The command to love is central to the Gospel of John. Internationally respected scholar Francis Moloney offers a thorough exploration of this theme, focusing not only on Jesus's words but also on his actions. Instead of merely telling people that they must love one another, Jesus acts to make God's love known and calls all who follow him to do the same. This capstone work on John's Gospel uses a narrative approach to delve deeply into a theme at the heart of the Fourth Gospel and the life of the Christian church. Uniting rigorous exegesis with theological and pastoral insight, it makes a substantive contribution to contemporary Johannine scholarship.

A leading New Testament scholar explores key issues in the Gospel of John.

This work presents a first-class study of Old Testament covenant theology which breaks new ground in Johannine scholarship. It provides a detailed interpretation of the discipleship narratives and discourses in John's Gospel. It investigates Old Testament discipleship motifs, sets the Johannine community within the Jewish world, and argues that according to the Gospel of John, the relationship with God that had defined Israel as a people of God also defines the disciples of Jesus.

An overview of Celtic spirituality and its implications for us today.

In this published form of the 1997 Staley Lectures delivered at Southeastern College in Lakeland Florida, John Christopher Thomas explores the Farewell Materials in the Gospel according to John. Following a brief discussion devoted to the nature of biblical narrative, the concentric structure of this text is explored. Individual lectures are devoted to the signs of cleansing with which the Farewell Materials begin and end (the Foot washing and the Prayer of Jesus); the passages devoted to the themes of Departure, Betrayal, and Provision; teaching about the Paraclete; and those that underscore the solidarity the believers have with Jesus. The book concludes with the implications of the Farewell Materials for Pentecostal Theology and Ministry.

The Washing of the Saints Feet explores the historic tradition of feet washing and its influence on the 21st century church. Pinson presents a reinvestigation of feet washing in hopes to prepare the way for a renewal of this practice.

The first Catholic missionaries of the early modern period arrived in mainland China in 1582, but the first Catholic Bible did not appear until 1968, long after Protestant missionaries already had published several versions. The mystery behind the four-hundred-year gap is not a why question but instead involves many how questions—primarily, how did communication of the Bible take place in the Chinese context without a written text in the Chinese language? This book uncovers narrative forms of biblical stories and explores the ways they were delivered to Chinese audiences. Relying on textual evidence, it presents a diversified exploration of a specific biblical story from the Latin Vulgate Bible—the footwashing in John 13—and its translation into various Chinese texts. In different religious milieus, the biblical narrative provided Chinese audiences a core source of faith, connected them with the most commonly accepted beliefs, and fostered their religiosity across communities in China from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The interdisciplinary approach adopted herein sheds new light on the history of the Bible in China and paves the way for further studies on the abundance of Chinese biblical stories and texts.

As the first volume in the Johannine Monograph Series, The Gospel of John: A Commentary by Rudolf Bultmann well deserves this place of pride. Indeed, this provocative commentary is arguably the most important New Testament monograph in the twentieth century, perhaps second only to The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer. In contrasting Bultmann's and Schweitzer's paradigms, however, we find that Bultmann's is far more technically argued and original, commanding hegemony among other early-Christianity paradigms. Ernst Haenchen has described Bultmann's commentary as a giant oak tree in whose shade nothing could grow, and indeed, this reference accurately describes its dominance among Continental Protestant scholarship over the course of several decades.

D. Moody Smith treats the theology of the Gospel of John in its narrative form and historical context, both ancient Jewish and early Christian. His work draws upon the most recent scholarly investigations of the Gospel's historical purpose and setting. The major theological themes of the Gospel, especially its christology, are treated in relation to the context of the work, since Johannine theology is not simply a by-product of controversies that produced the Gospel, but is rather related to them in significant ways. As Professor Smith shows, John marks an important watershed between Christianity and Judaism. His study will thus serve equally well as an introduction to the question of the origin of John and as an introduction to its theology. It also consistently pays attention to the relationship of the Gospel to other major New Testament witnesses as well as to its important influence upon the development of later Christian doctrine.