This book provides an in-depth look at the most well structured gospel record originally designed to address Jewish questions about Jesus but later used by the early church as a primer for new Christians.

This textbook on how to read the Gospels well can stand on its own as a guide to reading this New Testament genre as Scripture. It is also ideally suited to serve as a supplemental text to more conventional textbooks that discuss each Gospel systematically. Most textbooks tend to introduce students to historical-critical concerns but may be less adequate for showing how the Gospel narratives, read as Scripture within the canonical framework of the entire New Testament and the whole Bible, yield material for theological reflection and moral edification. Pennington neither dismisses nor duplicates the results of current historical-critical work on the Gospels as historical sources. Rather, he offers critically aware and hermeneutically intelligent instruction in reading the Gospels in order to hear their witness to Christ in a way that supports Christian application and proclamation.

Why are there differences in the stories of the Gospels? Licona turns to Greek classicist Plutarch for an answer, assessing differences that appeared when Plutarch told the same story more than once in his Lives. He suggests the differences in the Gospels often resulted from their authors employing the same compositional devices used by Plutarch.

"Jesus and the Gospels" is one of the most popular religion courses at colleges, and it is required at many seminaries and divinity schools. This textbook, written by an award-winning educator, is designed for a semester-long course in both these settings. Moreover, it could be used as a supplementary text in courses on christology, the historical Jesus, New Testament literature, and the Bible. Murphy will provide an introduction to the gospels that does justice to the full range of modern critical methods and insights. He will discuss the implications of these methods for how we understand the nature of the gospels and how we can read them today. The chapters will sketch the portrait of Jesus that emerges from each gospel, and then examine the "canonical" view of Jesus by comparing and contrasting these pictures, as well as the ones that emerge from the non-canonical gospels and from the modern quest for the historical Jesus. Chapter list: Introduction, Theological and Historical Backgrounds; Chapter 1, What is a Gospel? Chapter 2, History of Critical Methods for Gospel Study; Chapter 3, The Gospel of Mark; Chapter 4, Q; Chapter 5, Matthew; Chapter 6, Luke; Chapter 7, John; Chapter 8, Other Gospels (Gospel of Thomas, Infancy Gospels, other Apocryphal Gospels); Chapter 8, Christian Interpretations of Jesus; Chapter 9, The Historical Jesus; Chapter 10, Conclusion; Glossary; Further Reading; Notes; Subject Index. (Charts, sidebars, illustrations, and maps.)

With clarity and verve, Mark Allen Powell introduces the beginning student to the contents and structure of the Gospels, their distinctive characteristics, and their major themes. An introductory chapter surveys the political, religious, and social world of the Gospels, methods of approaching early Christian texts, the genre of the Gospels, and the religious character of these writings. This second edition has been updated to take fuller account of different theories regarding the Gospels, with new chapters on the historical Jesus and on gospel literature not included in our New Testament, and with a pleasing new format. Special features include illustrations and more than two dozen special topics.

In this book respected New Testament scholar Pheme Perkins delivers a clear, fresh, informed introduction to the earliest written accounts of Jesus — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — situating those canonical Gospels within the wider world of oral storytelling and literary production of the first and second centuries. Cutting through the media confusion over new Gospel finds, Perkins s Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels presents a balanced, responsible look at how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke came to be and what they mean.

This is an ideal introduction to modern biblical studies. Readers are introduced to questions of inspiration, canon and authority. This is followed by chapters on historical approaches to the Bible, such as source, form and redaction criticism. Comparisons with other literature, such as ancient flood stories or Egyptian psalms help to set the context for this. Moyise also asks such questions as 'How did we get the Bible?' and, 'why do modern versions of the Bible differ among themselves?' Moyise considers a number of approaches to the Bible. Beginning with literary criticism, he shows how texts 'speak' to readers and influence their attitudes, emotions and behaviour. This is followed by liberation, feminist and finally a variety of theological approaches used by those who consider the Bible to be sacred scripture. For the third edition Moyise has added two sections, one giving a basic outline of the biblical story together with a timeline and key dates, and another on dating the New Testament.