Biblical Studies -- New Testament: Useful E-Books

This convenient text utilizes material from the award-winning Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (DTIB) to introduce students to the Bible and theological interpretation through a comprehensive book-by-book survey of the New Testament. The articles, authored by respected scholars, make unique contributions to the study of theological interpretation of Scripture.

Recommended by Dr. Gench:
The chapter on Hebrews is pages 443-459.

Recommended by Dr. Gench:
Harold W. Attridge, "Hebrews, Epistle to the," ABD vol. 3:97-105.

Recommended by Dr. Gench:
Koester, Craig, "Hebrews," pages 613-31.

Recommended by Dr. Gench:
While all of the New Testament writings offer windows into the personal religious experiences of their authors, says Kevin McCruden, the Letter to the Hebrews affords us a truly exquisite example of a particularly creative interpretation of such religious experience. It also supplies us with something all too rare in many of the documents of the New Testament: a glimpse into the personal experiences of the ancient persons who first heard this text. Partially obscured beneath the author's characteristic emphasis on the superiority of transcendent realities is the indelible imprint of the real-life experiences of early Christians who suffered emotionally and physically for the countercultural commitment that they placed in Jesus. For such persons, Hebrews vividly celebrates the unseen vindication of Jesus and, in this way, provides a hope-filled portrait of the victorious Son of God. At the same time, Hebrews is also very much concerned with what we might call the life of Christian discipleship-that is, what it means to journey this side of the age to come in a manner that is faithful to the countercultural character of God's kingdom embodied by Jesus. This brief study will help illumine for readers something of this creative balance between the transcendent and the concrete that Hebrews illustrates so well.
(This is the print book. When the e-book is available, the URL will be updated here!)

Contents:
Introduction -- 1. The Sermon's Setting and the Son's Glory (Hebrews 1:1-2:4) -- 2. Threshold Moments (Hebrews 2:5-4:13) -- 3. Responding Gracefully to Grace (Hebrews 4:14-6:20) -- 4. A Full, Perfect, and Sufficient Sacrifice (Hebrews 7:1-10:18) -- 5. Faithful Response in Action (Hebrews 10:19-11:40) -- 6. A Summons to Persevere in Gratitude (Hebrews 12:1-13:25) -- For Further Study -- Notes

The present volume contains a collection of fourteen essays applying the latest and neglected methods and offering new and innovative insights into the interpretation of the New Testament book To the Hebrews. The excitingly diverse contributions, which stem from an intriguing international group of senior and younger Hebrews, New Testament, and Old Testament scholars, are presented in three parts: Part One focuses on cultic language, concepts, and practice in Hebrews; Part Two on sociology, ethics, and rhetoric in Hebrews; and Part Three on textual-historical, comparative, and intertextual approaches to Hebrews. As the first ever compilation of essays on Hebrews by a range of authors, this volume presents an important contribution to the field of New Testament studies. It will particularly appeal to students, teachers, and scholars interested in a variety of critical perspectives on Hebrews and on the New Testament's third great theologian next to Paul and John. Moreover, the treatment of hermeneutical, cultic, sociological, and comparative matters in the context of biblical, Greco-Roman, and rabbinic literature will make this collection valuable to an even broader readership.

Hebrews is a powerful meditation on the gospel. It is a sixty-minute sermon delivered to a worshiping congregation. The spiraling impact of theological exposition and pastoral exhortation is impressive. Hebrews weans us away from our preoccupation with the start of the Christian life and focuses our attention on the perseverance of faith. Life is not a sprint; it's a marathon. Faithfulness to the end affirms faith from the beginning. If we let the word of God have its way with us, Hebrews will deepen our faith in Christ and strengthen our faithfulness. Like Jesus in the Gospels, Hebrews sees the fundamental difference between apostasy and faithfulness as the difference between a religion about God and a Christ-centered relationship with God. Any form of Christianity that competes like other religions for the attention of its adherents through its rituals, practices, pastors, traditions, and sacred spaces, has fallen back into an obsolete and worldly strategy. The pastor calls for a decisive end to religion, even the best religion ever conceived. The flow of reasoned argument for Christ and against religion, along with the pulsating emotional intensity of ultimate issues laid bare, and heart-felt warnings against complacency and unbelief, deliver a powerful and timely message.

In Hebrews and the Temple Philip Church argues that the silence of Hebrews concerning the temple does not mean that the author is not interested in the temple. He writes to encourage his readers to abandon their preoccupation with it and to follow Jesus to their eschatological goal. Following extensive discussions of attitudes to the temple in the literature of Second Temple Judaism, Church turns to Hebrews and argues that the temple is presented there as a symbolic foreshadowing of the eschatological dwelling of God with his people. Now that the eschatological moment has arrived with the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God, preoccupation with the temple and its rituals must cease.

The author of Hebrews is not preoccupied with the concepts of the Hellenistic philosophers but with the ideas of the ancient world is frequently conveyed by the notion of 'sacred space', which the worshipper wishes to approach in order to gain access to the deity. Standing as he does within the religious tradition of Judaism, the author of Hebrews inherited notions of sacred space whereby it was identified with the land, Jerusalem, Zion and the sanctuary. He shares priestly concern, so Isaacs argues, to guard the sacred, to protect it from the profane, and to regulate the means whereby the worshipper can approach the holy.

