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The Open Yale Courses Series
New Testament History and Literature
In this engaging introduction to the New Testament, Professor Dale B. Martin presents a historical study of the origins of Christianity by analyzing the literature of the earliest Christian movements. Focusing mainly on the New Testament, he also considers nonbiblical Christian writings of the era.
Martin begins by making a powerful case for the study of the New Testament. He next sets the Greco-Roman world in historical context and explains the place of Judaism within it. In the discussion of each New Testament book that follows, the author addresses theological themes, then emphasizes the significance of the writings as ancient literature and as sources for historical study. Throughout the volume, Martin introduces various early Christian groups and highlights the surprising variations among their versions of Christianity.
Martin begins by making a powerful case for the study of the New Testament. He next sets the Greco-Roman world in historical context and explains the place of Judaism within it. In the discussion of each New Testament book that follows, the author addresses theological themes, then emphasizes the significance of the writings as ancient literature and as sources for historical study. Throughout the volume, Martin introduces various early Christian groups and highlights the surprising variations among their versions of Christianity.
462 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2009
62 people are currently reading
257 people want to read
About the author
Dale B. Martin
11 books35 followersDale B. Martin specializes in New Testament and Christian Origins, including attention to social and cultural history of the Greco-Roman world. Before joining Yale in 1999, he taught at Rhodes College and Duke University. His books include: Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity; The Corinthian Body; Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians; Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation; and Pedagogy of the Bible: an Analysis and Proposal. He has edited several books, including (with Patricia Cox Miller), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. He was an associate editor for the revision and expansion of the Encyclopedia of Religion, published in 2005. He has published several articles on topics related to the ancient family, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and ideology of modern biblical scholarship, including titles such as: "Contradictions of Masculinity: Ascetic Inseminators and Menstruating Men in Greco-Roman Culture." He currently is working on issues in biblical interpretation, social history and religion in the Greco-Roman world, and sexual ethics. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the Lilly Foundation, the Fulbright Commission (USA-Denmark), and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2009).
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 10, 2021
https://oyc.yale.edu/courses
دانشگاه ییل برای کرونا چند تا از دورههای آموزشی خودش رو رایگان در اختیار عموم گذاشته. این دوره و دورههای دیگه با موضوعات مختلف رو از آدرس بالا میتونید دانلود کنید. از لحاظ کیفیت آموزش حرف ندارن.
دانشگاه ییل برای کرونا چند تا از دورههای آموزشی خودش رو رایگان در اختیار عموم گذاشته. این دوره و دورههای دیگه با موضوعات مختلف رو از آدرس بالا میتونید دانلود کنید. از لحاظ کیفیت آموزش حرف ندارن.
July 13, 2022
Reading the New testament (NT) as the literal word of God turns out to be a real hindrance; if instead you read the NT as you would any other piece of ancient literature—and within its proper historical context—you’ll inevitably start to notice some things, for instance that the earliest Gospel—the Gospel of Mark—was written 40 years after Jesus’ death (70 CE), and that the other three canonical Gospels were written much later (John was written as late as 110 CE). Matthew and Luke, both written 10 to 20 years after Mark, borrowed heavily from Mark, as well as from other circulating works and oral traditions. The result is a patchwork of contradictory accounts and divergent theological positions that were written by individuals that never met Jesus and were decades removed from the reported events. And this doesn’t even include the noncanonical and Gnostic Gospels that portray Jesus and his teachings in a radically different light.
Here’s something else you’ll notice. Christians like to say that Jesus was prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, and it IS true that the prophets foretold the coming of the Messiah. But the Jews believed that the Messiah would be a king or priest (or both) and that he would lead a revolt against Rome within his own lifetime to establish a kingdom of God on earth. The Christian idea of the Messiah being a poor, illiterate carpenter from a rural backwater, who was killed before accomplishing any of these objectives, was, frankly, laughable, especially to the majority of Jews of the time. The Messiah was never supposed to suffer and die, and was certainly not supposed to be crucified, which was a humiliating form of execution reserved by Romans for slaves, disgraced soldiers, and political acitivists and rebels.
Knowing that, one can read the Gospels according to what they were, in all likelihood, intended to be: accounts trying to justify or rationalize what the Jews would consider the failed mission of Jesus. Christians retroactively changed the story so that the Messiah would be REQUIRED to suffer and die for humanity’s sins and would then return at a LATER time to fulfill the prophecy.
