Showing titles in Biblical History & Culture

Start Your Journey Into the Bible Jesus Actually Read One Question Changes Everything: What if the Old Testament you've been reading your entire life isn't the same one Jesus knew? What if the apostles quoted from a different source than what's in your English Bible? What if the tradition that shaped Christianity from the beginning was somehow lost along the way for many believers? That tradition is the Septuagint. And it's been hiding in plain sight for over 2,000 years. The Septuagint— the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible completed more than a century before Christ —was ...

Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divine - wrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind. Yet over the course of the thousand-year biblical era, encounters with God changed dramatically.

En el corazón del mundo antiguo y contemporáneo, las tierras bíblicas se despliegan como un tapiz enriquecido por la diversidad de sus pueblos, la profundidad de sus tradiciones y la resonancia universal de su legado espiritual y cultural. Este libro se adentra en el entramado de historias, paisajes, y expresiones humanas que han emanado de esta región, explorando cómo su influencia se extiende mucho más allá de sus confines geográficos para tocar las vidas y las creencias de personas en todo el mundo. Desde la importancia histórica y el protagonismo de estas tierras en las ...

This book welcomes listeners to appreciate the origins of Christianity within the Roman world in which early Christianity got its first foothold. It does that by immersing listeners in the life and culture of two thriving first-century towns—Pompeii and Herculaneum. Those towns (destroyed in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE) act as showpieces of the world into which the early Christian movement was spreading.

You had a first day of school, a first date, a first kiss, a first job. But here’s something you may not have considered—faith has a starting point. Starting Point is a conversational environment where you can explore faith and experience community. It's a safe place for you to ask questions...

The Zondervan Biblical and Theological Lectures series provides a unique audio learning experience. Unlike a traditional audiobook’s direct narration of a book’s text, Encountering the Holy Land: Audio Lectures include high quality live-recordings of college-level lectures that cover the...

The Zondervan Biblical and Theological Lectures series provides a unique audio learning experience. Unlike a traditional audiobook's direct narration of a book's text, Redeeming Eden Audio Study includes high-quality live recordings of college-level lectures that cover the important points from...

4 Baruch is one of the most intriguing books in the Ethiopian Bible—and one of the most controversial texts excluded from the traditional Jeremiah narrative. In this immersive narration by Christopher Glyn, you'll hear the entire book read aloud that follows the storyline from Jerusalem to Babylon and back again.

The Zondervan Biblical and Theological Lectures series provides a unique audio learning experience. Unlike a traditional audiobook's direct narration of a book's text, Story of Reality: Audio Lectures includes high quality live-recordings of college-level lectures that cover the important points...

The Old Testament of the Bible can feel like a junk drawer—a disorganized collection of important stuff we don't want to lose yet but don't know what to do with. From the Pentateuch to patriarchs and from kings to prophets, it can feel like a puzzle we've tried to put together but wind up...

The Founding Story of Christianity—Told by Its First Historian A concise record of how the Christian church took root and endured. Covers the apostolic era through Constantine’s reign Documents persecution, martyrdom, and doctrinal development Preserves lost writings and oral traditions Profiles early church leaders, bishops, and heretics Shows how the faith spread across the Roman world Eusebius of Caesarea’s History of the Church (Historia Ecclesiastica) is the earliest surviving account of Christianity’s growth from a persecuted sect to an empire-wide faith. Written in the early ...

In western post-Christian society, humans are thought of less like precious image bearers and more like commodities. The canary in the coal mine of this ideological shift is often women and children, which manifests itself in the seemingly built-in disdain towards motherhood and children for their lack of production of economically valuable goods. However, the risk of this utilitarian approach to human life is not just outside the church, but within those spaces as well.

Decolonizing Palestine challenges the weaponization of biblical texts to support the current settler-colonial state of Israel. Raheb argues that some of the most important theological concepts—Israel, the land, election, and chosen people—must be decolonized in a paradigm shift in Christian theological thinking about Palestine. 

Women comprise at least half the world, and usually more than half the church, but so often Christian teaching to women either fails to move beyond a discussion of roles or assumes a particular economic situation or stage of life. This all but shuts women out from contributing to God’s kingdom...

The Christian market is flooded with diet and exercise programs, each claiming to be "God's way" to healthy living. While some of them are based on biblical principles, and some have even proven effective for weight loss, there is not one program leading the pack daring to answer the question...

Each Christmas, adults and children alike delight at the story of the kings from the East who followed the star to Bethlehem to offer gifts to the newborn Christ. While this familiar tale is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, another little-known version later emerged that claimed to be the eyewitness account of the wise men. This ancient manuscript has lain hidden for centuries in the vaults of the Vatican Library, but through the determined persistence of a young scholar, Brent Landau, this astonishing discovery has been translated into English for the very first time as the Revelation of the Magi.

When we first encounter the Bible, we are taught its stories—Adam and Eve, Moses and the Red Sea, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, and more. When a story lacks the details we crave, we fill in the blanks—with what we've seen in movies, read in books, and been told by our Sunday school teachers. But there's a better way to encounter the whole story of Scripture: uncovering and understanding the ancient world and the people who experienced biblical events.

Was Jesus a mainstream or sectarian Jew, as the scholarly consensus tells us? This view—that we must automatically adopt Second Temple Judaism as the paradigm in which to interpret or reconstruct the historical Jesus—is often presented as self-evident, unquestionable, and beyond dispute. However, the promotion of the Jewish Jesus raises serious questions—specifically, whether this consensus is the product of theological and ecumenical agendas. In Judaizing Jesus, noted scholar Robert M.

Believers today are facing a profound spiritual poverty—an ignorance of the women who shaped their faith and an incomplete understanding of the God those women faithfully served. The inspired writers of the Old Testament mention over one hundred women by name and countless others in passing. Yet, how many of us know the stories of these women and the God who wrote them?

The Second Book of Enoch, also known as the Slavonic Enoch or 2 Enoch, is an ancient religious text that is part of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. It is considered pseudepigraphical, attributed to the biblical figure Enoch, who was said to have been taken up to heaven and shown divine revelations. The book exists in various versions, with the most well-known being the Slavonic manuscript preserved in the Russian National Library. The Second Book of Enoch is comprised of several sections that offer a glimpse into cosmology, theology, and eschatology.