Revealing the Gospels: From the Secret Messiah to the Preexistent Son

Includes the NRSV Bible

For countless Christians, the gospels are the heart of the New Testament and the preeminent charter documents of Christianity. As such, they require informed, responsible engagement from Christians and non-Christians alike. Revealing^® the Gospels is designed to equip students to engage appreciatively, knowledgeably, and critically with the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Students are skillfully and painlessly introduced to both the “old” and the “new” in gospel scholarship. They learn how and why these four texts were canonized; the main critical methods used to analyze them; how their similarities and differences are best explained; how to determine who wrote them, in what circumstances, and with what sources; how to sift out their (often contradictory) theologies and christologies; how to read them as plotted narratives; how to analyze representations and constructions of gender in them; how to understand their complex relations to Judaism; and how to discern their politics and ethics, especially with regard to issues of social justice and relations to empire.

Revealing^® the Gospels aims to be the most accessible introduction to the canonical gospels available. No prior knowledge whatsoever of the gospels, or of the New Testament in general, is presupposed, nor is any familiarity with Christian church life and the biblical knowledge it generates through osmosis. But this introduction does not patronize the student either. Students are not required to accept on the authority of the author any position on any important textual matter independently of the evidence or reasoning that has led to it. The evidence and the arguments are clearly and meticulously laid out for students throughout, enabling them to draw different conclusions or construct alternative explanations. Ultimately, this introduction is designed to equip the student to become an informed participant in the vigorous, consequential, open-ended debate that is critical scholarship on the foundational texts of Christianity.

As courseware, in addition to the text content, which is as robust as that of traditional textbooks, Revealing^® the Gospels contains integrated resources than no print textbook or e-textbook can match. Each biblical chapter-and-verse reference is linked to the text of the New Revised Standard Version, the English translation most biblical scholars prefer. Reading the primary source material thereby becomes an altogether more inviting experience for the student than having to trawl through a print biblical text separate from the textbook. Even extracanonical sources, such as the Didache, the Gospel of Thomas, Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, or Eusebius’s Church History, are linked to the text when they are referenced. Each technical or potentially unfamiliar term in the text is linked to a glossary definition, another feature that makes this introduction uniquely accessible. Each technical or potentially unfamiliar term in the text is linked to a glossary definition. Creatively designed activities distributed throughout each module facilitate understanding and retention by the student. Over a thousand images from ancient material culture and the history of biblical reception are also available to the reader and the entire text is narrated. Revealing^® the Gospels imparts the basics of New Testament study engagingly and accessibly.

About the Author: Stephen D. Moore, Ph.D. (Drew University)

Stephen D. Moore is Edmund S. Janes Professor of New Testament Studies in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. A native of Ireland, he received the Ph.D. in New Testament from the University of Dublin (Trinity College) long ago. He is the author or co-author, editor or co-editor of around two dozen books, including Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (Yale University Press, 1989); The Postmodern Bible (Yale University Press, 1995); God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (Routledge, 1996); God’s Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible (Stanford University Press, 2001); Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006); Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (with Janice Capel Anderson; Fortress Press, 2008, 2nd ed.); The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (with Yvonne Sherwood; Fortress Press, 2011); and Untold Tales from the Book of Revelation: Sex and Gender, Empire and Ecology (SBL Press, 2014). He has served on the editorial boards of many journals, including the Journal of Biblical Literature. He has been learning from teaching the New Testament for more than thirty years, and his most treasured professional achievements are the teaching awards he has won.