There’s a related logical fallacy referred to as “moving the goalposts,” whereby an opponent whose claim is refuted simply changes the terms of the argument on the fly. That’s a bit what the NT is doing; Jesus was supposed to be the Messiah yet failed to accomplish what the Messiah was supposed to do, so it’s then suggested that, well, it may SEEM like he failed, but that’s just because he’s going to rise from the dead and return to fulfill the prophecy at some unspecified later time. Then, when Jesus didn’t return (Jesus said his own generation would see his return), the story changed AGAIN and now, thousands of years later, we’re still waiting for it.
Maybe you still believe this, but even if you do, it shouldn’t be too difficult to understand why Jews, or the nonreligious, might not. The claims, frankly, don’t really make a whole lot of sense, which is probably why “faith” is so strongly emphasized in the Christian religion (remember, no one plays the “faith” card unless they really have no valid reasons for sustaining their beliefs).
Yale professor Dale Martin does a fantastic job explaining these issues and much more in this phenomenal book. Admittedly, I was never religious to begin with, but in taking some time to try to understand the religious beliefs of others, I’ve honestly discovered that Christian claims make even less sense to me than they did before. It’s not that the NT is not interesting literature to study, but it is not to be taken any more seriously as a historical document than the epic poetry of Mesopotamia or the mythology of ancient Greece.
If you still believe in the literal truth of the NT, this book will disabuse you of that fallacy, from a professor who has been teaching NT studies for decades.
Here’s something else you’ll notice. Christians like to say that Jesus was prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, and it IS true that the prophets foretold the coming of the Messiah. But the Jews believed that the Messiah would be a king or priest (or both) and that he would lead a revolt against Rome within his own lifetime to establish a kingdom of God on earth. The Christian idea of the Messiah being a poor, illiterate carpenter from a rural backwater, who was killed before accomplishing any of these objectives, was, frankly, laughable, especially to the majority of Jews of the time. The Messiah was never supposed to suffer and die, and was certainly not supposed to be crucified, which was a humiliating form of execution reserved by Romans for slaves, disgraced soldiers, and political acitivists and rebels.
Knowing that, one can read the Gospels according to what they were, in all likelihood, intended to be: accounts trying to justify or rationalize what the Jews would consider the failed mission of Jesus. Christians retroactively changed the story so that the Messiah would be REQUIRED to suffer and die for humanity’s sins and would then return at a LATER time to fulfill the prophecy.
There’s a related logical fallacy referred to as “moving the goalposts,” whereby an opponent whose claim is refuted simply changes the terms of the argument on the fly. That’s a bit what the NT is doing; Jesus was supposed to be the Messiah yet failed to accomplish what the Messiah was supposed to do, so it’s then suggested that, well, it may SEEM like he failed, but that’s just because he’s going to rise from the dead and return to fulfill the prophecy at some unspecified later time. Then, when Jesus didn’t return (Jesus said his own generation would see his return), the story changed AGAIN and now, thousands of years later, we’re still waiting for it.
Maybe you still believe this, but even if you do, it shouldn’t be too difficult to understand why Jews, or the nonreligious, might not. The claims, frankly, don’t really make a whole lot of sense, which is probably why “faith” is so strongly emphasized in the Christian religion (remember, no one plays the “faith” card unless they really have no valid reasons for sustaining their beliefs).
Yale professor Dale Martin does a fantastic job explaining these issues and much more in this phenomenal book. Admittedly, I was never religious to begin with, but in taking some time to try to understand the religious beliefs of others, I’ve honestly discovered that Christian claims make even less sense to me than they did before. It’s not that the NT is not interesting literature to study, but it is not to be taken any more seriously as a historical document than the epic poetry of Mesopotamia or the mythology of ancient Greece.
If you still believe in the literal truth of the NT, this book will disabuse you of that fallacy, from a professor who has been teaching NT studies for decades.
December 31, 2018
I loved these lectures by Dale Martin. There were some things I had not considered before, and if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, knowing some of historical issues surrounding the construction of the New Testament, the different Christologies that were disseminating during the formulation of these texts, will help students to see why certain things were included in these documents and how early Christians had divergent beliefs about Jesus.
You probably will not agree with all of Martin's conclusions, but he will make you think!
You probably will not agree with all of Martin's conclusions, but he will make you think!
July 18, 2022
I wish a few of my fellow atheists would read this book, which is a summary of the Yale University course on New Testament Studies. Some of them seem to have taken a Fundamentalist outlook, which holds that the Bible is the literal word of God, and turned it on its head so that they now view the Bible as utterly worthless in every respect.
