The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZNW) is one of the oldest and most highly regarded international scholarly book series in the field of New Testament studies. Since 1923 it has been a forum for seminal works focusing on Early Christianity and related fields. The series is grounded in a historical-critical approach and also explores new methodological approaches that advance our understanding of the New Testament and its world.

New to this expanded & updated edition are revisions of Ferguson's original material, updated bibliographies, & a fresh dicussion of first century social life, the Dead Sea Scrolls & much else.

For the hundred years since W. Wrede ( Paulus, 1904) made the provocative claim that Paul should rightly be regarded as 'the second founder of Christianity', scholars have debated vigorously on the relationship between Jesus and Paul. Past studies on the Jesus-Paul debate have largely been confined to either the literary or the theological level. This study looks at the issue afresh by combining the historical and the theological approaches. The discussion focuses on the issue of faith, paying special attention to two groups of Jesus' sayings ('Faith that can remove mountains' and 'Your Faith has healed/saved you') and Paul's use of Gen. 15:6 and Hab. 2:4. The distinctive methodology of this study is to compare Jesus and Paul against the backdrops of the Jewish biblical tradition and Hellenistic parallels. The picture of the Jesus-Paul relationship that emerges is a most complex one. To a great extent the similarity between Jesus and Paul is due to their common Jewish heritage. The early Church plays a part in influencing Paul's concept of faith and Paul himself reinterprets the Jewish Scriptures in an innovative manner. At the same time, Paul is found to be greatly indebted to Jesus for his concept of faith. The method of placing Jesus and Paul against the Jewish and Hellenistic backgrounds permits a fuller appreciation of the historical and theological continuities between Jesus and Paul than has hitherto been possible.

Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics is a well-accepted approach to contemporary bioethics. Those principles are based on what Beauchamp and Childress call the common morality. This book employs New Testament theological themes to enhance the meaning of those principles of bioethics. The primary New Testament text for this study is the twin commands from Jesus to love God and love one's neighbor. The three theological themes developed from this study--the image of God, the covenant, and the pursuit of healing--are deeply embedded in the New Testament and in the ministry of Jesus. Three contemporary bioethics principles are used for this dissertation, based on The Belmont Report. They are the principles of respect for persons, justice, and beneficence. In each case, the theological themes are shown to enhance the meaning of these bioethics principles. Each of the three principles, as understood through the three theological themes, is applied to a current bioethics issue to demonstrate the efficacy of this approach. The three current issues addressed are the withdrawal or withholding of life-sustaining treatment, the distribution of health care in the Untied States, and the use of palliative care.

Pamela Shellberg shows that Luke's use of the language of "clean" and "unclean" has particular first-century medical connotations that make it especially powerful for expressing his understanding of the universal salvation prophesied by Isaiah and by Jesus. Shellberg traces how the stories of Jesus' cleansing of leprous bodies in the Gospel become the pattern for the divine cleansing of Gentile hearts throughout Acts, and one of Luke's primary expressions of the means of God's salvation and favor through the dissolving of distinctions between Jew and Gentile.

This volume explores the rhetorical role that miracle discourse plays in the argumentation of the New Testament and early Christianity. The investigation includes both the rhetoric within miracle discourse and the rhetorical role of miracle discourse as it was incorporated into the larger works in which it is now a part. The volume also examines the social, cultural, religious, political, and ideological associations that miracle discourse had in the first-century Mediterranean world, bringing these insights to bear on the broader questions of early Christian origins. The contributors are L. Gregory Bloomquist, Wendy Cotter, David A. deSilva, Davina C. Lopez, Gail O'Day, Todd Penner, Vernon K. Robbins, and Duane F. Watson.

Healings and miracles play a prominent role in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry. In the Western Christian tradition, however, Jesus’ works of healing tend to be downplayed and understood as little more than a demonstration of his divine power. In this book Jan-Olav Henriksen and Karl Olav Sandnes draw on both contemporary systematic theology and New Testament scholarship to challenge and investigate the reasons for that oversight. They constructively consider what it can mean for Christian theology today to understand Jesus as a healer, to embrace fully the embodied character of the Christian faith, and to recognize the many ways in which God can still be seen to have a healing presence in the world.