The writings of the Church Fathers form a distinct body of literature that shaped the early church and built upon the doctrinal foundations of Christianity established within the New Testament. Christian literature in the period c.100–c.400 constitutes one of the most influential textual oeuvres of any religion. Written mainly in Greek, Latin and Syriac, Patristic literature emanated from all parts of the early Christian world and helped to extend its boundaries. The History offers a systematic account of that literature and its setting. The works of individual writers in shaping the various genres of Christian literature is considered, alongside three general essays, covering distinct periods in the development of Christian literature, which survey the social, cultural and doctrinal context within which Christian literature arose and was used by Christians. This is a landmark reference book for scholars and students alike.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/23049402

The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature

Aim of the course. The aim of this course is to prepare the student for future exegesis coursework through an investigation of the backgrounds, origins, circumstances, and character of the New Testament books. In order to advance into deeper engagement with the Word of God, students must establish a foundational understanding of the historical context of the New Testament and the earliest Church as well as a basic familiarity with the issues surrounding the scholarly study of the New Testament, today. At Gordon-Conwell, the course ‘Introduction New Testament’ traditionally seeks to supply this need and so lay the foundation for more detailed engagement with individual New Testament books.

/pdf/an-introduction-to-the-new-testament-3gpu00cjwf.pdf

An Introduction to the New Testament

Chapter 1: The Reconstruction and Interpretation of the Teaching of Jesus The author examines the various sources available, and cautions that the more we learn about those sources the more difficult the task seems to become. He suggests that students must do justice to the categories of first-century Judaism in terms of which the teaching was originally expressed, and must always set the teaching of Jesus in the context of the circumstances and situation of his ministry. Finally, he insists we must employ the "form-critical approach" which uses methodology arising out of the nature of the sources rather than being imposed upon them from outside.

/pdf/rediscovering-the-teaching-of-jesus-1w7ucdegi6.pdf

Rediscovering the teaching of Jesus

History, Hayden White remarks, has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines. These disciplines, however, have varied over time. Latenineteenth-century German historiography looked to the rigorous procedures of the natural sciences to reconstruct the past “as it actually happened“; mid-twentieth-century historians turned to the social sciences, especially to anthropology and sociology, for their models and methods. More recently, historians' appropriation of (and experimentation with) concepts derived from literary and critical theory has occasioned much heated discussion within the field.

The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”

Christianity is unique among the world religions in being born with a Bible in its cradle. The use of the Old Testament continued to play a great part in Christian writing as it had done previously in Christian speech. The existence of an authoritative Bible would have had the negative effect of inhibiting any thought of producing fresh books, and there is more than a suggestion in the early Church of a reluctance to write. With the exception of the Pauline letters the New Testament writings were relatively slow in appearing, and a high proportion of them are anonymous. The Old Testament supplied the basis of early Christian thought, it did not supply the models for its writing, and in the matter of literary forms the New Testament is remarkably independent of the Old. The New Testament was not, like the Old Testament, revealed the limited amount of material available for canonisation.

The new testament in the making

New Testament Apocrypha

The document with which this paper is concerned was discovered in 1945 or 1946 in the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi, in the same codex as the more famous Gospel of Thomas. Unlike Thomas, however, it has so far attracted comparatively little attention—largely because it affords no scope for the seekers after sensation. It has been held by reputable scholars that Thomas goes back at least in part to a tradition independent of our canonical Gospels, but Philip has never been regarded as anything but a Gnostic work. Yet it is not thereby devoid of interest or of significance.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E4FB972BAFC64DA083146CBD78BE824F/S0424208400004228a.pdf/div-class-title-the-gospel-of-philip-div.pdf

R. McL. Wilson

Papers

New Testament Apocrypha

The Gospel of Philip

Gnosis : a selection of Gnostic texts

Gnosis and the New Testament

Studies in the Gospel of Thomas