Ancient iconography of Paul is dominated by one image: Paul as martyr. Whether he is carrying a sword--the traditional instrument of his execution--or receiving a martyr's crown from Christ, the apostle was remembered and honored for his faithfulness to the point of death. As a result, Christians created a cult of Paul, centered on particular holy sites and characterized by practices such as the telling of stories, pilgrimage, and the veneration of relics. This study integrates literary, archaeological, artistic, and liturgical evidence to describe the development of the Pauline cult within the cultural context of the late antique West.

Acts is the sequel to Luke's gospel and tells the story of Jesus's followers during the 30 years after his death. It describes how the 12 apostles, formerly Jesus's disciples, spread the message of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean against a background of persecution. With an introduction by P.D. James

“Except for the Lord Himself,no single figure has done more for the Christian faith.” If you want to understand Christianity, you need to understand Paul. But with so many books on the apostle, where do you start? Paul the Apostle is the ideal choice if you want a solid understanding of Paul’s life, ministry, and writings without getting weighed down with minutia. Author Robert E. Picirilli, who taught college courses on Paul for over twenty-five years, found that most books on the apostle were either too technical or too basic, so he wrote a book that strikes a happy medium. It offers: A profile of Paul in his historical and cultural context Outlines and explanations of his missionary journeys Introductions and brief analyses of each of his epistles Useful for individual study or as a textbook (as it is in many universities today), Paul the Apostle is a great one-stop study of the man who wrote half the New Testament, spread the gospel to the heart of the known world, and gave his life for the Kingdom.

New English translations based upon the most up-to-date critical editions This book for the first time collects the various ancient accounts of the martydoms of Peter and Paul, which number more than a dozen, along with more than forty references to the martyrdoms from early Christian literature. At last a more complete picture of the traditions about the deaths of Peter and Paul is able to emerge. Features: Greek, Latin, and Syriac accounts from antiquity translated into English Introductions and notes for each text Original texts are produced on facing pages for specialists

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

In an age in which scholars continue to produce books on the nature and significance of Jesus's death, books that often assume the Old Testament cult was the New Testament authors' primary background for their conception of Jesus's death, Jarvis J. Williams offers a fresh and novel contribution regarding both the nature of and background influences behind Paul's conception of Jesus's death. He argues that Paul's conception of Jesus's death both as an atoning sacrifice and as a saving event for Jews and Gentiles was significantly influenced by Maccabean Martyr Theology. To argue his thesis, Williams engages in an intense exegesis of 2 and 4 Maccabees while also interacting with other Second Temple Jewish texts that are relevant to his thesis. Williams further interacts with relevant Old Testament texts and the key texts in the Pauline corpus. He argues that the authors of 2 and 4 Maccabees present the deaths of the Jewish martyrs during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes IV as atoning sacrifices and as a saving event for Israel. He further argues that, although the Old Testament's cultic language certainly influenced Paul's understanding of Jesus's death at certain junctures in his letters, the Old Testament cult alone-which emphasized animal sacrifices-cannot fully explain why or even how Paul could conceive of Jesus's death, a human sacrifice, as both an atoning sacrifice and a saving event for Jews and Gentiles. Finally, Williams highlights the lexical, theological, and conceptual parallels between Martyr Theology and Paul's conception of Jesus's death. Even if scholars disagree with Williams's thesis or methodology, serious Pauline scholars interested in the background influences behind and the nature and significance of Jesus's death in Paul's theology will want to interact with this work.

The Book of Martyrs by John Foxe written in the 16th century has long been the go-to source for studying the lives and martyrdom of the apostles. Whilst other scholars have written individual treatments on the more prominent apostles such as Peter, Paul, John, and James, there is little published information on the other apostles. In The Fate of the Apostles, Sean McDowell offers a comprehensive, reasoned, historical analysis of the fate of the twelve disciples of Jesus along with the apostles Paul, and James. McDowell assesses the evidence for each apostle’s martyrdom as well as determining its significance to the reliability of their testimony. The question of the fate of the apostles also gets to the heart of the reliability of the kerygma: did the apostles really believe Jesus appeared to them after his death, or did they fabricate the entire story? How reliable are the resurrection accounts? The willingness of the apostles to die for their faith is a popular argument in resurrection studies and McDowell offers insightful scholarly analysis of this argument to break new ground within the spheres of New Testament studies, Church History, and apologetics.