The New Testament in Antiquity

Today many Christians know the basic elements of this story and enjoy an intimate, deeply personal love for numerous passages of the New Testament. However, few understand the breadth of this story, much less how to interpret each book. Many gravitate to familiar texts but don’t feel confident interpreting other more difficult chapters. The aims of this book are simple: to assist students to become alert, capable readers of the New Testament—to guide them through its many books, giving not only essential background information but also a digest of the New Testament’s most important teachings. Readers will grow in knowledge of the Scriptures by understanding not only their own interpretative contexts, but also the original context of the New Testament. The context of antiquity should control how we understand the New Testament today.

The New Testament in Antiquity is a textbook for college and seminary students penned by three evangelical scholars with over fifty years of combined experience in the classroom. Their challenge was to build a text that would be engaging, academically robust, richly illustrated, and relevant to the modern student. This book strikes a balance between being accessible to all students and challenging them to explore the depths of the New Testament within its cultural worlds.

This volume carefully develops how Jewish and Hellenistic cultures formed the essential environment in which the New Testament authors wrote their books and letters. It argues that knowing the land, history, and culture of this world brings remarkable new insights into how we read the New Testament itself. Numerous sidebars provide windows into the Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman worlds and integrate this material directly with the interpretation of the literature of the New Testament. This is an ideal introductory text for classroom use, with ample discussion questions and bibliographies.