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Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture is unavailable, but you can change that!

Contemporary Western readers may find it surprising that honor and shame, patronage and reciprocity, kinship and family, and purity and pollution offer us keys to interpreting the New Testament. But as recent scholarship has proposed and as David deSilva demonstrates, paying attention to these cultural themes opens our eyes and ears to new discoveries and deeper understanding. Through our...

the giver’s beneficent feelings.26 Many honorary inscriptions mention the graces (charitas) of the benefactor as the cause for conferring public praise, emphasizing the real and received products of the benefactor’s goodwill toward a city or group.27 Finally, grace can be used to speak of the response to a benefactor and his or her gifts, namely, “gratitude.” Demosthenes provides a helpful window into this aspect in his De Corona as he chides his audience for not responding honorably to those
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