A renewed interest in textual criticism has created an unfortunate proliferation of myths, mistakes, and misinformation about this technical area of biblical studies. Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry, along with a team of New Testament textual critics, offer up-to-date, accurate information on the history and current state of the New Testament text that will serve apologists and offer a self-corrective to evangelical excesses.

This volume highlights points of agreement and disagreement between two leading intellectuals on the subject of the textual reliability of the New Testament: Bart Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Daniel Wallace, Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. This book provides interested readers a fair and balanced case for both sides and allows them to decide for themselves: What does it mean for a text to be textually reliable? How reliable is the New Testament? How reliable is reliable enough?

Narrative criticism is a relatively recent development that applies literary methods to the study of Scripture. James Resseguie suggests that this approach to reading the Bible treats the text as a self-contained unit and avoids complications raised by other critical methods of interpretation. Resseguie begins with an introductory chapter that surveys the methods of narrative criticism and how they can be used to discover important nuances of meaning through what he describes as a "close reading" of the text. He then devotes chapters to the principal rhetorical devices: setting, point of view, character, rhetoric, plot, and reader. Readers will find here an accessible introduction to the subject of narrative criticism and a richly rewarding approach to reading the Bible.

One unfortunate consequence of the bitter fundamentalist-modernist controversy which raged in the early twenties has been the strongly negative attitude toward Biblical criticism assumed by some of the successors to the fundamentalists of the 1920s. Such people, according to the author, insist that the critical method is basically hostile to the evangelical faith, and they have continued to oppose any use of it. Others, however, claiming the same heritage, believe that the orthodox interpretation of the Gospel can be defended positively and constructively only with the aid of a sound critical method and the results of critical scholarship. The author believes that an evangelical Biblical criticism is not only possible but necessary. The central thesis of his book is that "the Bible is the Word of God given in the words of men in history", and as such its historical origins must be reconstructed as far as possible. In this way a richer understanding of the Scriptures can be achieved.

New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism provides readers of the Bible with an important tool for understanding the Scriptures. Based on the theory and practice of Greek rhetoric in the New Testament, George Kennedy's approach acknowledges that New Testament writers wrote to persuade an audience of the truth of their messages. These writers employed rhetorical conventions that were widely known and imitated in the society of the times. Sometimes confirming but often challenging common interpretations of texts, this is the first systematic study of the rhetorical composition of the New Testament. As a complement to form criticism, historical criticism, and other methods of biblical analysis, rhetorical criticism focuses on the text as we have it and seeks to discover the basis of its powerful appeal and the intent of its authors. Kennedy shows that biblical writers employed both "external" modes of persuasion, such as scriptural authority, the evidence of miracles, and the testimony of witnesses, and "internal" methods, such as ethos (authority and character of the speaker), pathos (emotional appeal to the audience), and logos (deductive and inductive argument in the text). In the opening chapter Kennedy presents a survey of how rhetoric was taught in the New Testament period and outlines a rigorous method of rhetorical criticism that involves a series of steps. He provides in succeeding chapters examples of rhetorical analysis, looking closely at the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus' farewell to the disciples in John's Gospel, the distinctive rhetoric of Jesus, the speeches in Acts, and the approach of Saint Paul in Second Corinthians, Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans.

New Testament textual criticism is an important but often overlooked field of study. Results drawn from textual studies bear important consequences for interpreting the New Testament and cannot be ignored by serious students of Scripture. This book introduces current issues in New Testament textual criticism and surveys the various methods used to determine the original text among variant readings. These essays from Eldon Jay Epp, Michael Holmes, J. K. Elliott, Maurice Robinson, and Moisés Silva provide readers with an excellent introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism.