The student who studies Jesus’s parables may have confidence that he or she “stands upon a particularly firm historical ground” (11). These parables not only “represent a specially reliable tradition,” but also “present the appearance of being entirely free from problematic elements” (12). Translation and tradition have added elements to the parables that were foreign to the original versions, but diligent scholarship can locate and remove these elements and reveal the original setting, intention, and effect of Jesus’s parables (15–21). Through these operations, modern Christians can “hear again his authentic voice” (22).

Picture a 20th-century Greek, forcibly expatriated from Turkey. Bemused and befuddled, he ponders his belongings, distinguishing peregrine wheat from chaff. Which items will his convoy convey? Why, he will carry the uncorrupted body of St. John of Russia (1690–1730), of course, and he will conceal it in a carpet lest the Turks, who also revere the saint, should detain him. While this reverential “martyr piety” surprises the modern ear, Vasiliki M. Limberis argues that it typified the Cappadocian Fathers’ Christian devotion and should therefore be understood as ancient rather than novel. As Limberis writes, “My hope is that the reader should recognize the gripping, dynamic, pervasively central role martyr piety had in the Christianity of the Cappadocian Fathers. If that is accomplished, transporting the relics of St. John the Russian on one’s back will never again appear startling” (7).

Bultmann contextualizes Jesus’s teaching within the Jewish teachings of his day, seeking not to derive universal truths, but to encounter the Jesus of history. Humanistic conceptions of Jesus fall to stroke after stroke of Bultmann’s pen: Jesus had no conception of humans’ intrinsic worth (46), no idea of religion as “self-actualization” (52), no notion of a universal moral law derivable through philosophical reflection (55). He knew only of humans as they related to God, and he preached that all humans face an eschatological decision between God and self (120). Only in this decision could humans have worth.

How do Jesus of Nazareth’s three identities comingle and interact? What features of his message animated early Christian theology? Larry Hurtado answers these and other questions in his book.

What can be known about Jesus’s relationship to Judaism? Why did his followers later split from their leader’s faith tradition? E. P. Sanders addresses these and other important questions in his book.

Plotinus on the Soul forwards a thorough study of one of antiquity’s most sophisticated Platonist psychologies. Through textual analyses, D. Caluori convincingly argues that Plotinus’s notion of the “hypostasis Soul” merits a higher seat in the western canon, and he devotes 200 pages to put it there.

What do we know about Tertullian? Timothy Barnes finds the answers to these questions in Tertullian’s own writings, even though they leave many questions unanswered.

This careful, thoughtful, and theologically relevant book successfully shows that Augustine’s kenotic model of deification explains humans’ material (corporeal) and intelligent (psychic) nature and demonstrates that, in lowering themselves, humans become like God. Emptying ourselves, we are filled.

What were the unique monastic disciplines? What mental, emotional, and imaginative states did monks develop, and what does modern cognitive science say about them? Dilley invites his readers to learn about and partake of monastic disciplines, expanding their own minds, emotions, and imaginations.

A review of Timothy Law’s book on the Septuigint’s transmission.

What is new and distinctive about the conceptions of ‘self’ developed in Hellenistic philosophy and perpetuated in Roman thought? Gill addresses these questions and more.

What denotes an original text, and what reception? How can one distinguish these categories, and who has the authority to do so? How should new discoveries shift interpretive paradigms? Brennan Breed addresses these questions in Nomadic Text.