“This is a marvelous book. It is clear, methodical, and written with an elegant simplicity. Its content is theologically rich and extraordinarily learned. But this is not just a fascinating collection of essays about the New Testament and New Testament studies. It is nothing less than a brilliant, wise, and faithful manifesto for how New Testament studies should be done.”
—Simon Gathercole
University of Cambridge
  
“Even where I disagree with this book, I am in awe of it. Like our own twenty-first-century Pascal, Kavin Rowe stakes everything on his earnest, existential approach to reading the New Testament, and the results are exhilarating to read.”   
—Matthew V. Novenson 
University of Edinburgh  
 
“Existentially powerful and theologically bold, these collected essays from one of the foremost New Testament scholars of this generation encapsulate a powerful and programmatic vision for ongoing New Testament study.”  
—Joshua Jipp  
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School 

C. Kavin Rowe is the George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament and vice dean for faculty at Duke Divinity School. His previous books include Early Narrative Christology, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age, Christianity's Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope, and Leading Christian Communities.

Table of Contents
Contents
Preface 
List of Abbreviations

Part 1: Biblical Studies and Theology
1. What If It Were True? Why Study the New Testament
2. The Kerygma of the Earliest Church
3. Biblical Studies: With Richard B. Hays
4. New Testament Theology: The Revival of a Discipline
5. The Doctrine of God Is a Hermeneutic: The Biblical Theology of Brevard S. Childs
6. What Is a Theological Commentary? With Richard B. Hays
7. For Future Generations: Worshiping Jesus and the Integration of the Theological Disciplines
8. Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics

Part 2: The New Testament, Grammars of Life,
and Religious Comparison
9. Making Friends and Comparing Lives
10. A Response to Friend-Critics
11. The Art of Retrieval: Stoicism: “Parallels” and the Retrieval of a Tradition
12. God, Greek Philosophy, and the Bible: A Response to Matthew Levering

Part 3: Christianity and the Human
13. Becoming Human: Deification in the Image of Jesus Christ
14. Christianity’s Surprise: New Testament Foundations of the Human
15. Recovering Our Humanity: Interdisciplinary Inquiry and the Unity of Life
16. Christianity’s First Millennium: Reflections on Robert Louis Wilken’s Magnum Opus

Bibliography
Index of Authors
Index of Subjects
Index of Scripture
Index of Other Ancient Sources