Olopsc Library

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Can textbook be the culmination and pinnacle of a life works? We often thing of textbooks as summaries of field of study, rehearsals of old material that expose students to the history of research, not as reconfigurations that challenges the way we have been doing things. But that is what this textbook is. It comes out of my own thirty-year career o teaching, studying, and writing as a woman concerned with the way that narratives about our past - religious or otherwise are often constructed to keep certain people in power to authenticate and otherwise - are often constructed to keep certain people in power, to authenticate and legitimize their dominance, and to justify the marginalization of people who differ from them. When I first started to teach Biblical Studies, I was young and did not understand this yet. If someone would have told me this when I was in my twenties, I probably would have resisted this idea. I had not yet experienced being a woman professor peering through the glass ceiling. I had not yet experienced working in a field almost completely dominated by male voices, colleagues, and publications. So when I started on my career path, I ran fairly typical courses in the New Testament, Jesus and the Gospels, and the History and Literature of Early Christianity from Paul to Augustine. I used the standard textbooks written by my male peers and supplemented with other readings to fill in the gaps. But as the years passed and I became more exposed to the expansive literature that the early Christians left behind, I began to question why the field of Biblical Studies organizes itself into Old and New Testaments (or the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament) and quarantines this "authentic" and "historical" literature from the rest of the writings produced by early Christians. I became less and less certain about the way that scholars argued and maintained this quarantine by dating the composition of the New Testament literature to the first century and all other literature (with the exception of perhaps The Didache) to the second-century. It was not long before I began to realize that, for much of the New Testament, this early dating is a fantasy and a fallacy. As I studied various scholarly treatments of individual texts, I came to terms with the fact that the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), the Catholic letters (James, 1 and 2 Peter, and Jude), Hebrews, and even Luke-Acts are most certainly second-century texts (ca. 130-150 CE). Then there is the matter of Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, Carpocrates, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, all Christians active in the same decades (130-150 CE), sometimes in the same locations (Rome, Alexandria, Asia Minor, and Antioch). Suddenly my picture of the New Testament was not so simple. I saw entanglement not quarantine"-- Ic Provided by publisher.