Revealing the New Testament Narratives: Gospels, Acts, Apocalypse

Includes the NRSV Bible

This critical introduction to the six full-length narratives found in the New Testament—the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the Acts of the Apostles; and the Book of Revelation—is timely as well as unique. In recent decades, narrative analysis has become a central endeavor in biblical scholarship. Treated together, the six New Testament narratives form a coherent group, Acts taking up where the gospels leave off, and Revelation taking up where Acts leaves off—that is, with Christian witness and consequent persecution. Revealing^® the New Testament Narratives equips student to engage appreciatively, knowledgeably, and critically with these inestimably influential texts. They learn the main critical methods used to study them; who wrote them, why, and in what circumstances; their (often contradictory) theologies and christologies; how they work as plotted narratives; how gender is represented and constructed in them; how Judaism is represented and embodied in them; and how politics infuses them, especially issues of social justice and relations to empire.

Revealing^® the New Testament Narratives aims to be the most accessible introduction available to the narrative literature of the New Testament. No prior knowledge of this literature, 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 throughout, enabling students to draw different conclusions or construct alternative explanations. Ultimately, this introduction is designed to equip students to become informed participants in the vigorous, consequential, open-ended debate that is critical scholarship on the foundational texts of Christianity.

Revealing^® the New Testament Narratives contains integrated resources than no print textbook or etextbook 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 Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, 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. 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 New Testament Narratives 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.