John Collins
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Ancient Jewish And Christian Scriptures
$45.00Add to cartAncient Jewish and Christian Scriptures examines the writings included in and excluded from the Jewish and Christian canons of Scripture and explores the social settings in which some of this literature was viewed as authoritative and some was viewed either as uninspired or as heretical. John J. Collins, Craig A. Evans, and Lee Martin McDonald examine how those noncanonical writings demonstrate the historical, literary, and religious aspects of the culture that gave rise to the writings. They also show how literature excluded from the Jewish and Christian canons of Scripture remains valuable today for understanding the questions and conflicts that early Jewish and Christian faith communities faced. Through this discussion, contemporary readers acquire a broader understanding of biblical Scripture and of Jewish and Christian faith inspired by Scripture.
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Apocalypse Prophecy And Pseudepigraphy
$37.99Add to cartA highly regarded expert on Jewish apocalyptic texts, John J. Collins has written extensively on the subject. Nineteen of his essays written over the last fifteen years, including several previously unpublished contributions, are brought together for the first time in Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Pseudepigraphy.
After an introductory essay that revisits the problem of defining Apocalypse as a literary genre, Collins deals with a number of different topics, including the relationship between apocalypse and prophecy and the troubling ethical issues raised by apocalyptic texts. Collins also examines several specific examples to show the themes and variation present in the genre. Organized in five sections, these thematic essays complement and enrich Collins’s well-known book The Apocalyptic Imagination.
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Seeing The Unseen
$12.49Add to cartAbandoning at age 30 what promised to be a lucrative law practice, John Collins escaped to Spain for a three-year sabbatical to search for the meaning of life. In SEEING THE UNSEEN: Opening the Closed Circuit of Everyday Consciousness, he relates his findings in maxims and identifi es seven impediments that commonly hinder our capacity to render our everyday experience of people, places and things intelligible, meaningful and joyful. Collins believes the greatest obstacle to realizing personal fulfi llment, or salvation or the Kingdom
of God is psychological. Living our lives almost entirely on the conscious surface of Self, we neglect the unconscious core of our being, resulting in the inability of the whole Self to truly see and know reality. Collins suggests that religion’s fi nest hour may come when it assumes responsibility for healing this rupture in our innermost being, allowing us to achieve greater understanding of ourselves, of the world and ultimately, of God. -
Beyond The Qumran Community
$29.99Add to cartWith the full publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fresh analysis of the evidence presented can be – and indeed, should be – made. Beyond the Qumran Community does just that, reaching a surprising conclusion: the sect described in the Dead Sea Scrolls developed later than has usually been supposed and was never confined to the site of Qumran.
John J. Collins here aims to deconstruct “the Qumran community” and show that the sectarian documents actually come from a text spread throughout the land. He first examines the Community Rule or Yahad. Rather than confirming the general assumption that this rulebook relates to a monastic-style community living at the site of Qumran, Collins finds instead that the Essene accounts themselves emphasize that they had settlements in every city. He also considers the Teacher of Righteousness, a pivotal figure in the Essene movement, discovering that he was probably active in the first century bce rather than in the Maccabean era. After examining the available evidence, Collins concludes that it is, in fact, overwhelmingly likely that the site of Qumran housed merely a single settlement of this widespread movement.
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Bible After Babel
$26.99Add to cartBiblical scholars today often sound as if they are caught in the aftermath of Babel – a clamor of voices unable to reach common agreement. Yet is this confusion necessarily a bad thing? Many postmodern critics see the recent profusion of critical approaches as a welcome opportunity for the emergence of diverse new techniques. In The Bible after Babel noted biblical scholar John J. Collins considers the effect of the postmodern situation on biblical, primarily Old Testament, criticism over the last three decades. Engaging and even-handed, Collins examines the quest of historical criticism to objectively establish a text’s basic meaning. Accepting that the Bible may no longer provide secure “foundations” for faith, Collins still highlights its ethical challenge to be concerned for “the other” – a challenge central both to Old Testament ethics and to the teaching of Jesus.
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Encounters With Biblical Theology
$23.00Add to cartThis important book for use in Old Testament courses is also a valuable resource for those exploring the role of the Bible in culture today. The articles include:
Theoretical Issues
“Is a Critical Biblical Theology Possible?”
“Biblical Theology and the History of Israelite Religion”
“The Politics of Biblical Interpretation”The Pentateuch
“Faith without Works: Biblical Ethics and the Sacrifice of Isaac”
“The Development of the Exodus Tradition”
“The Exodus and Biblical Theology”
“The Biblical Vision of the Common Good”Wisdom and Biblical Theology
“The Biblical Precedent for Natural Theology”
“Proverbial Wisdom and the Yahwist Vision”
“Natural Theology and Biblical Tradition: The Case of Hellenistic Judaism”Apocalyptic Literature
“Temporality and Politics in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature”
“The Book of Truth: Daniel as Reliable Witness to Past and Future in the United States of America”
“The Legacy of Apocalypticism: Christian Adaptations of Jewish Tradition”
“Jesus and the Messiahs of Israel”
“Jewish Monotheism and Christian Theology”