Search results for ""Author Hans Dieter Betz""

Paul's Letter to the Philippians is one of the most important but also most difficult parts of the corpus Paulinum. The main difficulties are caused by unresolved issues in the interpretation, which are reflected in the current commentary literature. In the present work, Hans Dieter Betz does not offer a full commentary, but rather seven chapters of new exegetical investigations focusing on controversial passages and issues of the letter. These chapters represent separate engagements over a period of several years and employ the standard historical-critical methodologies, including rhetorical and literary criticism. The introduction clarifies the author's understanding and use of key terminology such as text, manuscript, translation, critical-historical commentary, literary criticism, letter and letter-writing, literary integrity, and verification. As a result, the studies offer new proposals for analyzing difficult passages and issues, and lay the groundwork for understanding the letter as a whole. This letter is decisive primarily for understanding Paul's thinking and acting during his last days when he was imprisoned in Rome (ca. 62 CE). In this situation, he sees clearly what is at stake for his own "life or death", his churches, his collaborators, and the Gospel mission in the future. He took this last letter as being his final chance to set an example on facing personal catastrophe, even raising the question as to whether or not everything had been in vain. He wrote in retrospect of his entire life, but also looking forward to beyond his own death.

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"The Greek magical papyri" is a collection of magical spells and formulas, hymns, and rituals from Greco-Roman Egypt, dating from the second century B.C. to the fifth century A.D.. A comprehensive text, this volume contains a fresh translation of the Greek papyri, as well as Coptic and Demotic texts, the new translation has also been brought up to date.

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"Just hundred years after the first edition of Albrecht Dietrich's Eine Mithrasliturgie (Leipzig 1903; 1923), the present book offers a complete new edition of so complex a text. It provides the Greek text, an English translation, a punctual introduction, an extensive commentary, an index of Greek words and of the various voces magicae, and, finally, also an appendix, with photographic reproductions of the papyrus. ... Not only Hans Dieter Betz is one of the most gifted scholars in the domain of primeval Christianity and Hellenistic religions, but he already devoted to the Mithras Liturgy a monographic essay, which is here enriched and largely supplemented. We particularly appreciated how Betz deals with the critical debate which spread from Dietrich's book (in particular the criticism put forward by one of the most important scholars of Mithraism, the Belgian Franz Cumont) and how he sets Dietrich in the historical and cultural milieu of his age."Chiara O. Tommasi Moreschini auf www.plekos.uni-muenchen.de

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