Bücher von Ben Iii Witherington

Ben Witherington III confronts the claims of The Da Vinci Code with the sure-footedness of a New Testament scholar, yet in the plain language that any interested reader can follow. Dan Brown's international bestseller The Da Vinci Code has raised many questions in the minds of readers: Was Jesus really married to Mary Magdalene? Did he father a child with her? Did Constantine suppress the earliest Gospels and invent the doctrine of Christ's divinity? Do the Gnostic Gospels represent the true Christian faith which the early church sought to supplant?The Da Vinci Code popularizes the speculations and contentions of numerous more serious books that are also attracting wide attention. How should we respond to claims that we now have documents that reveal secrets about Jesus, secrets long suppressed by the church and other religious institutions? Do these new documents successfully debunk traditional views about Jesus and early Christianity? Ben Witherington takes us back to the early centuries after Jesus' death and tells us what we can really know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the canonical Gospels and their Gnostic rivals.

More than eighty years ago Albert Schweitzer posed a question of enduring debate for New Testament scholarship. Did Jesus--and later Paul--believe that the apocalyptic kingdom of God was about to appear, bringing an end to this world? Indeed, what were the eschatological teachings of Jesus and Paul? Is there any appreciable continuity between the two?Ben Witherington takes a hard look at the Gospel texts and makes a thorough and critical assessment of Paul's eschatology. For each topic examined--the language of imminence, the dominion of God, the community of Christ, the Israel of God, the day of the Lord and the resurrection of the dead--he compares and contrasts Jesus and Paul. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of New Testament eschatology.With the second millennium drawing to a close and world events sparking the speculations of popular religious imaginations, Witherington provides a timely and sober re-examination of a topic too long neglected by serious scholarship.

Archaeologist Art West makes the discovery of a lifetime in Jerusalem finding the tombstone of Lazarus, which indicates that Jesus raised him from the dead. But before he can make public his amazing discovery, the stone is stolen, sold to the British Library, and West is implicated in an antiquities fraud that will lead to a trial. West's Jewish and Muslim friends in Jerusalem rally to support West's innocence and to help find the thief who stole the stone, but then West is shot and in critical condition in a Jerusalem hospital. Can the truth be discovered in time, and West's life be saved? And what was on that Aramaic scroll that was found in Lazarus's coffin? In this fast-paced thriller, Ben Witherington, himself a NT scholar with a degree in English literature, together with his wife, Ann, introduces us to the life of an archaeologist and NT scholar and his trials and tribulations when a big find comes to light. Set in the always volatile city of Jerusalem, the Witheringtons reveal the fascinating hidden dimensions of multi-religious life in that Holy Place, and show how even today Christians, Jews, and Muslims can work together so the truth may come to light, and all may experience "the Lazarus Effect"--new life from the dead.

Art West has done it again. This time, he finds himself in hot water in Corinth, while excavating at a Roman villa with his fiancee, Marissa Okur, as they chart a sometimes bumpy course towards marriage. Art runs into a modern-day prophetess, survives an earthquake, and has to overcome annoying Greek authorities who stand in his way of making more discoveries of relevance to the study of the New Testament. Meanwhile his friend Kahlil el Said and his daughter who live in Jerusalem make a terrible discovery about her former husband the terrorist, with potentially dangerous and devastating consequences. The worlds of archaeology and the Bible converge once more with both heat and light shed on the origins of Christianity in this fourth installment in the series of seven Art West adventures.

In this second novel of the series, Art West seeks out the meaning of the mysterious symbolic number 666 while exploring sites in Egypt and Turkey. He discovers an inscription in southern Egypt at the Philae Temple in Aswan, which reads, ""He is many men and no man, towering like the sphinx, dead and alive, but who knows what he thinks? Back from the Styx; 666."" Who is this sphinx-like man? Could he be relevant to the twenty-first century? These questions lead Art to investigate possible connections between the Coptic Gospels and Coptic Orthodox beliefs. In the middle of such investigations Art is involved in a harrowing prisoner exchange in Israel at the hands of Hamas, and he discovers the origins of Christians wearing crosses. He also tangles with the notorious terrorist El Tigre.Set in the context of Middle East tensions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, this fast-paced thriller explores the meaning of eschatological or ""end times"" language for the earliest Christians, who, while trying to spread the kingdom of God, faced the rising tide of the kingdom of Caesar and his emperor cult. Along the way West learns some apocalyptic secrets destined to change his life forever.