The purpose of this book is to explore what a liturgical approach to the Bible looks like and what hermeneutical implications this might have: How does the liturgy celebrate, understand, and communicate Scripture? The starting point is Pope Benedict's affirmation that "a faith-filled understanding of sacred Scripture must always refer back to the liturgy" (Verbum Domini 52). The first part of the book (based on SC 24) provides significant examples to demonstrate: The liturgical order of readings intertextually combines Old Testament and New Testament readings using manifold hermeneutical principles, specifically how the psalms show the wide range of interpretations the liturgy employs. Prayers are biblically inspired and help to appropriate Scripture personally. The hymns convey Scripture in a poetic way. Signs and actions such as foot-washing or the Ephphetha rite enact Scripture. The study considers the Mass, the sacraments and the Liturgy of the Hours. In the second part, Benini systematically focuses on the various dimensions of liturgical hermeneutics of the Bible, which emerge from the first part. The study reflects the approaches the liturgy offers to Scripture and its liturgical reception. It explores theological aspects such as the unity of the two Testaments in Christ's paschal mystery or the anamnesis as a central category in both Scripture and liturgy. The liturgy does not understand Scripture primarily as a document of the past, but celebrates it as a current and living "Word of the Lord," as a medium of encounter with God: Scripture is sacramental. Liturgical Hermeneutics of Sacred Scripture seeks to contribute not only to the comparison of the Roman, Ambrosian, and Byzantine Rite regarding the Word of God, but most of all to the overall "liturgical approach" to Scripture. As such, it promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue of liturgical and biblical studies.

Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.

The Orthodox Church is one of the three major branches of Christianity. There are over 300 million adherents throughout the world. The Orthodox Church is a fellowship of independent churches, which split form the Roman Church over the question of papal supremacy in 1054. The Orthodox adherents include people in: Greece, Georgia, Russia, and Serbia. There are an estimated one million members in the United States. This Advanced book explains the basic principles of Orthodox Christianity and describes in detail the holidays observed by the Orthodox Church. In addition, relevant book literature is presented in bibliographic form with easy access provided by title, subject and author indexes.

This book offers a collection of essays on Byzantine Italy which provides a fresh synthesis of current research as well as new insights on various aspects of its local societies from the 6th to the 11th century.

The story of the woman taken in adultery features a dramatic confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees over whether the adulteress should be stoned as the law commands. In response, Jesus famously states, “Let him who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” To Cast the First Stone traces the history of this provocative story from its first appearance to its enduring presence today. Likely added to the Gospel of John in the third century, the passage is often held up by modern critics as an example of textual corruption by early Christian scribes and editors, yet a judgment of corruption obscures the warm embrace the story actually received. Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman trace the story’s incorporation into Gospel books, liturgical practices, storytelling, and art, overturning the mistaken perception that it was either peripheral or suppressed, even in the Greek East. The authors also explore the story’s many different meanings. Taken as an illustration of the expansiveness of Christ’s mercy, the purported superiority of Christians over Jews, the necessity of penance, and more, this vivid episode has invited any number of creative receptions. This history reveals as much about the changing priorities of audiences, scribes, editors, and scholars as it does about an “original” text of John. To Cast the First Stone calls attention to significant shifts in Christian book cultures and the enduring impact of oral tradition on the preservation—and destabilization—of scripture.

In 1958, Bible scholar Morton Smith announced the discovery of a sensational manuscript-a second-century letter written by St. Clement of Alexandria, who quotes an unknown, longer version of the Gospel of Mark. When Smith published the letter in 1973, he set off a firestorm of controversy that has raged ever since. Is the text authentic, or a hoax? Is Smith’s interpretation correct? Did Jesus really practice magic, or homosexuality? And if the letter is a forgery . . . why? Through close examination of the "discovered” manuscript’s text, Peter Jeffery unravels the answers to the mystery and tells the tragic tale of an estranged Episcopalian priest who forged an ancient gospel and fooled many of the best biblical scholars of his time. Jeffery shows convincingly that Smith’s Secret Gospel is steeped in anachronisms and that its construction was influenced by Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, twentieth-century misunderstandings of early Christian liturgy, and Smith’s personal struggles with Christian sexual morality.

This new version of the late fourth-century diary of journeys in and around the Holy Land known as the Itinerarium Egeriae provides a more literal translation of the Latin text than earlier English renderings, with the aim of revealing more of the female traveler’s personality. The substantial introduction to the book covers both early pilgrimage as a whole, especially travel by women, and the many liturgical rites of Jerusalem that Egeria describes. Both this and the verse-by-verse commentary alongside the translated text draw on the most recent scholarship, making this essential reading for pilgrims, students, and scholars seeking insight into life and piety during one of Christianity’s most formative periods.