This volume presents a dialogue between historians, exegetes, and theologians on the background and key themes of the atonement in Hebrews. Presenting a range of differing perspectives and contributing to the renewed conversation between biblical and theological scholarship, the argument is structured in two parts: contexts and themes within Hebrews.Focusing on atonement not only in the Old Testament but also in the Greco-Roman world, and touching on themes such as sacrifice, plight and solution, and faith, these contributions shed light on the concept of the atonement in a directly scriptural way. The whole is a definitive collection of studies on the atonement in Hebrews that will be of service well beyond the confines of Hebrews' specialists, a collection as important for what it says about the atonement and the 21st century church as for what it says about Hebrews.

Scholars argue over where Hebrews fit in the first century world. Kenneth L. Schenck works towards resolving this question by approaching Hebrews' cosmology and eschatology from a text-orientated perspective. After observing that the key passages in the background debate mostly relate to the 'settings' of the story of salvation history evoked by Hebrews, Schenck attempts to delineate those settings by asking how the 'rhetorical world' of Hebrews engages that underlying narrative. Hebrews largely argue from an eschatology of two ages, which correspond to two covenants. The fresh age has come despite the continuance of some old age elements. The most characteristic elements of Hebrews' settings, however, are its spatial settings, where we find an underlying metaphysical dualism between the highest heaven, which is the domain of spirit, and the created realm, including the created heavens. This creation will be removed at the eschaton, leaving only the unshakeable heaven.

In Hebrews the New Covenant concept is the key to the author's hermeneutical scheme. When the New Covenant in Hebrews is compared with the same idea in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in Paul and in the Last Supper accounts, the independence and originality of the author of Hebrews become evident. His cultic reinterpretation of the New Covenant concept allows him to depict the Christ event in continuity with its Levitical heritage, through the shared rubrics of high priest, bloody sacrifice and tent. His simultaneous stress on the new, heavenly character of the New Covenant is designed to convince his readers of its surpassing effectiveness and definitive superiority.

"Faith" gets its most powerful definition from the New Testament book of Hebrews. Yet this anonymous treatise tantalizes with both its lack of contemporary precision about faith's definition and its shrouded original context. There are, however, sufficient clues in Hebrew's text to guide astute investigators toward a strange and yet familiar world of religious challenge in which the deeply significant rituals of ancient Israel, the attractive moral character of first-century Jews in Rome, a crowd of disaffected righteous Romans, and a purported Palestinian messiah converge to produce one of the world's most thoughtful, courageous, and brilliant calls to martyrdom. In this careful pilgrimage along the author's meticulous development of a holy challenge to remain faithful to Jesus (precisely because there are no meaningful alternatives), Brouwer helps us find an inspiring and ever-relevant call to faith--we become the persons we are through the daily choices we make about Jesus and others.

Suffering and death are two topics that are frequently referred to in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but have rarely been examined within scholarship on this important New Testament text. Dyer redresses the balance in this study of these topics, conducting a thorough investigation using semantic domain analysis. He incorporates recent advancements in modern linguistics, in particular the 'context of situation', and then connects these topics to the social situation addressed in Hebrews. In so doing he is able to reveal how the author is responding to the reality of suffering in the lives of his audience. With this awareness, it becomes clear how the author also responds to his audience's pain by creating models of endurance in suffering and death. These serve to motivate his audience toward similar endurance within their own social context.Dyer shows that it is possible to make significant determinations about the social setting of Hebrews based upon an examination and analysis of the language used therein.

Presents a doctrine of Scripture based on Hebrews in dialogue with Augustine and Calvin   What vision of biblical authority arises from Scripture's own use of Scripture? This question has received surprisingly little attention from theologians seeking to develop a comprehensive doctrine of Scripture. Today When You Hear His Voice by Gregory W. Lee fills this gap by listening carefully to the Epistle to the Hebrews.   Lee illuminates the unique way that Hebrews appropriates Old Testament texts as he considers the theological relationship between salvation history and scriptural interpretation. He illustrates these dynamics through extended treatments of Augustine and Calvin, whose contrasting perspectives on the covenants, Israel, and the literal and figural senses provide theological categories for appreciating how Hebrews innovatively presents Scripture as God's direct address in the contemporary moment.

Inventing Hebrews examines a perennial topic in the study of the Letter to the Hebrews, its structure and purpose. Michael Wade Martin and Jason A. Whitlark undertake at thorough synthesis of the ancient theory of invention and arrangement, providing a new account of Hebrews' design. The key to the speech's outline, the authors argue, is in its use of 'disjointed' arrangement, a template ubiquitous in antiquity but little discussed in modern biblical studies. This method of arrangement accounts for the long-observed pattern of alternating epideictic and deliberative units in Hebrews as blocks of narratio and argumentatiorespectively. Thus the 'letter' may be seen as a conventional speech arranged according to the expectations of ancient rhetoric (exordium, narratio, argumentatio, peroratio), with epideictic comparisons of old and new covenant representatives (narratio) repeatedly enlisted in amplification of what may be viewed as the central argument of the speech (argumentatio), the recurring deliberative summons for perseverance. Resolving a long-standing conundrum, this volume offers a hermeneutical tool necessary for interpreting Hebrews, as well as countless other speeches from Greco-Roman antiquity.

