Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture: Reading the Bible Critically in Faith

I've been following "non-canonical" lit for some time. This volume more or less pickups where Charles and others left off and offers many more and later texts with good historical commentaries. I've been interested in the progression of a text (or texts) that circulated under the title clavicula salomonus, made "famous" in "Macgregor" Mather's edition. Several of Mather's sources begin with a letter purportedly from Solomon to his son Rehoboam, likewise the greek solomonic version in this edition also begins with a similar letter. Without going into detail, Rehoboam is perhaps better remembered as loosing the ten northern kingdoms and his kingdom to an Egyptian invasion. Mather's sources seem to suggest a tenuous association to the Greek although there is no deeper relationship. The Greek text calls it self "a little key...Solomon", the letter is quite unlike that of Mather's version as is the rest of the Greek text. I'm looking forward to the next volume which includes another magic text Sefer ha-Razim "The Book of the Mysteries" (not to be confused with Sefer Raziel).Volume 2 has been mentioned, but has not been followed with an official announcement.

With almost a dozen of these documents dated around the first century, you can understand WHY both the Jews and the early church felt they need to define a definitive canon! There are over three dozen documents examined in this work, (many are written by clearly Christian authors), with a handful of these from before the time of Christ.This work is good in that while it continues with a similar format of the latest Hendrickson issue OTP 1&2 from JHC, it includes a lot of cross referencing (fully indexed) to the Rabbinic literature (Mishnah/Talmuds etc) and early church fathers and other commonly references sources. It's also fully indexed to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament (handy for us students!). This volume contains a number of constructed documents, where there have not been extant copies found, but their entries in this work have been necessarily constructed from quotations. This is a stand alone work, designed as a one stop shop for these documents for most undergrad students, although everything is fully footnoted and there's a bibliography available for each document. Where there are two radically different versions of the one document, both are given. Nothing is repeated from OTP 1&2!Although I must confess there is one thing that I did almost as soon as I received this book, and that's pencil in the dates for each document beside their entry in the front index!!This book would be ideal for anyone studying early church history, the languages of the early church, even the development of Judaism (seemingly influenced by Christian thought), or Islam (a surprising amount of material in the koran is found in early church literature, although this volume only annotates a bit of it briefly).(it's possibly a bit technical in places for a general reader, but you can easily skip those places and move onto the next section. The documents themselves are easily understood, and there's a particularly interesting history stretching from Creation to Daniel that would make the book a worthwhile purchase for non-students or general interest readers).

False demonic books

This great book does a good job as a follow-up to the preceding 2 volumes. They are actually fun and educational to read if you are into that kind of material.

Fascinating. It may take the rest of my life to read but I'm loving every moment.

This has a version of the Key of Solomon which is fascinating, also good material on Melchezadek.

Good Book especially if you are truly interested in ancient and biblical history. It is nice they finally published it.

deep