The Making of the New Testament Documents

Front Cover
BRILL, 2002 - Religion - 517 pages
Do we "really" know who wrote the New Testament documents? Do we really know "when" they were written? Scholars have long debated these fundamental questions. This volume identifies and investigates literary traditions and their implications for the authorship and dating of the Gospels and the letters of the New Testament. Departing from past scholarship, E. Earle Ellis argues that the Gospels and the letters are products of the corporate authorship of four allied apostolic missions and not just the creation of individual authors. The analysis of literary traditions also has implications for the dating of New Testament documents. Providing a critique of the current critical orthodoxy with respect to the dating of New Testament documents, Ellis weighs the patristic traditions more heavily and more critically than has been done in the past. Ellis's new reconstruction of the origin of the New Testament documents provides better answers than have been previously proposed to a number of critical questions. Ellis provides a comprehensive historical reconstruction of the process by which the gospel message became the Gospel books. His arguments, if persuasive, will require a reassessment of the history of early Christianity. Please note that "The Making of the New Testament Documents" was previously published by Brill in hardback, ISBN 90 04 11332 0 (no longer available).

From inside the book

Contents

From Traditions to the New Testament
1
1
33
The Formation of the Epistles as a Corporate
39
Conclusion
45
The Use of Traditions in the Early Christian Missions
53
Traditions in the Pauline Letters
69
Thessalonians
111
Traditions in Hebrews James and Jude
117
The Relationship of the Four Apostolic Missions
307
The Significance of Preformed Traditions for
320
Conclusion
329
Geographical Settings
351
The Date and Provenance of Marks Gospel
357
Clement of Alexandria
363
A New Reconstruction
372
Title
378

The Composition of the New Testament Epistles
138
The Making of the Johannine Literature
153
Traditions in First John
183
Traditions Introduced by Formulas
189
Traditions in Revelation
208
New Testament Traditions
226
Vice Lists
232
The New Testament Documents in the History of Early
238
Trends in the Twentieth Century
387
Authorship
397
Traditions in the Pastoral Epistles
406
3435
426
3435 A Preformed Tradition
433
Indexes
447
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

E. Earle Ellis, is Research Professor of Theology, Southwestern Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, has authored The Old Testament in Early Christianity (1992), Paul's Use of the Old Testament (1991), and Prophecy and Hermeneutic (1993).

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