In no other New Testament writing does the interest in the cult and its practice figure more prominently than in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Whereas scholarly research has preoccupied itself with the high priesthood of Christ, comparatively little consideration has previously been given to the implied priesthood of the readers. Scholer begins with an examination of the role and function of the priesthood found in the Old Testament, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran, rabbinic, Philo and mystery traditions. His second goal is to discover why the readers of Hebrews may be described as priests, and how the high-priestly Christology of the writer impinges on the status of Christian believers. Finally, Scholer concludes that the priestly function of believers in Hebrews is to have 'access' to the divine presence, which for the writer is the significance of 'perfection' (teleioun). Such perfection does not await the eschaton, but rather anticipates a full consummation at the time of 'rest' (katapausis).

This study attempts to analyse the text of Hebrews with a method of discourse analysis primarily based on a form of systemic functional linguistics developed for Hellenistic Greek, but it is also informed by other linguistic studies. It begins with a general survey of the literature that is either influential or representative of approaches to the structure of Hebrews. The survey is followed by an introduction to the terminology and definitions of discourse analysis, as well as the theory behind the methodology, and describes a procedure for analysing text. Hebrews is treated as having three sections. The first section of Hebrews (1:1-4:16) demonstrates the organization of the units, the topic of the units, the prominent text, and the relationship of the first section with the rest of the discourse. The second section of Hebrews (4:11-10:25) is described in two parts (4:11-7:28 and 8:1-10:25) because of its length. There is an overlap between the first and second sections in 4:11-16 and between the second and third sections in 10:19-25. Both of these passages have a concluding function for the preceding co-text and a staging function for the following co-text, so that they look backwards and forwards. The third and final section in 10:19-13:25 contains the climax or discourse peak. The study is concluded with a description of the coherence of the discourse and a presentation of a mental representation of the text. JSNTS and Studies in New Testament Greek subseries

This book addresses two crucial, related questions in current research on the Epistle to the Hebrews: when and where did Jesus offer himself? And what role does Jesus' death play both in Hebrews' soteriology as a whole, and specifically in Jesus' high-priestly self-offering? The work argues that the cross is not when and where Jesus offers himself, but it is what he offers. After his resurrection, appointment to high priesthood, and ascent to heaven, Jesus offers himself to God in the inner sanctum of the heavenly tabernacle, and what he offers to God is the soteriological achievement enacted in his death. Hebrews figures blood, in both the Levitical cult and the Christ-event, as a medium of exchange, a life given for life owed. Represented as blood, Christ's death is both means of access and material offered: what he achieved in his death is what he offered to God in heaven.

The interest that Hebrews holds today is testimony to its enduring message. Central to its message is what Jesus Christ did and continues to do for his people. This is spelled out in arresting images. Dr. McKelvey provides new insight on Hebrews by demonstrating that two of its chief images - pioneer and priest - function not independently but in tandem. Christ is not pioneer without also being priest, and his priesthood is only properly understood in terms of the pioneer figure. Only one who is both pioneer and priest can provide the church with the help it needs. The double analogy in fact conveys the meaning of the Christian faith. This creative work takes account of the author's rhetorical style, showing how Hebrews is addressed to an urgent practical situation. It will appeal to those who want to know more about Hebrews as well as those who believe that the emerging church must follow Christ "outside the camp."

Scholars often explain Hebrews' relative silence regarding Jesus' resurrection by emphasizing the author's appeal to Yom Kippur's two key moments--the sacrificial slaughter and the high priest's presentation of blood in the holy of holies--in his distinctive portrayal of Jesus' death and heavenly exaltation. The writer's depiction of Jesus as the high priest whose blood effected ultimate atonement appears to be modeled upon these two moments. Such a typology discourages discrete reflection on Jesus' resurrection. Drawing on contemporary studies of Jewish sacrifice (which note that blood represents life, not death), parallels in Jewish apocalyptic literature, and fresh exegetical insights, this volume demonstrates that Jesus' embodied, resurrected life is crucial for the high-priestly Christology and sacrificial soteriology developed in Hebrews.

Scholars have long questioned the conceptual background for the priestly Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, with suggestions including Gnosticism, the thought of Philo of Alexandria, common themes in early Christian theology and exegesis, and the creativity of the author of Hebrews himself. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls prompted waves of enthusiasm for understanding Hebrews in that context, both in terms of the Qumran sect's priestly messianism and understanding of Melchizedek, but claims often were excessive and the approach was discredited. The present study reevaluates the priestly Christology of Hebrews and the presentations of the messianic priest and Melchizedek in the Qumran texts, arguing that the latter do indeed provide the closest parallels to Hebrews' thought.