The Importance of a Comparative Approach to the NT

I started this thread thinking that I would devote it to discussing the changes that I am making in the sixth edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. But I realized, once I started, that I needed to explain more fully what the textbook was at its inception back in the mid 1990s before talking about changes that I’m making now. And so my past few posts have been about how I imagined the book to be a distinctively *historical* introd...