Dale Martin outlines what the secular study of the Bible involves: analysing the texts critically to work out what we can know about the authors, the context in which they wrote and the reasons why they chose to write what they did. Even if they are Christians, secular historical-critical scholars do not concern themselves with theological lessons to be drawn from the texts but with what the texts reveal about the very different theological outlooks of their authors. They go where the evidence leads, even if, as is often the case, that evidence leads to some very uncomfortable places for Christians.
Some key takeaways from this book:
Jesus was an eschatological Jewish preacher whose message was firmly of its time and place. He taught that the imminent arrival of God’s direct rule on earth would sweep away the Jews’ Roman oppressors.
The early Church was an extremely disparate movement. Its evolution into Christianity as we know it was not inevitable but is a product of the almost random vagaries of history as it unfolds. Martin illustrates this by examining some works that didn’t make it into the canon, such as The Gospel of St Thomas and the Acts of Paul and Thecia.
The New Testament overstates Paul’s importance. He didn’t “found” Christianity as a gentile religion but was part of a wider movement within the Jesus sect that took its message to the gentiles. The Acts of the Apostles is not a reliable account of what happened but a myth-like narrative loosely based on real events.
Like the Old Testament, the New Testament contains books that are forgeries. Six of the 13 letters attributed to Paul were almost certainly not written by him but were forged using his name in order to lend them greater authority. The same is true of the letters attributed to Peter and James.
A final point is to note that while historical-critical scholars agree that the New Testament is not in any sense a reliable source for the story of what actually happened, this doesn’t mean that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist. Martin is very clear: “No reputable scholar, to my knowledge, today makes such an argument.”
Dale Martin outlines what the secular study of the Bible involves: analysing the texts critically to work out what we can know about the authors, the context in which they wrote and the reasons why they chose to write what they did. Even if they are Christians, secular historical-critical scholars do not concern themselves with theological lessons to be drawn from the texts but with what the texts reveal about the very different theological outlooks of their authors. They go where the evidence leads, even if, as is often the case, that evidence leads to some very uncomfortable places for Christians.
Some key takeaways from this book:
Jesus was an eschatological Jewish preacher whose message was firmly of its time and place. He taught that the imminent arrival of God’s direct rule on earth would sweep away the Jews’ Roman oppressors.
The early Church was an extremely disparate movement. Its evolution into Christianity as we know it was not inevitable but is a product of the almost random vagaries of history as it unfolds. Martin illustrates this by examining some works that didn’t make it into the canon, such as The Gospel of St Thomas and the Acts of Paul and Thecia.
The New Testament overstates Paul’s importance. He didn’t “found” Christianity as a gentile religion but was part of a wider movement within the Jesus sect that took its message to the gentiles. The Acts of the Apostles is not a reliable account of what happened but a myth-like narrative loosely based on real events.
Like the Old Testament, the New Testament contains books that are forgeries. Six of the 13 letters attributed to Paul were almost certainly not written by him but were forged using his name in order to lend them greater authority. The same is true of the letters attributed to Peter and James.
A final point is to note that while historical-critical scholars agree that the New Testament is not in any sense a reliable source for the story of what actually happened, this doesn’t mean that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist. Martin is very clear: “No reputable scholar, to my knowledge, today makes such an argument.”
March 18, 2015
Excellent course materials to accompany the Open Yale course offered on itune. The material is immense and complex, requires much reading and collating of facts. Yet Prof. Martin has a lively and engaging lecturing style imparting his scholarly knowledge of New Testament in the scholar-historical method approach. An extremely useful course. Bart Erhman's books are good supplement for this course.
January 17, 2014
Fascinating. This book is filled with many insights that brought new life to the NT for me. I only wish I'd written notes as I went along. I didn't finish it before the end of 2013, largely because I tried to read the NT text concurrent with each chapter. Anyway, I'm on to reading the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible for Sunday School. I'll have to come back to this next year.
July 15, 2021
Incredible. Dale Martin is so fun, and I wish all of his courses were offered online for free! Highly recommend to those who want to learn more about the historical-critical textual method and the diverse sects of early Christianity.
January 23, 2019
Dale Martin is a knowledgeable professor and an entertaining writer. I enjoy his work without always agreeing with his conclusions.
February 23, 2023
This is a terrific introduction to the study of the New Testament, especially in the interpretive practice of historical criticism. More important than professor Dale Martin's conclusions, which are invaluable, is his work as a representation of the historical-critical method. I can't recommend this enough and will return to it as a reference.
February 1, 2020
I had to read this in short segments. Lots to learn!
February 21, 2017
A good survey course.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews