Bibliography
| Title: Monotheism and Christology in 1 Corinthians 8.4-6 Type: Generic Year: 1987 Abstract: "Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. The thesis is a description of the relationship between the 'one God, the Father' and the 'one Lord, Jesus Christ' in I Cor. 8. 4-6. It analyses Paul's language about God and Christ against the background of contemporary Jewish language about the one God, making use of methodic concepts gleaned eclectically from the structural movement in linguistics and the social sciences. Part one uses the Greek Old Testament, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and the New Testament, in particular some two hundred statements of monotheism collected from these sources (presented in an appendix), to illumine the oblique references to monotheistic belief in Paul's letters. This part of the study concentrates on answering a series of nine questions about Jewish monotheism designed to shed light on Paul's language in our chosen passage. Part two combines the familiar grammatical-historical methods of biblical scholarship with newer, structural methods of exegesis to investigate the doctrinal content of the quasi-confessional language about God and Christ in I Cor. 8. 4-6 in the light of our results from part one. The contribution of the thesis to knowledge lies in three areas. (1) It clarifies the nature and associations of Jewish monotheistic language. (2) It provides scientific support, using the most current methods of exegesis and working with a wide selection of comparative Jewish materials, for the view, by no means generally accepted, that the New Testament adumbrates the concept of the ontological deity of Christ. (3) It brings to the fore a christological category--the language of monotheism--which has been largely overlooked by researchers in the field of the origins and development of christology in the early church. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)" Keywords: New Testament / Early Christianity |