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Exegesis that bears fruit both for the academy and the church

In this collection of essays and sermons on the Gospel of John and Revelation, friends, colleagues, and former students of Gail R. O’Day explore and extend the possibilities raised by her work in her groundbreaking study Revelation in the Fourth Gospel. The essays engage with both historical contextualization and literary analysis to identify the rhetorical features that ancient readers might have apprehended, while the sermons explore how the literary shape of the text can inform preaching through attention to the narrative modes of the text. Contributions from Yoshimi Azuma, Teresa Fry Brown, Patrick Gray, Lynn R. Huber, Susan E. Hylen, Karoline M. Lewis, Thomas G. Long, Veronice Miles, Vernon K. Robbins, Gilberto A. Ruiz, Ted A. Smith, and William M. Wright IV thematize the importance of narrative approaches and the diverse ways they can be employed.

An intersectional study of New Testament and noncanonical literature

Anna Rebecca Solevåg explores how nonnormative bodies are presented in early Christian literature through the lens of disability studies. In a number of case studies, Solevåg shows how early Christians struggled to come to terms with issues relating to body, health, and dis/ability in the gospel stories, apocryphal narratives, Pauline letters, and patristic expositions. Solevåg uses the concepts of narrative prosthesis, gaze and stare, stigma, monster theory, and crip theory to examine early Christian material to reveal the multiple, polyphonous, contradictory ways in which nonnormative bodies appear.

Features:

• Case studies that reveal a variety of understandings, attitudes, medical frameworks, and taxonomies for how disabled bodies were interpreted
• A methodology that uses disability as an analytical tool that contributes insights about cultural categories, ideas of otherness, and social groups’ access to or lack of power
• An intersectional perspective drawing on feminist, gender, queer, race, class, and postcolonial studies

A new English translation of the first text translated from Arabic to Armenian for research and classroom use

Robert W. Thomson translates this ninth-century commentary defending the miaphysite theological position of the Armenian church against the chalcedonian position of the Greek Byzantine church. Nonnus’s exegesis of the gospel falls in the context of trends in Eastern Christian biblical exposition, primarily the Syrian tradition. Therefore, Thomson emphasizes the parallels in Syriac commentaries on the book of John, noting also earlier Greek writers whose works were influential in Syria. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Armenian church and church history.

Features:

• Introductory material on the text’s history, manuscript traditions, and theological importance
• Translation of the Armenian text and commentary
• Bibliography covering the Armenian, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic texts as well as secondary sources