Jesus, Debt, and the Lord's Prayer
First-Century Debt and Jesus' Intentions
Foreword by K. C. Hanson
Imprint: Cascade Books
Douglas E. Oakman has been with the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University since 1988. Prior to that he taught at Santa Clara University, the University of San Francisco, and San Francisco Theological Seminary. He was chair of the Religion Department from 1996-2003 and Dean of Humanities from 2004-2010. Oakman has published numerous articles applying the social sciences to biblical studies. He is the author of Jesus and the Economic Questions of His Day (1986), with K. C. Hanson the award-winning Palestine in the Time of Jesus (second edition, 2008), Jesus and the Peasants (Cascade Books, 2008), The Political Aims of Jesus (2012), and Jesus, Debt, and the Lord's Prayer (Cascade Books, 2014). Oakman is an ordained minister on the roster of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. During the 1990s, he participated in archaeological excavations at Jotapata and Cana in Galilee.
"Douglas Oakman brings a most welcome scholarly and prophetic voice to this sustained analysis of Jesus's political goals. He invites us to suspend our social or religious notions and follow him through some complex literary and historical matters. We enter a fruitful, open conversation on the nature of Jesus's radical belief in divine forgiveness and the kingdom of God, and we begin to understand the development of his messiahship and divinity in entirely new ways."
--Gildas Hamel, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA
"In Oakman's perceptive and rewarding political and socioeconomic analysis, written with sincere personal conviction, the 'preferential option for the poor' in modern theology receives a distinctive historical Jesus confirmation."
--Dennis C. Duling, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY
"While the Lord's Prayer is foundational for Christian belief and identity, no other scholar has done more in recent decades than Douglas Oakman to explore its original meaning in the context of Jesus's life and ministry. With Oakman's incisive and wide-ranging understanding of the first-century Palestinian world, that meaning comes to life in this volume as the inspiring and hope-filled expression of someone deeply and compassionately invested in the plight of the poor. . . . Oakman brings the Lord's Prayer to life for our world."
--Philip F. Esler, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire UK