Digital Verbum Edition
Jerome H. Neyrey gives us a thoroughly up-to-date and comprehensive study of two of the most obscure books of the New Testament. Written after the death of Jesus and his Apostles, the Epistles of 2 Peter and Jude offer a glimpse into the turbulent life of the early Christian communities. Neyrey’s fascinating study not only provides an entirely new translation of the two texts, but also stirring commentary that takes the reader inside groups located at the very edges of Christianity, in contact with the wider Roman world and Greek culture of the day.
Neyrey builds upon the excellent scholarship of the past, and introduces readers to the discussion factors that were rarely understood or considered in earlier times: the social, political, and economic setting in which the New Testament Epistles were written and read—the church as a community within the larger context of the vast Roman empire of the late first and early second centuries. And while these letters are often considered peripheral or marginal to the New Testament, they nevertheless reveal and interpret one of the murkier eras in the life of the church. They reflect the hard times and difficult circumstances of the faithful, beset by treacherous comrades within and malevolent enemies without. But all the while, these documents express the constancy and commitment of those who found salvation and the renewal of life in the one Lord, Jesus Christ.
“Dorothy correctly tells Toto that they are no longer in Kansas.” (Page 2)
“All of this is to say that the social sciences can offer fresh and compelling reading scenarios about the social world of the ancient authors which greatly complement standard exegesis.” (Page 3)
“The document may profitably be examined as the author’s riposte to an honor challenge.” (Page 52)
“In part such scenarios were elements of the conventional description of the state visit of an honorable sovereign, in particular the God of Israel. The power and honorable status of the sovereign are publicly expressed through symbolic, even cosmic, phenomena. The same is applicable both for the birth of God’s Christ (Matt 2:2) and his death (27:45, 51–54). Yet as the document explains later, the parousia of the Lord came to include expectation of new heavens and a new earth, which entails the destruction of the old ones (see Rev 6:12–14; 8:12; 21:1). Thus notions of honor, that is, the cosmic phenomena accompanying the sovereign’s visit, are linked with those of purity, the cleansing of the corrupt world and its replacement with a new, pure one.” (Pages 228–229)
“This mockery in turn calls into question the Lord’s role as lawmaker and enforcer of laws. As the author interprets his opponents, they reject the traditional understanding of God as sovereign; they call into question God’s providential powers to create and to judge. The honor of God has been impugned.” (Page 237)
Jerome H. Neyrey, a Jesuit priest, is professor of New Testament at the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD from Yale University, is a past associate editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and is currently associate editor of the Biblical Theology Bulletin.
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