Wayne A. Meeks

Analyzes the letters of the disciple Paul in order to discover what life was like for the early Christians in Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessalonica

The Social World of the Apostle Paul

The First Urban Christians

John T. Fitzgerald

The Second Edition of this perennially popular Norton Critical Edition is based on the Today's New International Version of Paul's letters, a new translation that is heralded for its inclusiveness and accuracy in representation of gender.

Annotated Texts, Reception and Criticism

The Writings of St. Paul

By the time Christianity became a political and cultural force in the Roman Empire, it had come to embody a new moral vision. This wise and eloquent book describes the formative years--from the crucifixion of Jesus to the end of the second century of the common era--when Christian beliefs and practices shaped their unique moral order. Wayne A. Meeks examines the surviving documents from Christianity's beginnings (some of which became the New Testament) and shows that they are largely concerned with the way converts to the movement should behave. Meeks finds that for these Christians, the formation of morals means the formation of community; the documents are addressed not to individuals but to groups, and they have among their primary aims the maintenance and growth of these groups. Meeks paints a picture of the process of socialization that produced the early forms of Christian morality, discussing many factors that made the Christians feel that they were a single and "chosen" people. He describes, for example, the impact of conversion; the rapid spread of Christian household cult-associations in the cities of the Roman Empire; the language of Christian moral discourse as revealed in letters, testaments, and "moral stories"; the rituals, meetings, and institutionalization of charity; the Christians' feelings about celibacy, sex, and gender roles; and their sense of the end-time and final judgment. In each of these areas Meeks seeks to determine what is distinctive about the Christian viewpoint and what is similar to the moral components of Greco-Roman or Jewish thought.

The First Two Centuries

The Origins of Christian Morality

A central figure in the reconception of early Christian history over the last three decades, Wayne A. Meeks offers here a selection of his most influential writings on the New Testament and early Christianity. His essays illustrate recent changes in our thinking about the early Christian movement and pose provocative questions regarding the history of this period. Meeks explores a fascinating range of topics, from the figure of the androgyne in antiquity to the timeless matter of God’s reliability, from Paul’s ethical rhetoric to New Testament pictures of Christianity’s separation from Jewish communities. Meeks’ introduction offers a retrospective on New Testament studies of the past thirty years and explains the intersection of these studies with a variety of exploratory and revisionist movements in the humanities, embracing social theory, history, anthropology, and literature. In an epilogue the author reflects on future directions for New Testament scholarship.

Selected Essays

In Search of the Early Christians

Notes and introductions by 60 leading Bible experts Illustrations 16 full-color maps Tables Index Scholars are members of the Society of Biblical Literature 6 1/5 X 9 1/4 % Font size: 9

New Revised Standard Version (with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books)

The HarperCollins Study Bible black leather

i primi due secoli

Le origini della morale cristiana

Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology

The Prophet King

Provides an introduction to each book of the Bible, and accompanies the text with historical and theological notes

Wayne A. Meeks

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