From Jesus to J-Setting details the experiences of Black people with diverse sexual identities from ages eighteen to thirty years old. The work examines how the intersection of racial, sexual, gender, and religious identities influence self-expression and lifestyle modalities in this understudied, often hidden population, by exploring how racial, sexual, and religious dynamics play out. Voices in the book illuminate a continuum of decisions-from more traditional (i.e., Black church participation) to nontraditional (i.e., dancing known as J-Setting and spirituality)-and the corresponding beliefs, values, and experiences that emerge under the ever-present specter of racism, homophobia, heterosexism, and for many, ageism. Drawing upon sociology, sociology of religion, black studies, queer studies, inequality, stratification, and cultural studies, Sandra Lynn Barnes explores the everyday lives of young Black people with fluid sexual identities and their everyday forms of individual as well as collective resistance.

Contributions by internationally known scholars from the United States, Germany, Scotland, Spain, and Canada move beyond many of the impasses in historical Jesus research. Includes essays using social sciences, social history, and traditional historical methods.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the historical Jesus debate, this volume offers a comprehensive and balanced account of research into the person of Jesus.

This collection of essays by leading experts in New Testament scholarship addresses core themes in the study of early Christianity. The topics addressed include text-critical issues relating to the New Testament, the historical situation in which the earliest Christian documents were composed, early Christian rituals, historical questions concerning Jesus and Paul, and the origin and development of important theological ideas in the early Church. This volume is dedicated to Henk Jan de Jonge (Emeritus Professor in the New Testament, Leiden University) in honour of his important contributions to the field of New Testament Studies.

This volume identifies and investigates literary traditions and their implications for the authorship and dating of the Gospels and the letters of the New Testament. Ellis argues that the Gospels and the letters are products of the corporate authorship of four allied apostolic missions and not the creation of individual authors.

Most historical Jesus and Gospel scholars have supposed three hypotheses of unidirectionality: geographically, the more Judaeo-Palestinian, the earlier; modally, the more oral, the earlier; and linguistically, the more Aramaized, the earlier. These are based on the chronological assumption of'the earlier, the more original'. These four long-held hypotheses have been applied as authenticity criteria. However, this book proposes that linguistic milieus of 1st-century Palestine and the Roman Near East were bilingual in Greek and vernacular languages and that the earliest church in Jerusalem was a bilingual Christian community. The study of bilingualism blurs the lines between each of the temporal dichotomies. The bilingual approach undermines unidirectional assumptions prevalent among Gospels and Acts scholarship with regard to the major issues of source criticism, textual criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, literary criticism, the Synoptic Problem, the Historical Jesus, provenances of the Gospels and Acts, the development of Christological titles and the development of early Christianity. There is a need for New Testament studies to rethink the major issues from the perspective of the interdirectionality theory based on bilingualism.