Mark Harding - The Content and the Setting of the Gospel Tradition

Edited by

Mark Harding and Alanna Nobbs

To our colleagues in teaching

"To the one who gives wisdom I will give glory." Sirach 51:17

ix

Alanna Nobbs

xi

xv

Archaeology

Robert K. Mclver

The Text of the NT

Scott D. Charlesworth

Erica A. Mathieson

The Setting

Murray J. Smith

James R. Harrison

Mark Harding

The Gospels in the Early Churches

Theresa Yu Chui Siang Lau

Murray J. Smith

Johan Ferreira

Jesus' Life and Ministry

Chris Forbes

Johan Ferreira

Timothy J. Harris

Stephen Voorwinde

Greg W. Forbes

Brian Powell

Evelyn Ashley

Van Shore

Ian K. Smith

This book has its genesis in the strong connections forged over the years between the Ancient History Department of Macquarie University and the Australian College of Theology (ACT), many of whose teachers are graduates of the Ancient History Department at Macquarie and still retain links as honoraries.

The Ancient History Department at Macquarie has long had a focus on the Greco-Roman background of the New Testament. Its Ancient History Documentary Research Centre series, New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity (nine volumes to date), now published by Eerdmans, discusses evidence for the background of the New Testament in published inscriptions and papyri. The Society for the Study of Early Christianity, also based in the Research Centre, funds annual conferences, seminar series and an international Visiting Scholar in the field. The Centre has had a long term interest too in the papyri from Egypt which bear on the history of Christianity. Many of the essays included in this volume demonstrate the fruits of the historical enquiry fostered there.

The ACT, a major provider of theological education since its establishment by the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia in 1891, operates nationally as a network of affiliated colleges. Each college has its own well-qualified faculty teaching a range of disciplines, including the New Testament and its Greco-Roman and Jewish background. Eight of the 16 contributors to this volume are ACT academic staff members.

Whereas many introductory books on the New Testament and its background continue to be written, they tend to concentrate almost exclusively on the content of the books of the New Testament, and deal with issues such as authorship, date and provenance. This work is a serious attempt to tackle the social setting and textual tradition of the New Testament, in a way that provides a distinctly Australian contribution and shows the degree of scholarship in this area. It is aimed as a resource primarily for undergraduates in theology or history but the bibliographies and wider setting of the issues will we hope make it useful to scholars beyond those years. A Macquarie PhD graduate and current principal of an ACT affiliated college (the Queensland Theological College), Dr Bruce Winter, edited a pioneering six volume series on the Book of Acts in its First Century Setting, which serves as something of a model for the present volume.

In view of our understanding of the prime readership of this volume, and to maximize its benefits, we have retained Greek quotations but transliterated Hebrew ones.

All contributions have been refereed, and thanks are owed both to those who generously gave their time, and to the contributors who rewrote and adapted sometimes in several drafts.

Both editors used their contacts to invite the contributors, and discussed the overall plan and details with them, but by far the larger share of the burden was shouldered by Mark Harding, and it is fitting that his name come first not merely for alphabetical reasons.

For the detailed work of subediting we are indebted to Philip Harding and Meredith Walker, both ACT graduates in theology.

We wish to thank Eerdmans publishing house for their ready endorsement of this project, and our families for support over its duration.

Alanna Nobbs

Professor of Ancient History

Macquarie University

16 February 2010

Mark Harding

Mark Harding is an Honorary Associate of Macquarie University. Since 1996 he has been the Dean of the Australian College of Theology. He has postgraduate degrees from London University, Macquarie University, and Princeton Theological Seminary where he completed a PhD in New Testament in 1993. He is the author of Tradition and Rhetoric in the Pastoral Epistles (Peter Lang, 1998) and Early Christian Life and Thought in Social Context (T. & T. Clark, 2003).

Alanna Nobbs

Alanna Nobbs is Professor of Ancient History and deputy Director of the Ancient Cultures Research Centre at Macquarie University. Her teaching, research interests and publications are in Greek and Roman historiography (including New Testament background), and in the history of Christianity especially as seen through the papyri.

Evelyn Ashley

Evelyn Ashley has been lecturing at Vose Seminary (previously known as the Baptist Theological College of Western Australia), an affiliated college of the Australian College of Theology, since 2003. She is a graduate of the Seminary and Murdoch University where in 2006 she completed a PhD entitled "Paul's Paradigm for Ministry in 2 Corinthians: Christ's Death and Resurrection."

Scott D. Charlesworth

Scott Charlesworth holds an MA in Early Christian and Jewish Studies from Macquarie and a PhD in Greek from the University of New England (Armidale, NSW). His doctoral thesis will be published in 2010 as Early Christian Gospels: their Production and Transmission in the European series Papyrologica Florentina. He currently teaches biblical languages and theology at Pacific Adventist University in Papua New Guinea.

Johan Ferreira

Johan Ferreira is Principal of the Bible College of Queensland, an affiliated college of the Australian College of Theology. Johan is a graduate of the Reformed Theological College, the University of Queensland, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of Johannine Ecclesiology (Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), The Hymn of the Pearl: The Syriac and Greek Texts with Introduction, Translations, and Notes (St Pauls, 2002), and Chinese language grammars of Biblical Hebrew and Greek. He has published several articles in biblical studies and missiology. Johan is completing a book on Tang Christianity based on extensive study of original Chinese documents and inscriptions.

Chris Forbes

Chris Forbes is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Macquarie University, where he teaches New Testament history, Hellenistic history and Greco-Roman history of ideas. He completed his PhD in Ancient History at Macquarie University under the supervision of Professor E. A. Judge in 1987. His thesis was published by Mohr Siebeck in 1995 as Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and its Hellenistic Environment. He has published various articles on the intellectual and cultural context of the early Christians and is a regular contributor to the conferences of the Society for the Study of Early Christianity held annually at Macquarie University.