For half a century Leander Keck thought, taught, and wrote about the New Testament. He first served as a Professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Emory University's Candler School of Theology before becoming Dean and Professor of Biblical Theology at Yale Divinity School. Keck's lifelong work on Jesus and Paul was a catalyst for the emerging discussions of New Testament Christology and Pauline theology in the Society of Biblical Literature and the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. Keck wrote a staggering number of now industry-standard articles on the New Testament. Here, they are all collected for the first time. In Christ's First Theologian and Why Christ Matters, readers will discover how Keck gave new answers to old questions even as he carefully reframed old answers into new questions. Keck's work is a treasure trove of historical, exegetical, and theological interpretation.

New York Times best-selling author Darrell Bock teams with Daniel Wallace to help lay readers separate fact from fiction and help from hype in the recent best-selling Jesus books and television specials.

There is a quest going on. It's the quest to reduce Jesus to a mythic legend or to nothing more than a mere man. Scholars such as Elaine Pagels and James Tabor are using such recent discoveries as the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas to argue that the Christ of Christianity is a contrived figure and that a different Christ-one human and not divine-is the "true" Christ.

In his trademark easy-to-understand style Darrell Bock takes on these attempts to redefine Jesus in a convincing, winsome way that will help readers understand that the orthodox understanding of Christ and his divinity is as trustworthy and sure as it ever was. Joining Bock for the first time is fellow scholar Daniel Wallace.

Christians around the world recite the Lords Prayer daily, but what exactly are they praying forand what relationship does it have with Jesus own context? Jeffrey B. Gibson reviews scholarship that derives the so-called Lords Prayer from Jewish synagogal prayers and refutes it. The genre of the prayer, he shows, is petitionary, and understanding its intent requires understanding Jesus purpose in calling disciples as witnesses against this generation. Jesus did not mean to teach a unique understanding of God; the prayer had its roots in first-century Jewish movements of protest.

In context, Gibson shows (pace Schweitzer, Lohmeyer, Davies, Allison, and a host of other scholars) that the prayer had little to do with calling down into the present realities of the age to come. Rather, it was meant to protect disciples from the temptations of their age and, thus, to strengthen their countercultural testimony. Gibsons conclusions offer new insights into the historical Jesus and the movement he sought to establish.