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Description: Twenty-four scholars join their efforts to congratulate David Lee Balch for a long career of dedication to scholarship and teaching. Topics range from the life of early Christian house churches to the kinds of challenges that early Christians needed to negotiate in their artistic and literary worlds as they established their own identity. Contributors Edward Adams Frederick E Brenk Warren Carter John R. Clarke Everett Ferguson John T. Fitzgerald Richard A. Freund Ronald F. Hock Robin M. Jensen Davina C. Lopez Margaret Y. MacDonald Abraham J. Malherbe Aliou Ciss Niang Peter Oakes Todd Penner Leo G. Perdue Turid Karlsen Seim Dennis E. Smith Yancy W. Smith Stephen V. Sprinkle Hal Taussig Oliver Larry Yarbrough Endorsements: ""From captivating glimpses into the microcosm of ancient households to the broader question of a hermeneutics of images, from Christian house churches to visual representations and archeology in the interaction with texts-this is a strikingly rich collection of stimulating essays that each in their own way illustrate the breadth and fecundity of David Balch's scholarship, as well as his great capacity to impel multi-faceted questions and inquiries that are re-defining New Testament Studies."" --Brigitte Kahl Union Theological Seminary ""Richly decorated with images, this remarkably diverse yet unified collection of twenty-one essays serves up a fitting tribute to David Lee Balch. As David Balch has noted throughout his research career, material culture, visual and constructed worlds, and texts are deliberate acts of communication and persuasion. Thus, convinced that archaeology, art, literary documents, and the iconography of the Greeks and Romans situate text in context, each of the essayists picks up on these social-cultural elements and covers a stunning variety of texts, topics, representative artistic images, sculptures, reliefs, and epigraphic remains. Stimulating, provocative, and challenging are the operative words for this fes