Thomas L. Brodie – författare

This book presents a controversial thesis concerning the composition of the Gospel According to John. Most New Testament scholars believe that John was independent of the other three (Synoptic) Gospels, although some hold that he may have been familiar with Mark. This has led many to attempt to reconstruct the history of the community within which and for which John must have written. Brodie argues, however, that until the source question is settled, the historical question remains fruitless. What has been missing from Johannine scholarship, he says, is an accurate sense of the way in which writers of the ancient world set about composing their works. Given this literary context, it can be argued that John knew and used not only all of the Synoptic Gospels, but Acts, Ephesians, and the Pentateuch as well. Finally Brodie concludes that `John' was the individual John and not the mouthpiece of a putative `Johannine Community'. The Gospel should thus be read as a unified work, and not as the product of an aggregation of different sources or different dates of redaction.

While synthesizing well-established commentators as diverse as Bultmann and Brown, Brodie expands Johannine studies in two directions. First, by drawing on the techniques of contemporary literary studies, he shows that John's Gospel, far from being poorly edited, is a carefully-wrought unity. Second, he shows that the final basis of this unity lies not in history or theology but, as ancient tradition suggested, in spirituality. Brodie also includes his own innovative translation of John. The result is a new type of commentary that is thoroughly contemporary in style, perspective, and method.

Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in interest in the book of Genesis - the first book of the Bible - and a foundational text of Western culture. In this new commentary, Thomas Brodie offers a complete and accessible overview of Genesis from literary, theological, and historical standpoints. Brodie's work is organized around three main ideas: the first is that the primary subject of Genesis is human existence - while full of historical echoes, it is primarily a sophisticated portrayal of the progress and pitfalls of human life. His second thesis is that Genesis' basic organizational unity is binary, or diptych: building on older insights that Genesis is somehow dialogical, he argues that the entire book is composed of diptychs - accounts which, like some paintings, consist of two parts or panels. Finally, Brodie contends that many of Genesis' sources still exist, and can be identified and verified.