its own voice on topics from law to the mourning period of a parent, revealing both its ethnic and its philosophical diversity.

Alpha is an annual repository for leading-edge research in the New Testament and related texts, and the historical development which the texts imply. Like its older sister journal Warring States Papers, it has a central focus on the methodology of text-based historical research, and includes examples of the application of basic historical and philological methods to texts in other traditions, including Chinese and Homeric Greek. In the past, the early Christian texts have been approached theologically, rather than as historical sources. Christian history has been seen as fully realized in Paul, and all other viewpoints are dismissed as later heresies. But many of the NT texts give hints of a pre-Pauline Christianity, the thing Paul began by persecuting. The work of the Project leads to an unexpectedly full picture of that pattern of early belief and practice. It is this to which we have given the name Alpha Christianity. It turns out to be remarkably close to what many contemporary Christians actually live. This first volume takes up the principal Gospels and other early sources for the teachings of Jesus. It notes evidence for stratification in Mark, leading to the earliest and thus most authoritative stratum of that text. It finds no need to posit a common source for Matthew and Luke, and instead argues for mutual contact between them. Mandaean and Gospel echoes of John the Baptist are compared, the work of William O Walker Jr on interpolations in Paul is continued, and a foundation is laid for the introduction of a new stylistic difference test in v2.

The Bible contains many doublets: conflicting accounts of the same event. These are a challenge to faith: if the Bible is the Word of God, how can it differ from itself? It was proposed that the first five books of the Old Testament were formed from combining four source texts, each of them without contradictions. But scholars have argued endlessly over the details, and in any case, there are doublets in the other books of the Bible. How to deal with all of them?This book regards the Bible as words of men about God, and sees the doublets as evidence of growth over time, as an early opinion is superseded by a later one. On this view, the doublets are not the problem, they are the answer: they show the growth of doctrine and opinion as the Biblical centuries pass.That approach is supplemented by a new statistical test of stylistic difference, which can suggest, on objective grounds, which Biblical passages might be, and which could not be, by the same writer. Both Canaanite and Hebrew traditions are noticed, and tendencies common to all the antiquities, such as urbanization, law, and the new legal status of women, are given due attention.

Jesus and After uses extracts from Biblical and other writings to outline the birth and early development of the Jesus sect of Judaism - its early simplicity, its later growth, and its separation from its Jewish parent. Besides its focus on the past, this book offers suggestions for the future of both religions.The book shows how these writings fit together chronologically, and how, together, they give a sense of the evolution of Christian thinking, from the death of Jesus in the year 30 to the trials of Christians under Pliny in 110. It has the scholar in view, but it also speaks to the concerns of modern Christians who are uncertain about some traditional church doctrines, and who may be interested to find that those doctrines are not original to Christianity, but are instead part of its later development.