As the early church moved away from the original cultural setting of the Bible and found its home in the west, Christians lost touch with the ancient world of the Bible. Cultural habits, the particulars of landscape, even the biblical languages soon were unknown. And the cost was enormous: Christians began reading the Bible as foreigners and missing the original images and ideas that shaped a biblical worldview. "The Bible and the Land", by New Testament scholar Gary M. Burge, launches a multi-volume series that explores how the culture of the biblical world is presupposed in story after story of the Bible. Using cultural anthropology, ancient literary sources, and a selective use of modern Middle Eastern culture, Burge reopens the ancient biblical story and urges us to look at them through new lenses. Here he explores primary motifs from the biblical landscape - geography, water, rock, bread, etcetera - and applies them to vital stories from the Bible. In "Jesus, the Middle Eastern Storyteller", Burge explains that Jesus lived in a story-telling culture that was completely unlike the modern world. When we imagine Jesus' teaching in his own time and place, we cannot use profiles of teachers from our own setting to understand the nature of his work. Jesus' world was different. Using biblical scholarship, cultural anthropology, and a knowledge of the Middle East's traditions, Gary M. Burge explains the parables like they have been rarely explained before. And he does so to bring new insight to Jesus' view of God and his understanding of the life of discipleship.

Author Biography

Gary M. Burge (PhD, King's College, Aberdeen University) is a professor of New Testament in the Department of Biblical & Theological Studies at Wheaton College and Graduate School. Gary has authored a number of books including commentaries on John and The Letters of John in the NIV Application Commentary Series. He also specializes in the Middle East, its churches and its history in the Hellenistic period. His most recent book is Whose Land? Whose Promise? (2003) received a number of awards from national journals.