Wednesday, April 01, 2015

New book from Carta

I just received a new book from Carta, Jerusalem:


In the Master's Steps: The Gospels in the Land
R. Steven Notley
Carta, Jerusalem, 2015
88 pages, English
ISBN: 9789652208514
Price: $25.00

Description: This volume, the first of four in The Carta New Testament Atlas, is about recent advances in history, geography, toponomy, and archaeology, the tools necessary to shed fresh light on the Gospels.

According to the forward, parts of it are extracted from The Carta Bible Atlas, but I haven't had a chance to see which ones.

I have looked it over, and as usual, it is up to the high standards that Carta has for its products. The maps are clear and crisp, the choice of photos is excellent. And the parts of Steven's commentary that I have read are good. I specifically looked over Chapter 7: Jesus and the Myth of an Essene Quarter in Jerusalem, which appears in The Sacred Bridge as Excursus 22.1. I haven't, however, compared them, so I don't know to what degree they overlap. Further, I have the original 2006 edition, not the updated 2014 one, so even if I did compare them, it wouldn't say much.

Here's the Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1: The Birth of Jesus and the Flight into Egypt
Chapter 2: The Ministry of John and the Baptism of Jesus
Chapter 3: The Travels of Jesus
Chapter 4: The Sea of Galilee: Development of an Early Christian Toponym
Chapter 5: The First Century Environs of the Sea of Galilee
Chapter 6: The Last Days of Jesus
Chapter 7: Jesus and the Myth of an Essene Quarter in Jerusalem
Chapter 8: The Arrest and Death of Jesus
Chapter 9: From the Empty Tomb to the Road to Emmaus
Index

As you can see, it covers the whole of the Gospels. According to the back of the book, the second volume will be Jerusalem City of the Great King, volume three will be From Jerusalem to the Ends of the Earth: The Spread of the Early Church, and volume four will be Armageddon & The Apocalypse: Mapping the End of Days.

If you are looking for an atlas that covers just the Gospels, then this would be it. Even if you owned the shorter abridgment of The Sacred Bridge, Carta's New Century Handbook and Atlas of the Bible, you would benefit, as it doesn't include the excursus (what's the plural of excursus? Isn't it fourth declension? If so, it would simply be excursūs...).

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