Fourteen-year-old Lucas leads a lonely, monotonous life in the house of his unpleasant guardian until the unexpected arrival of an unusual little girl presages a series of events that completely change his life.

Fourteen-year-old Lucas leads a lonely, monotonous life in the house of his unpleasant guardian until the unexpected arrival of an unusual little girl presages a series of events that completely change his life.

Who were Paul's opponents? Were they one or were they many, depending upon the church concerned? These questions continue to be of interest to Pauline and other New Testament scholars, and are addressed in this volume of collected essays. Some of the essays are on specific books, such as Galatians, the Corinthian letters and Romans, while others treat broader issues in Paul's world.

To develop a method for identifying Paul's opponents it is first necessary to analyse procedures used by previous scholars. Too little attention has been paid in the past to issues of method, and many procedures have been used which violate the canons of historical research. In the first place, limits should be set upon the use of historical reconstructions and of external sources, and the determinative source for identifying the opponents of any letter must be that letter itself. Secondly, a satisfactory method will analyse passages within the primary text according to the nature of the section (e.g. polemical or didactic) and the types of statements they contain (e.g. explicit statements about opponents or allusions to them). Then each combination of context and statement type is evaluated to determine (1) how certain we can be about whether the passage refers to opponents and (2) how much distortion is likely to be present. The application of the proposed method to the two letters within 2 Corinthians indicates that Paul faced the same group of opponents in both letters. These opponents were pneumatics who demanded a particular manner of life as evidence that a person possesses the measure of the spirit which makes one an apostle.

B. J. Oropeza offers the most thorough examination in recent times on the subject of apostasy in the New Testament. The study examines each book of the New Testament with a fourfold approach that identifies the emerging Christian community in danger, the nature of apostasy that threatens the congregations, and the consequences of defection. Oropeza then compares the various perspectives of the communities in Christ in order to determine the ways in which they perceived apostasy and whether defectors could be restored. In this second volume of a three-volume set titled Apostasy in the New Testament Communities, Oropeza focuses on the Christ communities of the undisputed and disputed Pauline Letters.

This book sets out a method for identifying the opponents in view in Paul's letters, and then applies it to the relevant writings of the Pauline corpus. The method limits the use of parallels or prior constructions as a basis for identification, dealing with each letter on an individual basis and taking full acount of the historical and social context. Sumney concludes that the Pauline letters address different kinds of opposition in different places, including two distinct anti-Paul movements. Here is a fundamental study for research into a basic problem of the Pauline correspondence.

The 'Dictionary of Paul and his letters' is a one-of-a-kind reference work. Following the format of its highly successful companion volume, the 'Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels', this Dictionary is designed to bring students, teachers, ministers and laypeople abreast of the established conclusions and significant recent developments in Pauline scholarship. No other single reference work presents as much information focused exclusively on Pauline theology, literature, background and scholarship. In a field that recently has undergone significant shifts in perspective, the 'Dictionary of Paul and His Letters' offers a summa of Paul and Pauline studies. In-depth articles focus on individual theological themes (such as law, resurrection and Son of God), broad theological topics (such as Christology, eschatology and the death of Christ), methods of interpretation (such as rhetorical criticism and social-scientific approaches), background topics (such as apocalypticism, Hellenism and Qumran) and various other subjects specifically related to the scholarly study of Pauline theology and literature (such as early catholicism, the centre of Paul's theology, and Paul and his interpreters since F. C. Baur). Separate articles are also devoted to each of the Pauline letters, to hermeneutics and to preaching Paul today. The 'Dictionary of Paul and His Letters' takes its place alongside the 'Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels' in presenting the fruit of evangelical New Testament scholarship at the end of the twentieth century - committed to the authority of Scripture, utilising the best of critical methods, and maintaining dialogue with contemporary scholarship and challenges facing the church.

The commentary tradition regarding 1 Corinthians unanimously identifies the "weak" as Christ-followers whose faith was not yet sufficient to indulge in the eating of idol food with indifference, as if ideally Paul wanted them to become "strong" enough to do so. Commentaries also do not hesitate to explain that Paul advised the Corinthians that he behaved like non-Jews (e.g., ate idol food) in order to win non-Jews to Christ, convinced that he was free from any obligation to observe Jewish covenantal behavior--except when he expediently chose to mimic Jewish behavior in order to win Jews to Christ. Similarly, commentators continue to conclude that in Philippians Paul called Jews "dogs" for upholding the value of undertaking circumcision, and that he renounced such identification as "mutilation." None of these interpretations likely represent what Paul meant originally, according to Nanos. Each essay explains why, and provides new alternatives for re-reading Paul's language "within Judaism." In this process, Nanos combines investigations of relevant elements from Jewish sources and from various Cynic and other Greco-Roman contemporaries, as well as the New Testament.