If you want to walk on water, you've got to get out of the boat

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Allen Dwight Callahan

The Bible has profoundly influenced African Americans throughout their history. This wide-ranging book is the first to explore the African American experience of the Bible from a variety of perspectives. Connecting biblical stories and images to the music, politics, religion, and arts and letters of African Americans, the book demonstrates the centrality of the Bible in black culture, both popular and highbrow. African Americans first came to the Bible under the yoke of slavery. The Bible was not read but heard, and its stories became first a source of songs, spirituals, and hollers, and later, after the Civil War, a powerful motivation for learning to read. Allen Callahan traces the Bible culture that developed during and following enslavement. He identifies the most important biblical images for African Americans - Exile, Exodus, Ethiopia, and Emmanuel - and discusses their recurrence and their role in the formation of a collective identity and sense of justice. With insights into the deeply interwoven histories of African Americans and the Bible, the author guides his readers toward a deeper appreciation of both.

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Thomas L. Thompson

"The Mythic Past is the first accessible overview and synthesis of two decades of scholarship on various aspects of early Palestine history - linguistic, economic, agricultural, and archaeological. While its controversial conclusion - that the Old Testament offers absolutely no historical evidence for the early history of Israel - will surely draw fire from conservative Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals alike, the author's insistence on the Old Testament as a great collection of literature offers refreshing new ways to read it. By separating the Bible from history, we are not getting rid of the Bible; instead, we are reading it as it was meant to be read - as stories and legends, as some of the world's most beautiful poetry, pious, lyrical, and erotic, as epic narratives and wondrous folktales, often stunningly profound and evocative, as romances and adventure stories both moralistic and sentimental."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kenneth E. Bailey

Beginning with Jesus' birth, Ken Bailey leads readers on a kaleidoscopic study of Jesus throughout the four Gospels. Bailey examines the life and ministry of Jesus with attention to the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women and especially Jesus' parables. Through it all, Bailey employs his trademark expertise as a master of Middle Eastern culture to lead us into a deeper understanding of the person and significance of Jesus within his own cultural context. With a sure but gentle hand, Bailey lifts away the obscuring layers of modern Western interpretation to reveal Jesus in the light of his actual historical and cultural setting. -- from back cover.

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Mark Link

Discusses the evidence revealed by modern archaeological discoveries that supports the accuracy of the Old Testament in historical particulars. THESE STONES WILL SHOUT tries to present the Jewish Scriptures in a way that not only remains faithful to them, but in a way, also, that relates them to what people today are doing and thinking. More importantly, it tries to present the Jewish Scriptures in a way that leads to a prayerful reflection of them. The author, Mark Link, says that his method and approach grew out of a classroom teaching situation. (back cover) CONTENTS: Biblical Prehistory Folk History/Peoplehood Peoplehood/Nationhood Nationhood/Exile Exile/Remnant Community Remnant Community.