Preliminary Questions
Q. This book is largely a collection of your previously published essays, plus a couple of additions. What prompted you to produce this book in this way, and why are the essays arranged as they are?
A. This book came about because, over the course of a decade or so, I had written quite a number of one-off essays on Paul which, taken together, more or less amounted to a book, but were not part of any planned monograph project. The red thread running through the essays is the challenge of hermeneutics in the study of Paul (hence the book’s title). Recognising this, I wrote a new, programmatic piece on “Our Apostles, Ourselves” (which is chapter 1 of the book) and then put the whole thing together. The actual occasion for doing this was the UK’s first Covid lockdown in 2020, when I was without library access for months on end. Being unable to do any proper research, I was brainstorming what other useful work I could do, and Trevor Thompson (at Eerdmans) discussed with me the idea of putting together a book of essays such as this. (Thank you, Trevor!)
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