Here we reread George W.E. Nickelsburg’s more important articles and encounter afresh some of his books, to criticize them and to attend to his response to the criticism.
This set of Auseinandersetzungen thus carries forward the life of learning and debate that yields a rich harvest of scholarship. It pays tribute to a scholar through acts of engaged, critical scholarship, in which specialists reread articles reproduced in these pages and respond to them, with Nickelsburg then joining issue-a protracted engagement, spanning an entire intellectual career and many of its more important moments. Nickelsburg’s work not only deserves such rigorous analysis, it also sustains it. On any list of scholars who over the past forty years have defined and cultivated the field of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, George Nickelsburg is included at or near the top. Here we present the natural outcome of such a life in the academy: scholars in contention over truth.