Was Paul an opponent of imperialism or a participant in the patriarchal social codes of his day? Joseph A. Marchal moves beyond this too-simple dichotomy to examine the language of power and obedience, ethnicity, and gender in Paul's letters.

Acts of the Apostles presents Roman officials and militarized police criminalizing, prosecuting, and incarcerating a movement of Jesus followers. This book brings Acts into conversation with ancient and modern understandings of crime by tending to laws and by exploring how different writers portray the criminalized.

This book examines slavery and gender through a feminist reading of narratives including female slaves in the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and early Christian texts. Through the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, the voices of three enslaved female characters—the female slave who questions Peter in Luke 22, Rhoda in Acts 12, and the prophesying slave of Acts 16—are placed into dialogue with female slaves found in the Apocryphal Acts, ancient novels, classical texts, and images of enslaved women on funerary monuments. Although ancients typically distrusted the words of slaves, Christy Cobb argues that female slaves in Luke-Acts speak truth to power, even though their gender and status suggest that they cannot. In this Bakhtinian reading, female slaves become truth-tellers and their words confirm aspects of Lukan theology. This exegetical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary book is a substantial contribution to conversations about women and slaves in Luke-Acts and early Christian literature.

The essays in the present volume celebrate the work of Margaret M. Mitchell (University of Chicago) by engaging, extending, and challenging her ground-breaking research in three areas: (1) the letters of Paul the Apostle, both authentic and pseudepigraphic; (2) the emergence and rapid development of early Christian literary culture over the first few centuries of the cult’s existence; and (3) Late Antique interpretive practices and perspectives, particularly among patristic readers of the scriptures.

In this study Kim explores a new way of reading Paul's letters and understanding his theology with a focus on three aspects of Paul's gospel: "the righteousness of God," "faith of Christ," and "the body of Christ." Kim argues that Paul's thought can be best understood by reading these genitives as the subjective or attributive genitives, rather than as the objective genitives. The subjective or attributive reading places an emphasis on the subject's participation: God's participatory righteousness, Christ's faithful obedience to God, and the believer's living of Christ's body. Using this approach, Kim investigates the root of Paul's theology in a wide array of texts and contexts: in the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, the Greco-Roman world, and Paul's canonical letters. In doing so, Kim synthesizes Paul's theology and ethics seamlessly, balancing the roles of God, Christ, and believers in Paul's gospel. For the website: Study/Discussion Questions and Sample Syllabus available at http://youaregood.com/threefoldtheology.htm