The New Testament as Literature

Catalog description

Though one of the world’s most widely read works, the New Testament is not typically read as literature. More often it is broken into small, isolated passages used by Christians for spiritual guidance. What does it look like, though, when read as an anthology of ancient literature? And more specifically as the diverse literary expressions of an ancient culture quite different from our own? How can close reading of various works of the New Testament with an eye to questions of composition, genre, plot, characters, and rhetorical situations create new perspectives on its meaning and significance? How might this type of reading illuminate the earliest Christian understanding(s) of the human condition?