Envisioning God in the Humanities: Essays on Christianity, Judaism, and Ancient Religion in Honor of Melissa Harl Sellew. Edited by Courtney J. P. Friesen

Envisioning God in the Humanities is a festschrift in honour of the career of Melissa Harl Sellew. The chapters cover a wide variety of material from the Gospels of the New Testament to the texts of the Nag Hammadi Codices to the cultural worlds in which such texts were produced. This variety speaks to Sellew’s own diverse scholarly interests and to the significant contributions that she has made to the study of ancient Christianity, especially with her focus on classical literature and culture as foundational and often overlooked (or misunderstood) contexts. A foreword by Calvin J. Roetzel narrates Sellew’s years as a student, and an introduction by editor Courtney J. P. Friesen celebrates Sellew’s impressive career as a writer, and even more importantly, as a teacher and mentor. Following the foreword, introduction, and a bibliography of Sellew’s work, the book is divided into three parts: New Testament Gospels and Acts (chapters 1–5), ‘Gnostic’ Christianity (chapters 6–9), and Jewish and Greco-Roman culture (chapters 10–17). Each chapter is standalone, and while there is occasionally some untranslated Greek, this volume is very accessible to experts and non-experts alike.