Hebrews (The New Testament Library | NTL)
Digital Verbum Edition
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Overview
This volume of The New Testament Library offers a thorough and careful commentary on the complicated book of Hebrews, showing its meaning within the context of ancient culture and the theological development of the early church. Written by one of the leading New Testament scholars of the present generation, Luke Timothy Johnson, this commentary offers remarkable insights into the Hellenistic, Roman, and Jewish contexts of the book of Hebrews.
- Offers commentary on and exploration of New Testament themes
- Provides insight from one of today’s prominent New Testament scholars
Top Highlights
“The more important point is that Hebrews is a composition that is meant to be heard as a discourse rather than seen as a text, experienced as a whole in its unfolding rather than studied in separate segments.” (Page 11)
“The struggle to find definite answers to the puzzles provided by these allusive lists is, to be sure, a distraction. The main point is perfectly straightforward: the enormity of apostasy is measured by the greatness of the experience of God it abandons. That is why it is impossible to ‘renew to repentance’ people who have proven capable of turning away from their own most powerful and transforming experience.” (Page 163)
“Hope, then, has to do with the future, but it enables people to have boldness and confidence in the present as they move toward that future. What is in the future for the hearers, as for the ancients, is the complete realization of the promises.” (Page 277)
“The simplest and most adequate answer is simply that Hebrews interprets Scripture entirely from the perspective of the experience of the death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus.” (Page 24)
“In brief, Hebrews presents itself as a work of deliberative rhetoric, careful in language and rich in metaphor, which makes strong appeals to character and emotion as well as to reason, and whose arrangement is dominated by the alternating pattern of exposition and exhortation.” (Page 15)
Luke Timothy Johnson the author of the Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections on the Letter of James, is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His works include The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Trust of the Traditional Gospels and The Letter of James, in the Anchor Yale Bible.
Reviews
21 ratings
taewoong um
8/14/2024
Marco Ceccarelli
9/23/2023
I make my own a comment about Heb 12:22-24 from G. L. Cockerill, The Epistles to the Hebrews, 651, n. 41: The following quotation from Johnson, 330, appears to reveal either an undue dependence upon Platonic dualism in interpreting Hebrews or a modern reluctance to accept the concrete reality of God’s destiny for his people, or perhaps both: “I put quotation marks around the word ‘place’ as a reminder that this is entirely an imaginative evocation. If the author is truly speaking about entry into God’s life, as I think he is, then there is no more place with God than there is time. Spiritual realities are by definition not local. Imagination is therefore also required of the reader” (Johnson, 330). Did not the author of Hebrews believe in the concrete reality of “the City with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (11:9–10)? Can we really describe as “spiritual” in the sense of ethereal what is left after all that can be shaken has been removed (12:25–29)? Was the “home” Abraham sought (11:13–16) part of an “imaginative evocation”? I suggest that the writer of Hebrews believed that the “City of the living God” was more real or “concrete” than the present world. Our present understanding can go little further than this. Johnson’s quotation above causes us to imagine a less real or concrete existence. The statement that “spiritual realities are by definition not local” is misleading and not in harmony with biblical faith in the bodily resurrection. Yet on 349 he can say, “In his imaginative evocation of their approach to God in 12:18–24, the author spoke of the City of the living God. It is real. But the author and his hearers are not yet there in their mortal bodies” (italics added).
Jisung Lee
7/25/2023
Richard C. Hammond, Jr.
1/5/2023
Jim Rudolph
5/13/2019
C.H.HunterJr.
11/23/2018
JR
7/18/2018
Bill & Gail OBrallahan
12/24/2017
bonnietfowler
11/4/2017
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