The authors of this volume discuss the relevance and influence of various Old and New Testament documents, and early Christian and Jewish texts in terms of their impact in shaping the moral character, identity, and behaviour of the specific communities in which they were produced as well as their ethical application throughout the centuries. Against a narrow understanding of ethics, the term "application" is not used to analyse the texts of the Bible as step-by-step manuals for moral conduct. Rather, the contributors engage with biblical texts within the framework of a complex hermeneutical process of application of the relevance of these texts in contemporary ethical discourse. It is only when we understand more precisely what the texts themselves offer in terms of their self-understanding that we can reflect critically upon such hermeneutical processes and the appropriation of these biblical texts in contemporary ethical debates in different cultures as well as in current ethical theories and moral philosophy.

Born 1968; 1999 Dr. theol. from the University of Heidelberg; 2003 Habilitation from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University München; currently Professor of New Testament and Ethics at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany and research associate at the Department of Old and New Testament Studies of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.