literature becomes an important vehicle for bringing Greek thought and rhetoric into the early Christian culture. A second compelling reason for studying these texts is that the authors of the New Testament themselves show signs of a high degree of familiarity with this literature and evidently place a high value upon it. The relationship can be overstated, as in an article by Elias Oikonomos (1991, 17): “Jesus himself, the apostles Peter, Paul, and James, and the Book of Revelation, use the deuterocanonical