One of the many books I’m using as a source for my revised version of The Untold Story of the New Testament Church, due to release in the future, is The New Testament in Antiquity: A Survey of the New Testament within Its Cultural Context by Gary Burge, Lynn Cohick, and Gene Green.
This is a masterfully crafted survey of the New Testament. It’s colorful, substantive, and Paul’s letters are arranged in chronological order (an uncommon plus).
Context is hugely important to understanding Scripture. The introductory chapters are also beneficial. They are titled: Studying the New Testament, The Historical Setting of the New Testament, The World of Jesus in His Jewish Homeland, The Mediterranean World of the Apostle Paul, Sources for the Story of Jesus, The Story of Jesus and The Teachings of Jesus.
These chapter cover our biases, the importance of context, knowing the land, knowing the history, and knowing the culture. All are critical for accurate interpretation. The book abounds with pictures, charts, maps, and timelines.
I do not believe that there are back to back pages in the entire book that are void of some form of visual help. All of these visuals really benefit the reader and help to immerse them into the time period of the New Testament authors. There are also small sections titled Notes From Antiquity that provide additional information. Most of this information in these sections is not vitally important but more like “fun facts” for the reader.
First-rate New Testament scholar Craig Keener praise the book saying, “Complete with an extraordinary array of visual illustrations, this book covers important topics needed for an introductory text in New Testament in a way that is both understandable and well-informed. It emphasizes many details that help students discover the biblical text in new ways they would rarely get on their own.”
Craig Blomberg also hails it as “one of the best introductions and surveys in recent times. Remarkably attractive in its layout, with color pictures, color pictures, charts, diagrams and sidebars galore . . . If it’s backgrounds you want to highlight in a one-semester introduction to the New Testament, this is the text to assign.”
From the publisher
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. The New Testament in Antiquity 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.
Order The New Testament in Antiquity: A Survey of the New Testament within Its Cultural Context on discount.
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