Starting New Testament Study: Learning and Doing
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Starting New Testament Study provides an introduction to the books of the New Testament, their authors, and their context for those just beginning to study the Bible.
It emphasizes “learning by doing”: alongside the main narrative sweep come text boxes that introduce readers to areas of critical scholarship, maps, timelines, and questions and exercises that encourage direct engagement with the biblical text.
This helpful and encouraging book will enable beginning students to start analyzing New Testament texts for themselves, developing their confidence and skill in this area.
In the Logos edition of Starting New Testament Study, you get easy access to Scripture texts and to a wealth of other resources in your digital library. Hovering over Scripture references links you instantly to the verse you’re looking for, and with passage guides, word studies, and a wealth of other tools from Logos, you can delve into God’s Word like never before!
- Instruction on how to properly interpret the New Testament books
- Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Top Highlights
“We possess nothing Jesus wrote, since he was in all probability illiterate, but much that he said” (Page 1)
“Reader-oriented theories recognize that readers bring to the text different worlds of experience and presuppositions. Such interpretative worlds bring out what is latent in the text. The text has no inherent meaning; indeed, some scholars assert that it is the reader who creates textual meaning. A modified version of this approach would be that meaning comes from engagement between the reader and the text rather than from discerning the intention of the author.” (Page 5)
“A good rule of thumb is to interpret words within the larger context of the text in which they occur, rather than as they appear in a completely different writing.” (Page 9)
“Behind every text lie earlier traditions of some kind. Source criticism seeks to identify these earlier traditions and probe how they are used in the present text since this may well reveal an author’s intentions and purpose for writing. As well as finding sources of the text, source criticism tries to determine textual relationships among similar texts and directions of dependence. Source critics propose to isolate materials of different style and vocabulary from a text, arguing that they belong to a different source.” (Page 3)
“to help the reader make a start in the critical study of the New Testament” (Page 1)
- Title: Starting New Testament Study: Learning and Doing
- Authors: Bruce Chilton and Deirdre Good
- Publisher: SPCK
- Publication Date: 2009
- Pages: 192
Bruce Chilton, the Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College in New York, is the author of numerous books, including Starting New Testament Study (with Deidre Good), Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, and Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography.
Deirdre J. Good is a professor of New Testament at General Theological Seminary in New York. She is the coauthor of Starting New Testament Study (with Bruce Chilton). Her other publications include Jesus and Family Values and Jesus the Meek King.
Reviews
2 ratings
Zachary Adams
10/23/2021
I am an Assemblies of God pastor, and while I keep an open mind and invite my beliefs to be challenged, I found this book to be distasteful. I was not too fond of this resource, would not recommend it.
