Revealing the New Testament

Includes the NRSV Bible

The New Testament is the foundational text of Christianity, the world’s most populous religion. As such, the New Testament requires informed, responsible engagement from Christians and non-Christians alike. Revealing^® the New Testament is designed to equip students for such engagement by bringing the New Testament to life as a historically situated, theologically diverse, and ethically fraught text—or, rather, an anthology of early Christian texts, each with its own distinctive voice.

This lively introduction engages each of the narratives and letters that make up the New Testament on its own terms. To each of these texts questions such as the following are addressed: What is its author attempting to communicate? What were the circumstances in response to which it was written? How does its image of Jesus differ from other images of Jesus found in the New Testament? What kinds of ethical issues and moral dilemmas does this ancient text throw up for contemporary readers who embrace values such as democracy or gender equality, values seemingly at odds with those enshrined in the text? More than most New Testament textbooks, this introduction foregrounds ethical and political issues, asking what kind of stance in relation to empire or government specific New Testament texts urge, what relationships between women and men they enjoin, and other such questions.

Revealing^® the New Testament aims to be the most accessible introduction to the New Testament available. No prior knowledge of the New Testament 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 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 the student to become an informed participant in the vigorous, consequential, open-ended debate that is critical New Testament scholarship.

As courseware, this digital textbook 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. 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 Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Paul or Irenaeus’s Against Heresies and 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. Creatively designed interactive exercises distributed throughout each module make understanding and retention enjoyable activities for the student. Over a thousand images from ancient material culture and the history of biblical reception are also available to the reader, one image for every paragraph of text. Revealing the New Testament 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.