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Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture
| Title | Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2025-03-10 13:19:44 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
For contemporary Western readers, it can be easy to miss or misread cultural nuances in the New Testament. To hear the text correctly we must be attuned to its original context. As David deSilva demonstrates, keys to interpretation are found in paying attention to four essential cultural themes: honor and shame, patronage and reciprocity, kinship and family, and purity and pollution.Through our understanding of honor and shame in the Mediterranean world, we gain new appreciation for how early Christians sustained commitment to a distinctive Christian identity and practice. By examining the protocols of patronage and reciprocity, we grasp more firmly the connections between God’s grace and our response. In exploring kinship and household relations, we grasp more fully the ethos of the early Christian communities as a new family brought together by God. And by investigating the notions of purity and pollution along with their associated practices, we realize how the ancient map of society and the world was revised by the power of the gospel.This new edition is thoroughly revised and expanded with up-to-date scholarship. A milestone work in the study of New Testament cultural backgrounds, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity offers a deeper appreciation of the New Testament, the gospel, and Christian discipleship. Read more
Review
Editorial Reviews Review "Chapter is the best discussion of the language of grace as patronage that I have ever encountered." -- Carolyn Osiek, Catholic Biblical Quarterly"His discussion of grace as a circle of giving and receiving that involves generosity, gift, and gratitude ... is particularly valuable." -- Ritva Williams, Interpretation Review "David deSilva's expanded and updated revision of his classic book highlights for a new generation of readers the sensation created by its original publication. For the first time it contextualized the New Testament documents against four of the driving cultural forces of antiquity (honor, patronage, kinship, purity), paying meticulous attention to the ancient sources and drawing on modern sociology for further exegetical insights. The reader is swept up by the motivations animating the private and public life of the ancients, thereby exposing the ethical and social challenge posed by the countercultural gospel of the first believers. A masterpiece relaunched." -- James R. Harrison, professor of biblical studies and research director at the Sydney College of Divinity About the Author David A. deSilva is associate professor of New Testament and Greek at Ashland Theological Seminary, Ashland, Ohio. He is the author of The Hope of Glory: Honor Discourse and New Testament Interpretation, Despising Shame: Honor Discourse and Community Maintenance in the Epistle to the Hebrews and 4 Maccabees in the Sheffield Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha series. Read more
