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Sin was an extremely important and serious concern for the earliest Christians and the authors of the New Testament writings. Early Christians came to see the life and ministry of Jesus as challenging presumptions about the meanings of sin and faithfulness. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of different understandings of sin in early Christianity. Jeffrey S. Siker describes how the earliest Christian voices represented in the New Testament writings understood "sin" not only as a theological abstraction, but also as a real reflection upon human thought and behavior that violated right relationships with both other human beings and with God. Siker explores language about sin in relation to the Jewish and Greco-Roman contextual worlds of the New Testament writings, and examines the development and change of these worlds in relation to the modern concept of sin.
List of contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1: Whatever Happened to Sin?
- Chapter 2: A Taxonomy of Sin in the New Testament Worlds
- Chapter 3: Sin in the Gospel of Mark
- Chapter 4: Sin in the Gospel of Matthew
- Chapter 5: Sin in Luke-Acts
- Chapter 6: Sin in the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles
- Chapter 7: Sin in the Letters of Paul and Deutero-Paul
- Chapter 8: Sin in Hebrews, James, and 1 and 2 Peter
- Chapter 9: Sin in Jude, Revelation, and Beyond
- Chapter 10: Sin Then and Now
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Dr. Jeffrey S. Siker has taught at Loyola Marymount University since 1987 in the areas of New Testament, early Jewish/Christian relations, the Bible and Ethics, and the history of biblical interpretation. Dr. Siker has been awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Catholic Biblical Association, the Wabash Center, and has been a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. Dr. Siker is an active Presbyterian minister. He is married to Judy Siker, herself a biblical scholar and PCUSA minister, and together they have five grown children.
Summary
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of different understandings of sin in early Christianity.
Additional text
This book is crisply and lucidly written...The book includes a substantial bibliography, along with indexes of Scripture passages and topics.
