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Mark Allan Powell is an American New Testament scholar and professional music critic.
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Mark Allan Powell is an American New Testament scholar and professional music critic.
Powell was Professor of New Testament at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio until his retirement in 2018. He is editor of the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary and author of more than 100 articles and 35 books on the Bible and religion, including a widely used textbook, Introducing the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2009; 2nd ed., 2018).[ citation needed ]
Powell has held a number of positions in the academic guild of theological studies. From 1992–1996, he served as co-chair of The Matthew Group, a section of the Society of Biblical Literature devoted to the study of Matthew's Gospel, and from 2000–2006, he served as Chair of The Historical Jesus Section for that same organization. He has also served for many years as editor of the Society of Biblical Literature's dissertation series (Academia Biblica), and he has been on the editorial boards of numerous professional journals, including Catholic Biblical Quarterly , Journal of Biblical Literature , and Word and World . He is one of the founding editors of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus .
Powell's primary contributions in the field of biblical/theological studies have been in three areas: the application of modern literary criticism to the Bible, the interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew as a product of early Christian formation developing out of Judaism, and the scholarly appraisal of what can be reliably known about Jesus through the application of traditional historical methodology.
Powell is best known to many students of religion as the author of a few widely used textbooks. His Introducing the New Testament (Baker Academic 2009; 2nd. ed., 2018), is designed to serve as a college textbook for survey courses on the New Testament. It is descriptive in tone, avoiding stands on contentious issues; well illustrated with color reproductions of artwork from various cultures depicting New Testament themes; and "another noteworthy feature, perhaps the most important one, is that the book is filled with hyperlinks to a website (www.IntroducingNT.com)" offering extensive printable material, including hundreds of supplemental essays and bibliographies. [1] Powell's What Is Narrative Criticism? (Fortress Press, 1990) is a standard work for introducing students to modern literary criticism and its application to the Gospels. His Jesus as a Figure in History (Westminster/John Knox, 1998; 2nd ed., 2012) is the standard text for many institutions that feature history courses on Jesus or Christian origins. Another book, Fortress Introduction to the Gospels (Fortress Press, 1998; 2nd ed. 2020) is often used at a graduate level for courses focusing on the distinctive characteristics and theological messages of the four New Testament Gospels.
Powell has also written books in the areas of spiritual formation (Loving Jesus), stewardship (Giving To God), and homiletics (What Do They Hear?: Bridging the Gap between Pulpit and Pew). A set of DVDs called How Lutherans Understand the Bible received widespread use throughout the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and were excerpted for inclusion in the Lutheran Study Bible (Augsburg Fortress). An ecumenical, global scholar, Powell served for many years as a Protestant on the Executive Committee of the Catholic Biblical Association, and taught at seminaries in Estonia, Russia, and Tanzania.
Powell has also worked as a professional music critic, with more than 1000 published reviews in the fields of rock and pop music. The two fields of music criticism and religious scholarship come together in his 1200-page volume Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music (Hendrickson, 2000), a critical survey and analysis of artists in both the religious and mainstream markets who have produced faith-oriented products.
Powell was born in Gainesville, Florida in 1953 and ordained as a minister of the American Lutheran Church (now the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) in 1980. He married Melissa Curtis Powell in 1995.
Gospel originally meant the Christian message, but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus, culminating in his trial and death and concluding with various reports of his post-resurrection appearances. Modern biblical scholars are cautious of relying on the gospels uncritically, but nevertheless, they provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus, and critical study can attempt to distinguish the original ideas of Jesus from those of the later Christian authors.
Frank Stagg was a Southern Baptist theologian, seminary professor, author, and pastor over a 50-year ministry career. He taught New Testament interpretation and Greek at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary from 1945 until 1964 and at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky from 1964 until 1978. His publications, recognitions and honors earned him distinction as one of the eminent theologians of the past century. Other eminent theologians have honored him as a "Teaching Prophet."
No one...has ever taken the New Testament more seriously than Frank Stagg, who spent his entire life wrestling with it, paying the price in sweat and hours in an unrelenting quest to hear the message expressed in a language no longer spoken and directed toward a cultural context so foreign to the modern reader.
Walter Brueggemann is an American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian who is widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades. His work often focuses on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and sociopolitical imagination of the Church. He argues that the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, and nationalism.
The Context Group is a working group of international biblical scholars who promote research into the Bible using social-scientific methods such as anthropology and sociology.
Roy Alvin Harrisville II was an American Lutheran theologian who wrote extensively on the interpretation of the New Testament.
Luke Timothy Johnson is an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
Carl Edward Braaten was an American Lutheran theologian and minister.
Terence E. Fretheim was an Old Testament scholar and the Elva B. Lovell professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary. His writings have played a major part in the development of process theology and open theism.
Craig Alan Evans is an American biblical scholar. He is a prolific writer with 70 books and over 600 journal articles and reviews to his name.
Jon Douglas Levenson is an American Hebrew Bible scholar who is the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at the Harvard Divinity School.
Paul John Achtemeier was Herbert Worth and Annie H. Jackson Professor of Biblical Interpretation Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, now Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. He was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1927.
Pheme Perkins is a Professor of Theology at Boston College, where she has been teaching since 1972. She is a nationally recognized expert on the Greco-Roman cultural setting of early Christianity, as well as the Pauline Epistles and Gnosticism.
Jack Dean Kingsbury is the former Aubrey Lee Brooks professor of theology at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, now an emeritus professor.
Richard A. Horsley was the Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts Boston until his retirement in 2007.
Bruce John Malina was an American biblical scholar, noted for his application of social scientific approaches to the Bible.
David Lyon Bartlett was the J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor Emeritus of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, and an ordained minister of the American Baptist Churches, USA.
E. Elizabeth Johnson is an American New Testament scholar and the J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. She is widely known for her writings on the New Testament, specifically the Pauline Letters.
Stanley P. Saunders is a New Testament scholar, whose particular research interest includes eschatology, creation and the Gospel of Matthew. He is also involved in issues of social justice particularly pertaining to the American criminal justice system and creation care.
Beverly Roberts Gaventa is Distinguished Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Baylor University and Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Mitzi J. Smith is an American biblical scholar who is J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. She is the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in New Testament from Harvard. She has written extensively in the field of womanist biblical hermeneutics, particularly on the intersection between race, gender, class, and biblical studies. She considers her work a form of social justice activism that brings attention to unequal treatment of marginalized groups.
2nd edition, revised with three appendixes: mythicists, apologists, psychohistorians.